{"id":9236,"date":"2013-10-03T16:01:11","date_gmt":"2013-10-03T16:01:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/blog\/?p=9236"},"modified":"2013-10-03T16:01:11","modified_gmt":"2013-10-03T16:01:11","slug":"i-forgot-the-elephant","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/?p=9236","title":{"rendered":"I forgot the elephant!"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/images\/photos\/elephantintheroom.jpg\" width=\"175\" height=\"188\" align=\"right\" style=\"margin:0 0 10px 15px;\" alt=\"The elephant I forgot\" \/><\/p>\n<p>A few days ago after the Bangor Languages Learners&#8217; meet up, I was talking to one of the other members of the group and suddenly exclaimed, &#8220;I forgot the elephant!&#8221;, and hurried back into the caf\u00e9 to retrieve it. As he commented, it&#8217;s not a phrase that often comes up in conversation. The elephant in question is a small white one from Morocco that usually lives on my mantelpiece, but which had taken up temporary residence on the table in the caf\u00e9 where we met so that people who hadn&#8217;t been to the group before could find us. When we left the caf\u00e9 I forgot to take the elephant, and only remembered when I went outside.<\/p>\n<p>Many people suggest that you should focus on learning the most frequently-used words of a language first, and only learn the less common ones later, if you really want to. However, I like to learn both frequently-used words and obscure words because you never know when you might need them.<\/p>\n<p>Do you focus exclusively on frequently-used words, or do you like learning obscure and unusual words as well?<\/p>\n<p>Can you imagine a situation in which you would say &#8220;I forgot the elephant!&#8221; or something similarly unusual?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A few days ago after the Bangor Languages Learners&#8217; meet up, I was talking to one of the other members of the group and suddenly exclaimed, &#8220;I forgot the elephant!&#8221;, and hurried back into the caf\u00e9 to retrieve it. As he commented, it&#8217;s not a phrase that often comes up in conversation. The elephant in [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[104,10,13,78],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9236","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-english","category-language","category-language-learning","category-words-and-phrases"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9236","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=9236"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9236\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=9236"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=9236"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=9236"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}