What if you could learn up to 75% of daily vocabulary in just 1000 words?
Having gone through the process of learning a foreign language a couple of times, I’ve noticed several things.
I often get stuck with frustrating grammar, and I often stop because I don’t have a clear end goal.
I always think “Wouldn’t it be cool to learn a little Swedish?” but then I start on Duolingo with a lot of enthusiasm and after a while, I simply stop.
Not because I don’t like learning Swedish.
Not because I don’t have the drive to continue.
I stop because, besides a daily streak and certain levels, there is no clear end-goal.
What I wanted for my language learning was to have a clear list of basic vocabulary.
Not because this covers everything, but because it is a good start.
The list is largely inspired by a much shorter list I downloaded when I started learning Portuguese.
Instead of starting with grammar, it included mostly words and short sentences such as “Yes”, “Maybe”, “More or less” and “What’s up?”.
These phrases, though simple, ended up being incredibly useful, and I encountered them a lot more often than the words that most other language courses had tried to teach me.
Compared to my Spanish, which I began studying in a classroom, my Portuguese was a lot more conversational and practical.
With these basic words, I found myself puzzling together the pieces and learning in a much more enjoyable way than I was used to with other languages.
And with that idea in mind, I wanted to create something for language learners, including myself, that would be extensive enough to cover a large part of the daily vocabulary, but short enough to be an attainable, clear-set goal.
75% of Daily Vocabulary
According to the BBC “If you learn only 800 of the most frequently-used lemmas in English, you’ll be able to understand 75% of the language as it is spoken in normal life.”.
That sounds pretty good, right?
Snowball effect
Another thing I’ve noticed with languages is that it has a certain snowball effect.
The first words are the most fun, but also the hardest because when used in sentences you still don’t understand what’s being said.
The more words you know, the more you understand of the sentence until eventually, you can guess the meaning of the words you don’t know by context.
By learning the 1000 most frequently used words, you basically get your snowball rolling to a degree that, even without knowing much grammar, you will be able to not only understand the words that you know but also the ones that you don’t know just by understanding the context.
Will this make you fluent?
Maybe.
The reality is that fluency is about a lot more than simply learning vocabulary.
Learning these 1000 words won’t make you fluent necessary, but I can promise you that those who are fluent know these 1000 words.
The idea of these words is not that it’s super fun, but that it’s short enough to get started with, long enough to give you a good basic understanding of most daily conversations, and most importantly – a clear list to create a goal around.
So what is this list?
From my experience learning foreign languages, I have carefully curated a list of the 1000 most frequently used words and phrases across several languages, and put them together into a downloadable file for you.
As said before, the BBC talked about lemmas, so I tried my best to take this into consideration when it came to selecting the words.
However, each language is different, so you might find a lemma in different forms in the list.
It is currently available in 23 languages, with more to come very soon.
Which languages are available?
The list is currently available in Afrikaans, Arabic, Basque, Bulgarian, Catalan, Chinese Trad. , Croatian, Dutch, Finnish, French, German, Italian, Korean, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish, Turkish and Ukrainian.
Languages soon to be added are Albanian, Czech, Danish, Estonian, Greek, Hebrew, Hindi, Hungarian, Irish, Kazakh, Malay, Marathi, Serbian, Slovenian, Swedish and Vietnamese.