Introduction
The Six Lines of Gold are a series of phrases organized by Tim Ferriss. It essentially includes a technique to learn, but not master, any language within an hour. Although time to learn varies per person, these lines hint at several distinctions related to variations in syntax and semantics across languages.
Reasoning
The reasoning behind using these phrases is to cover a good portion of commonly spoken and written variations of related thematic roles. The technique helps to deconstruct the language to focus on key nuances and idiosyncracies that come with conversational and written languages.
In essence, they ask the following questions (taken from Tim's blog):
Are there new grammatical structures that will postpone fluency? (look at SOV vs. SVO, as well as noun cases)
This may contain certain nuances, such as the lack of plurals coupled to the word or how a comma is used to separate concepts instead of phrases.
Are there new sounds that will double or quadruple time to fluency? (especially vowels)
There may be intonation or inflections that are needed for certain punctuation, or in Asian countries, fixed tones and cadences for words in a sentence.
How similar is it to languages I already understand? What will help and what will interfere? (Will acquisition erase a previous language? Can I borrow structures without fatal interference like Portuguese after Spanish?)
The idea of finding similarities is to also help acquire fluency faster while also identifying what the key differences that we should look out for.
All of which answer: How difficult will it be, and how long would it take to become functionally fluent?
Fluency encompasses not only general understanding of the native writing system, but also sounds, phonetics, and tones.
Examples
Canonical example in English
- The apple is red.
- It is John’s apple.
- I give John the apple.
- We give him the apple.
- He gives it to John.
- She gives it to him.
Example in Vietnamese
- Quả táo đỏ.
- Đó là quả táo của John.
- Tôi đưa cho John quả táo.
- Chúng tôi đưa cho anh ta quả táo.
- Ông đưa nó cho John.
- Cô ấy đưa nó cho anh ta.
