![]() ![]() If you want to focus on conversational dialogue, then popular novels with lots of dialogue and soap operas provide that. General news is the hardest because it covers such a broad area. Or you can "specialize" in various thematic areas in a newspaper for instance, and learn all the new words there and soon be able to read such areas fairly well. Once you know such a base of vocabulary in a language, you can merely read what interests you, intensively at first, and extract unknown words and their definitions to put into Anki. the exact words you know are not as important as the cumulative effect of knowing them all (and vice versa when you have not yet reached the threshold). The lexical threshold I mentioned above works mainly by exclusion, i.e. So while it makes a lot of sense to learn the most common words first, there is none of the magic in it that writers like to ascribe it.Ĭlick to expand.Disregarding potential problems with frequency lists, if you learned the most frequent 5000 or so words, then you would be doing that, After that though, the rest of the words are relatively infrequent apart from specialist language. The author's assumption would presumably be Western European languages, but if we redefined our "word" to include English phrasal verbs as a minimal unit of meaning, we'd find that English "come back" and "go back" are one word in Spanish (volver) and the same is true of many other examples. I mean, how many words do Eskimos really have for snow? The Eskimo languages are agglutinative, which means words can be an arbitrary length, so Eskimos technically have many millions of possible words for snow. While the author has statistical sources, this isn't all that much more than a statistical curiosity.įurthermore, his rule of 625 English = 1000 > is pretty much baseless conjecture - it really all depends on the language, and when you get away from English the question of "what is a word?" is more than just an amusing academic debate. does that count as understanding 70% of the sentence.? I was fromblish that I had grimbled it without triblobding.ħ0% of the vocabulary is familiar to you. These "most common words" lists are useful, but as the others have already said, understanding words isn't the same as understanding phrases. and many more besides.Īll of these so-called "phrasal verbs" are made up of very common English words, but in most cases the words aren't enough. Put on - put off - put through - put up - put up with - put behind you - put away - put away - put out - put down - put down - put down. Those 2000-3000 word families though have the most colloquial variations and uses and they are the firm basis on which to build, so any time spent learning them is never wasted, and is in fact absolutely necessary. But if you wish to read widely in non-fiction and fiction, let alone for any professional or academic purpose, and understand most everything you encounter, then you need to hit the lexical threshold. If you just want to chit-chat, then 2000-3000 word families is probably sufficient. I suspect that due to the high number of cognates and some relationship to English, that the threshold for Spanish is somewhat lower, maybe 20% lower. The lexical threshold, where one understands 98% of the words encountered to allow comfortable listening and reading and being able to have a shot at inferring the meaning of unknown words from context, is between 6000-7000 word families (10,200-11,900 words) for English spoken text, and 8000-9000 word families (13,600-15,300 words) for written text for English. This has been discussed a lot, but though it is true that relatively few words account for a majority of those found in general texts and speech, you've got 15,000-20,000 other words constantly rotating through the remaining 20% at various frequencies, and which keep you from getting much of the meaning. A lot of the same criticisms apply to Wyner. and welcome to the forum! Check out the review thread for Benny's Fluent in 3 months. I am drilling from this deck daily (or almost daily). I am slowly creating a deck in Anki of these 625 words for my Spanish learning. Needless to say, I have decided to try this out. I will add that verbs in the word list only include the infinitives, and he assumes that you will learn the conjugations in the most commonly used tenses. He has created a list of the 625 most commonly used words in English, which he says will correspond to the 1000 most common in other languages. ![]() ![]() By knowing the 2000 most common words, understanding would increase to 80%. He basically says (and backs it up with some research) that by knowing the 1000 most commonly used words in a language, one could understand roughly 70% of the language. The vocabulary section of the website is particularly interesting. Is anyone familiar with the book "Fluent Forever" by Gabriel Wyner? While I have not read it, I have read alot about it on the website. ![]()
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