GigaSardinian Words (240 pages) is a free Sardinian “treasury of words”. The 1300+ words of the first edition are translated in English, German, Italian, French and Spanish.
Download the free PDF.
Check the print edition.
How to use GigaSardinian Words
Your language skills depend on the number of words you know. If you know 2000 Sardinian words, you will understand people better and be able to express finer thoughts than a friend who knows only 500 words. You could therefore say:
15,000 > 10,000 > 5,000 > 2,000 > 1,000 > 500
The more words you know, the better you are. If you are a novice to the Sardinian language, download our GigaSardinian textbook (free download from www.GigaSardinian.com) and follow the instructions of Chapter Zero. Read and listen to the Elio & Sebastian stories several times and start studying the Sardinian grammar. Within a few months you will master hundreds of words.
However, even the best language manual cannot bring together the thousands of words you’ll need to be comfortable in another language (see Chapter 1 of The Word Brain, free PDF at TheWordBrain.com). GigaSardinian Words will help you fill the gap. First, you’ll use it to recapitulate the words you already know; second you’ll use it to learn and repeat those you DON’T know. Be prepared to study this manual over several weeks for dozens of hours. Most importantly, get used to a daily routine:
- Define the number of new pages you’ll memorize every day (for example: 1, 2, 3 or 4 pages).
- Read the pages.
- Go back to the beginning and memorize every single word.
- Start again from the beginning, hide the second column and check if you know the meaning of the Sardinian words.
- Go back to the start and hide the first column. This exercise is more difficult than #4.
- Do step #2, #4 and #5 for yesterday’s pages and those from the day before yesterday.
In #3, read the words attentively one after the other. Check the spelling, imagine the sound of the word and make a guess at the resistance a word is likely to oppose: easy to learn or not? Four-syllable words such as crocorighedda will demand more time than monosyllabics such as no, ciao, and cras. Go through the list a second and third time, either line by line or leaping at random from word to word. Push the words around in your mind, squeeze them, press them, and stretch them. Finally, test yourself by covering first the right column and then the left column. 100 percent correct answers is a perfect score.
As thrilling as 100 percent results are, the first learning session is only the starting point for a weeklong consolidation process. After only a single day, the percentage of correct answers is dramatically down, and after one month, recall may be 20 percent or less. As learning is nothing and recalling is everything, the second pillar of word learning is repetition. Find out which strategy fits you best, either daily repetitions or repetitions on day 1, 3, 6, 10, 17, and 31, or any other regime.
This preliminary edition will soon be expanded to more words and more languages. Check www.GigaSardinian.com/words for the coming editions.
Welcome to Sardinian, welcome to Sardinia!
Elio Turno Arthemalle + Bernd Sebastian Kamps
18 September 2018