Method Review: C.K. Ogden's Basic English (1930)

In the early part of the 1900's, a British man by the name of C.K. Ogden devised a method to teach English abroad, which is still taught in some places. This is what Ogden.basic-english.org had to say:

If one were to take the 25,000 word Oxford Pocket English Dictionary and take away the redundancies of our rich language and eliminate the words that can be made by putting together simpler words, we find that 90% of the concepts in that dictionary can be achieved with 850 words. The shortened list makes simpler the effort to learn spelling and pronunciation irregularities. The rules of usage are identical to full English so that the practitioner communicates in perfectly good, but simple, English. We call this simplified language Basic English, the developer is Charles K. Ogden, and was released in 1930 with the book: Basic English: A General Introduction with Rules and Grammar. He founded the Orthological Institute to develop the tools for teaching Basic English. His most famous associate, I.A. Richards, led the effort in the Orient, which uses the techniques to this day.

Basically it goes back to word frequency--how to find the most useful words in a given language.

I tried using his method via flashcards (it's an addiction) for learning Spanish. in 2003 when I was a soldier in Alaska, before my deployment to Afghanistan had even come up, I was trying to learn Spanish at the local college, University of Alaska - Anchorage (UAA). I took one semester of Spanish there, as well as multiple other methods simultaneously, trying to learn it from all angles.

One method I tried was "Basic English"; I took the words in his list of 850, and learned their Spanish equivalent. 850 flashcards later, I gave up. His method is based on everyone learning those words to communicate, because they are not the most common words, they are just words that you can use to describe anything. He even rewrote the bible into Basic English. SO the words may have been great to get any point across in 1930's England, they do not work now for comprehending native speakers of any language.

The idea is good, but needs to be updated for modern word usage, and probably change the words completely to whatever country and culture you're looking into. From a Linguistical standpoint, the idea is very interesting, and leads to some prominent Linguistic writing of that time. Winston Churchill even mentions C.K. Ogden's method by name in a speech.

LINKS (also put on links in the right side column)
Ogden.Basic-English.org
Wiki - C.K. Ogden