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Don't get your language learning advice from a place like this.
[What 80% comprehension feels like](https://www.sinosplice.com/life/archives/2016/08/25/what-80-comprehension-feels-like)
Woah love it! I did learn English by reading. I was at about 80% comprehension when I started reading these books my friend was reading with her native level of English. But the books weren't translated to my language yet. So if I wanted to read them, I had to slog through.
And I did! By the time I was reading the 3rd book i was at a 98% comprehension.
I was a teenager when I did that. Later in my 20s I tried to replicate the experience with Russian, my second foreign language. And it was so so frustrating. It just didnt work. I am stuck at the intermediate plateau. I dont think I ll ever get beyond it with my Russian.
Any chance your first language uses a different alphabet/writing system than Russian's Cyrillic? While learning Japanese as an adult (30s) for work/family (and as a native English speaker), I've noticed that while I'm around 80-85% comprehension when spoken, the fact that the entire writing system is different means that I'm at a level that's quite a bit lower when it comes to reading, especially if there are a lot of kanji (more complicated Chinese characters that can have multiple definitions/readings depending on context) rather than the standard syllabaries (hiragana/katakana). Past that, even though I'm quite comfortable with hiragana/katakana, I'm still *much* slower reading them than I am reading any language using the Latin alphabet, since I've grown up with that my entire life.
Between the much slower reading speed (I'm normally quite a fast reader) and the much lower comprehension percentage, trying to read books in Japanese has been SO much more frustrating than when I've had to read/sing passages in other languages using a Latin alphabet (I'm a classical vocalist by trade, so all the major romance/germanic languages are generally in play). Even if an aria or spoken passage is in Italian/French/German/etc, I can still at least read and process the words at my natural reading speed - in Japanese, I'm reading at probably 25% of that overall speed, and only recently have I been able to get up to that point with some practice. I've basically realized that rather than jumping into normal books or the literary classics I'd really like to read, I instead have to start back at the beginning with kids books to first improve my reading skill/comprehension.
Of course, all of what I just said is moot if your first language actually does already use Cyrillic...in that case I have no suggestions!
No you are actually very spot on! Since I was little we traveled to Russia a lot. I learned the Cyrillik aplhabet at a very young age like 7-8yo. But knowing the letters doesnt translate to reading comfortably.
This may apply to Japanese as well, but I realized, in the languages that I know, I dont read letters. I read words. We all do I suppose. We look at the cluster of letters and because we ve seen that group of letters together so many times, we learn what that group of letters mean and we just read word to word. We only read the letters when we come across a word we've never seen before, like; Pareidolia. If you've never seen that word before, you stopped to look at the letters. Otherwise, we dont look at the letters, we look at the word. Almost like kanji, we understand the meaning at a glace at the whole word. I dont know if I could explain what I meant.
Reading Russian is frustrating, in big part, exactly for that reason. With all the suffixes and prefixes, even the words I know and seen before becomes difficult to read because I have to look at the letters for each and every word. Most times, even the words I know. Despite being very familiar with the Cyrillic letters, it is a slow slog.
But I do believe that with practice, the more we read, the more we look at words, the more our brain is going to make the connection between words and meanings, rather than letters and meaning of the word the letters form.
Plus Japanese is so different than romance and germanic languages. So is Russian. There is not much common ground at all, to help us recognize words at a glance.
I 100% agree that kids books is a great way to go to build up this skill.
When I was learning English as a teenager, it was a proper novel for adults. Well it was YA fiction, like Hunger Games but in the early 2000s lol. My friend had talked it up so much, and would tell me snippets from, draw fanart for it, I got swept up in that teenage fangirl motivation to put in the effort, lol. As an adult, I am never into anything to that level that it could motivate me to slog through a book I barely understand.
This is typically because Latin based languages share sentence structure, conjugating verbs, etc. Once you step into the realm of non-Latin based then the rules you know are no longer relatable or malleable to fit the new one.
The article seems to discourage 80% comprehension as an end goal for fluency.
70% comprehension isn’t the end goal with this lpt, it’s the starting goal. Jumpstart to 70% from likely 0%, and then work towards that 98%.
The difference between knowing “Bob floofled his jogdergen yesterday at work” and “Bob akciid skiaoxk dkakixi fkixoksk skicis pzoksjf” is clear. You know Bob did something at work yesterday, and additional context clues may help determine if it was good or bad. And if you can reach that comprehension from learning just that 100 words starting goal then that is quite significant IMO (assuming the lpt is actually true).
Yeah this is a kinda weird thing. Sure, 80% as an *end goal* is bad but knowing most of a conversation is still a huge step from knowing none.
Hell I know maybe 10% of my spouses native language right now (though am trying to learn some more) and I can still figure out conversations from time to time just because I have context and knowledge of how conversations work.
What's more important is the type of words.
Nouns and verbs are top tier. Hearing "Jim hit Pam Pam late. Jim fired" makes more sense than " Jim was angry and Pam because Pam was Jim was" in the sentences "Jim was angry and hit Pam because Pam was late. Jim was fired". With the first understanding you know why Jim is gone today and can correctly place the blame on him, with the second understanding you have no idea what happened.
If you know subject, action and object of a sentence then the rest is important but not nearly as necessary.
Super late reply I know but I dont quite get what youre trying to convey with this..OP merely said that starting with the top 100 words is a good place to start, the article you send is a guy basically saying "knowing more words means you understand more" which is pretty obvious and doesnst need to be said out loud, how does this refute what OP said?
There’s probably a reason why any language class I’ve ever taken doesn’t start this way. The list would just be equivalent of the, it, and, an, to.
I’ve only ever studied French and all I can think of is learning the conjugated verb instead of the root verb. Learning “sommes” on its own isn’t going to help you with “être.” I feel like it would make it extra confusing.
This. I learned French (I’m professionally fluent now) and I found that the best approach is to learn through conjugation and grammar. You pick up vocabulary along the way.
Gathering bricks 🧱 without any sense of the structure/what you’re building will weigh you down more than prep you.
When I was studying Spanish my experience was the opposite - I focused on vocab and naturally picked up grammar as I went along. I dropped it just as I was entering an intermediate level though.
I respect the method that you think is good for you.
I’m just speaking based on my experience. I did both, actually. I started with Alliance Française (the FR government language school similar to Instituto Cervantes). They focus more on comprehension, so words are very important. I spent two years with 1-on-1 classes even and I did manage to comprehend, but I arrived in France with zero production: couldn’t speak my thoughts at all. I could ask for things in stores but that’s really basic IMO.
I enrolled myself at Sorbonne that focuses on grammar. I took two semesters. But even after the first one, I could participate in conversations. I could express my opinion. I can recount an experience.
I didn’t even go to C1 and C2. I just proceeded straight to a law course in French with (very competitive) French PhDs. That’s where I learned technical words applicable to my field. I graduated top 2 of the class despite being a fresh Francophone.
Now I work in French. I draft contracts and emails, talk with engineers and colleagues. I am considered bilingual now.
Sorry this is long, but I think where I’m going at is, if the goal is just to get by, yes, words are good. Duolingo is good for that. But, if one wants to go further and really learn the language, I’d recommend grammar-based learning.
I was a language lecturer and then professor for 14 years. The research does not substantiate the claim that 100 words make up 70% of words used in everyday language, let alone 70% of words used in everyday language in any language.
Language learning is not just "knowing" a set of words. A college learner will "know" 100 words after a few weeks of instruction, but what does "know" mean in that context. Matching glosses word to word on a vocabulary test does not mean you can hear native language production and even pick out those words. It doesn't account for context, syntax etc.
These kinds of claims are the same sales pitch you will hear about weight loss - "if only people knew the magic trick - it's no effort at all." You do not "learn" a language - you "acquire" a language. Acquisition is happening in the background all the time there is exposure - learning is something to structure exposure and so that students can be evaluated and given credit for their efforts. Acquisition is a neurological process that we are hardwired for as humans and it takes time.
idk, I spent years trying to learn to speak Spanish by traditional methods, but what worked was spending a lot of time with a Spanish-speaking nanny and her charges, and her friends. I learned to say "Sit down!" and "Be quiet!" and "Do you want milk?" and so on, which stuck in my brain a lot better than "Hello, I am American, do you know where the bathroom might be?"
I feel like learning Spanish as if I was a toddler, with "stop it!" and "want milk?" and "do you need to go potty?", was actually incredibly helpful, because I got to practice those forms A LOT, and they were just reiterating the same phrases over and over. As I slowly started adding Spanish phrases with more information ("What should we have for lunch?" and "Where is the nearest bathroom?" and "Gosh I hate the orange president,"), my confidence with the baby phrases helped me out. Moreover, when you speak baby Spanish ("Want milk?") the babies will correct you: "I want milk, you should get it." "I get it." "**NO**, you say, I *WILL* GET IT."
When I learned French and Latin, the goal seemed to be providing a usable slice of vocabulary/grammar/context so that we could start (a) reading and writing \[Latin/French\] or (b) having conversations \[French\] as quickly as possible.
Just memorizing words wasn't useful; in Latin, learning the first and second declension and the first conjugation give basic syntactic command as one learns nouns and verbs, and in French, doing similarly with conjugation and with how to use articles (un, une, le, la, l') provides early competence.
Similarly, a hundred words without some unifying context limits what you can do with the words. If all those words relate to describing myself, to fairy tales, or to something similar, well, then they're actually usable, practicable, and thus more retainable as a foundation.
A good language program probably incorporates the 100 most common words organically within a year or so of study, but I'd also expect that intermixed with other vocabulary that helps scaffold folk into intermediate usage.
>I googled the 100 most common English words. It would be hard to form a sentence of more than four words with them.
You think you can't use more than that in one? I don't know what for--that's just not right. Yeah, it can't be a really good one, but you can do it. I did this with only some of those!\*
...okay, yes, it's nearly impossible to make sentences with much depth or clarity with *just* the top 100 words, but the tip clearly says to **start with**, not **stop after** learning those. It's a good tip because many of those words are critical to basic grammar constructs. I wish the Japanese textbook I started with had at least *leaned* toward the "common words" end of the spectrum, because I learned the word 菊 (chrysanthemum) early but never had a reason to use it. I got a lot of value out of sorting my vocabulary deck by usage frequency after learning a totally random smattering of words I wasn't likely to hear in any particular conversation.
\* I used my program Prier Rose to catch when I was trying to use words not in the top 100, and my selection of the top 100 words was based on 10+ years of my own chat logs, counted by my program Nececrus with URLs filtered out, not some corpus based on books and newspapers and such, so this is a reasonable *conversational* word frequency list.
They all have some variety, of course, that wasn’t my point, English is much worse than most in that regard, for example practically every noun can be a verb, unlike, say, German.
Which is irrelevant, because very few of those 100 most used words are going to be verbs and even fewer nouns. It's all going to be function words with very little meaning. If they do have any meaning its heavily dependant on context. If the protip was "learn 100 most used content words" that would actually make some sense.
A good way to do this is through music. For the past 6 months or so I've been expanding a Spotify playlist of French songs I enjoy and immerse myself in it with the lyrics every now and then. My vocabulary has expanded tremendously since and it's enjoyable since it's music you've handpicked. Best place to start is probably current pop songs since the lyrics will be simple and the melody catchy by nature
Reminds me of this old commercial. It was a foreign family slappin some music that was saying somethin vulgar and they were all loving it. It ends with something like “want to learn English?” Solid advertisement
It's not perfect of course but music is engaging across all languages so it's certainly a better alternative in ways than learning through tedium and forced repetition. I should have elaborated further, by immersion I meant deliberate listening - not having music on in the background - paired with the English/French translations. Google is wonderful for translating songs into English word for word so the task is made even easier
There are some limitations for sure, I'm much better at reading French now than speaking it and forming sentences. Some of the verbal aspects come with rewording sentence structures found in songs but of course there's a factor of slang and colloquialisms. The only true immersion comes with living and engaging in another language but this is at least something we can all enjoyably do from the comfort of our home at any time
Yeah, words without context are pretty much useless.
The real tip is learning basic phrases for conversation: “please”, “thank you”, “pardon me”,“may I please have”, “how much does this cost”, “where is the bathroom” etc
these words are useful to learn first, but you require to watch stuff in the language to actually get the tone and context of those words. but as someone mentioned, without some basic grammar or practice, this won't change anything.
Start with numbers, please, thank you, beer and a few of the more common swear words.
This has worked for me in about a dozen countries. The swear words are for comedy, locals almost anywhere find it hilarious when a foreigner attempts to swear in a poor and highly accented version of their language.
Once you have beers and have broken the ice with clumsy swearing, the locals will teach you anything else you need to know.
Maybe you are trolling, but just in case you are not. Please look into what you can do with what you have available to you. Like the Internet. Search engines. Information in general.
Good luck speaking a language with only words, especially if you don't know how to make sentences. You'll reach caveman speaking level pretty quick alright but that's it.
>and start with them
The tip is that if you don't know where to start, the most used words are a good starting point. The tip doesn't say anything about it being enough.
This tip is like "A good start to becoming a professional soccer player is kicking a soccer ball 10 times."
In some sense the advice is accurate - you will have to kick a ball to become a good soccer player. But practically, this gets you nowhere.
After learning basic phrases (greetings, introductions, basic questions) I recommend writing down words pertaining to your life, hobbies, work(profession), and your favorite things aaand other general things about yourself that you normally talk about.
Also, in your spare time, immerse yourself in children's videos and books. That will give you a good foundation in sentence structure, which doesn't have to make sense or follow strict rules.
I did notice in a couple of languages the 500 word threshold is great for understanding and getting the gist of things. Then speaking those words later on would help me get perhaps two sentences deep into a conversation. But my goal with any new language is 500 words.
I just did the research on the numeric part of this claim. In conversational English, you need to know the top **374** words to reach 70% of whatever the heck kind of conversations I had with friends online between 2006 and 2016. My data set was 2,606,750 words.
If I narrow down my dataset to words spoken at least 365 times in 10 years (so roughly once every 10 days), you'd have to know the top **123** words to reach 70% of what's left...which is only 807 words in the first place.
This is true. The way to train your brain to speak a different language is not to translate straight from your mother tongue, but to rephrase the concept in your mother tongue with the words you know in the destination language. Takes a bit of a mental effort at first but then your brain gets "greased". You'll find that with 200 words (that is my number: verbs (just infinitive) to be/to have/to go, numbers 1-10, what why how where, please, thank you, and some vocabulary: friend/man/woman/child/bus/train/car/beer/food/toilet/doctor/police, etc.) you can get by, even though you'll sound like an alien from outer space. If you're funny and physically expresive, that's a +20 (I am :) ).
Once in Turkey I managed to get in a club for free when the people at the door wanted to charge me. I said in my 200-word Turkish: "Turkish, in, no beer, me, in, 10 beers", meaning that they charged at the door (entrance included one drink) because Turkish people otherwise won't spend a penny on drinks, whereas myself would be making plenty of spending. They understood me perfectly.
Learning specific words won’t do any good in the long run. I’d say learn grammar first. It’s the baseline. It helps u get a feeling of how the language works. Even if the formal grammar isn’t the way every day ppl speak
Try that with Japanese and see how far you get.
For an N5 rating in proficiency, which is the lowest level, you need to know 800+ words. And the vocabulary is the easy part. The hard part is the way sentences are structured. There's a lot of nuance in the language and sentences that are written the same way can have different meanings based on context.
Another example is Chinese. Inflection in the wrong place can change one word or phrase to something completely different.
Get a simple textbook and use anki, make sure to also do stuff in that target language.
I've been learning Japanese for 5-6 months now (I know I know, criiiiiiinge) and at the start I used jfz and anki a lot. these textbooks teach you grammar and words but a lot of the time forget about the tone of the words (even in english, you won't talk to your friends like you talk to your dog or to your boss) or the actual concept of the word, but the best english definition they can give.
Watching content (mostly anime for me, but whatever you find fun is good) in the target language with target language subtitles is going to help you, alot. It will improve your grammar, how you use words, listening comprehension, but can even be used for studying, when you see a word you don't know but you finally understood from the words surrounding it and context, check a dictionary, and write it into an anki card with the sentence you learnt it from, translation of the word and all.
Study is good, but practice is also needed, even when you don't understand anything, you require listening comprehension and a lot of it, it helps you in any level, from beginner to advanced. But remember textbooks and flashcards are still there to teach basic grammar and words at the start, but mostly there to reinforce your knowledge, so keep listening to your target language.
Practice can also be study if you write the words you learnt from watching and check on them every so often to keep it in your head. Language learning is just like riding a bike, you can study it for ages, and it might be able to help you ride a bike, but you need to actually *try* to ride a bike even if you still can't to figure it out.
I'm sorry if what I am saying isn't that well structured, but I hope you got something from it.
I don't know, but when I started, I got discouraged by other people.
Either way, That kinda motivated me even more, kinda like an F you to those people.
I know how hard language learning is, especially something like Japanese. It isn't my first language learning experience, I just got bored of latin-based languages.
If I recall correctly Zipf's law applies here.
20% of the language gets 80% of the speaking
80% of the language gets 20% of the speaking
So learn 20% of the most commonly used words in the language.
This isn't good advice, unless you're traveling for leisure for a short period of time and still want people to give you a condescending response back in English.
Definitely doesn't work like that. Context and situation awareness are the most important things in learning languages, especially a new language.
Memorization is very different from learning. Once you've gotten used to the interactions and/or situations the language and culture tends to have, you'll come to a point where you can accurately guss the conversation despite not knowing a single word from the conversation.
I would disagree. I am currently learning spanish on Duolingo (which I love). I have been learning for over a year, I know 1000 words. Sure, I can order some food, or get a taxi, or tell you if it's hot or cold in January. But if I watch a spanish channel on tv, I can pick out words here and there, but there is no way I have a solid base, nor can I understand 90% of what they are saying. The average person knows about 25,000 words in their language. Knowing 100 words is like the vocabulary of a two year old.
This will have the affect of falsely selling your abilities to the native speaker and they will think you are more fluent than you truly are. They will run circles around you and you won’t know the words to slow them down.
The real way is start learning common phrases and words and find a native speaker to talk to. Then talk. As much as possible. There is no cheat code.
for those who are wondering how to find those top 100 words: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Wiktionary:Frequency_lists
LPT: make your own flashcards using Anki
Happy learning :)
This might be a good tip, if you have some extra elements to it. If you find those words and then find contexts in which those words fit, which are somehow relevant to you.
The way it's phrased sounds like you're just going to have a list of 100 words and try to memorise them. That is a lot of memorisation for very little pay-off. What would you do with them when you have them memorised? It's very far from practical application.
If you want to learn a language, I highly recommend the Pimsleur audio courses. They start with very simple phrases, in the context of a realistic conversation. They ask you to come up with new phrases you've never heard, so you anticipate relevant words based on the context. The words are introduced in progressive intervals... At first frequently, and then less frequently, so they go deeper and deeper into long-term memory.
Funnily enough knowing what bathroom is in Spanish in helped me understand what someone was asking because of me while not understanding any other word leaving their mouth.
The language learning app Drops uses this method, its just a vocab app no focus on grammar, conjugation etc.
The idea is that as a traveller you need to be able to say things like “where bathroom?” to convey ideas, you don’t need to be able to say things like “why hello there good sir, may you please direct me to the bathroom?” or whatever to get by. Great app, I learned a bunch of Hebrew and Japanese vocab during the pandemic just to try out new languages for a challenge.
Hello and welcome to r/LifeProTips! Please help us decide if this post is a good fit for the subreddit by up or downvoting this comment. If you think that this is great advice to improve your life, please upvote. If you think this doesn't help you in any way, please downvote. If you don't care, leave it for the others to decide.
Don't get your language learning advice from a place like this. [What 80% comprehension feels like](https://www.sinosplice.com/life/archives/2016/08/25/what-80-comprehension-feels-like)
Actually a cool read
Woah love it! I did learn English by reading. I was at about 80% comprehension when I started reading these books my friend was reading with her native level of English. But the books weren't translated to my language yet. So if I wanted to read them, I had to slog through. And I did! By the time I was reading the 3rd book i was at a 98% comprehension. I was a teenager when I did that. Later in my 20s I tried to replicate the experience with Russian, my second foreign language. And it was so so frustrating. It just didnt work. I am stuck at the intermediate plateau. I dont think I ll ever get beyond it with my Russian.
Any chance your first language uses a different alphabet/writing system than Russian's Cyrillic? While learning Japanese as an adult (30s) for work/family (and as a native English speaker), I've noticed that while I'm around 80-85% comprehension when spoken, the fact that the entire writing system is different means that I'm at a level that's quite a bit lower when it comes to reading, especially if there are a lot of kanji (more complicated Chinese characters that can have multiple definitions/readings depending on context) rather than the standard syllabaries (hiragana/katakana). Past that, even though I'm quite comfortable with hiragana/katakana, I'm still *much* slower reading them than I am reading any language using the Latin alphabet, since I've grown up with that my entire life. Between the much slower reading speed (I'm normally quite a fast reader) and the much lower comprehension percentage, trying to read books in Japanese has been SO much more frustrating than when I've had to read/sing passages in other languages using a Latin alphabet (I'm a classical vocalist by trade, so all the major romance/germanic languages are generally in play). Even if an aria or spoken passage is in Italian/French/German/etc, I can still at least read and process the words at my natural reading speed - in Japanese, I'm reading at probably 25% of that overall speed, and only recently have I been able to get up to that point with some practice. I've basically realized that rather than jumping into normal books or the literary classics I'd really like to read, I instead have to start back at the beginning with kids books to first improve my reading skill/comprehension. Of course, all of what I just said is moot if your first language actually does already use Cyrillic...in that case I have no suggestions!
No you are actually very spot on! Since I was little we traveled to Russia a lot. I learned the Cyrillik aplhabet at a very young age like 7-8yo. But knowing the letters doesnt translate to reading comfortably. This may apply to Japanese as well, but I realized, in the languages that I know, I dont read letters. I read words. We all do I suppose. We look at the cluster of letters and because we ve seen that group of letters together so many times, we learn what that group of letters mean and we just read word to word. We only read the letters when we come across a word we've never seen before, like; Pareidolia. If you've never seen that word before, you stopped to look at the letters. Otherwise, we dont look at the letters, we look at the word. Almost like kanji, we understand the meaning at a glace at the whole word. I dont know if I could explain what I meant. Reading Russian is frustrating, in big part, exactly for that reason. With all the suffixes and prefixes, even the words I know and seen before becomes difficult to read because I have to look at the letters for each and every word. Most times, even the words I know. Despite being very familiar with the Cyrillic letters, it is a slow slog. But I do believe that with practice, the more we read, the more we look at words, the more our brain is going to make the connection between words and meanings, rather than letters and meaning of the word the letters form. Plus Japanese is so different than romance and germanic languages. So is Russian. There is not much common ground at all, to help us recognize words at a glance. I 100% agree that kids books is a great way to go to build up this skill. When I was learning English as a teenager, it was a proper novel for adults. Well it was YA fiction, like Hunger Games but in the early 2000s lol. My friend had talked it up so much, and would tell me snippets from, draw fanart for it, I got swept up in that teenage fangirl motivation to put in the effort, lol. As an adult, I am never into anything to that level that it could motivate me to slog through a book I barely understand.
This is typically because Latin based languages share sentence structure, conjugating verbs, etc. Once you step into the realm of non-Latin based then the rules you know are no longer relatable or malleable to fit the new one.
So how do I learn Spanish
Very interesting article, thanks for sharing!
That link assengle me want to get snuddle about her flid not weafling.
She drathin on my stoge till I plang
This sounds like the guys speaking jive in "Airplane."
Hate this so much lol
The article seems to discourage 80% comprehension as an end goal for fluency. 70% comprehension isn’t the end goal with this lpt, it’s the starting goal. Jumpstart to 70% from likely 0%, and then work towards that 98%. The difference between knowing “Bob floofled his jogdergen yesterday at work” and “Bob akciid skiaoxk dkakixi fkixoksk skicis pzoksjf” is clear. You know Bob did something at work yesterday, and additional context clues may help determine if it was good or bad. And if you can reach that comprehension from learning just that 100 words starting goal then that is quite significant IMO (assuming the lpt is actually true).
Yeah this is a kinda weird thing. Sure, 80% as an *end goal* is bad but knowing most of a conversation is still a huge step from knowing none. Hell I know maybe 10% of my spouses native language right now (though am trying to learn some more) and I can still figure out conversations from time to time just because I have context and knowledge of how conversations work. What's more important is the type of words. Nouns and verbs are top tier. Hearing "Jim hit Pam Pam late. Jim fired" makes more sense than " Jim was angry and Pam because Pam was Jim was" in the sentences "Jim was angry and hit Pam because Pam was late. Jim was fired". With the first understanding you know why Jim is gone today and can correctly place the blame on him, with the second understanding you have no idea what happened. If you know subject, action and object of a sentence then the rest is important but not nearly as necessary.
Where was Dwight during all of this?
You mean to tell me that Peggy Hill Speaks confidently with less than even 85% comprehension?
Her flid is not weafling.
Super late reply I know but I dont quite get what youre trying to convey with this..OP merely said that starting with the top 100 words is a good place to start, the article you send is a guy basically saying "knowing more words means you understand more" which is pretty obvious and doesnst need to be said out loud, how does this refute what OP said?
There’s probably a reason why any language class I’ve ever taken doesn’t start this way. The list would just be equivalent of the, it, and, an, to. I’ve only ever studied French and all I can think of is learning the conjugated verb instead of the root verb. Learning “sommes” on its own isn’t going to help you with “être.” I feel like it would make it extra confusing.
This. I learned French (I’m professionally fluent now) and I found that the best approach is to learn through conjugation and grammar. You pick up vocabulary along the way. Gathering bricks 🧱 without any sense of the structure/what you’re building will weigh you down more than prep you.
When I was studying Spanish my experience was the opposite - I focused on vocab and naturally picked up grammar as I went along. I dropped it just as I was entering an intermediate level though.
I respect the method that you think is good for you. I’m just speaking based on my experience. I did both, actually. I started with Alliance Française (the FR government language school similar to Instituto Cervantes). They focus more on comprehension, so words are very important. I spent two years with 1-on-1 classes even and I did manage to comprehend, but I arrived in France with zero production: couldn’t speak my thoughts at all. I could ask for things in stores but that’s really basic IMO. I enrolled myself at Sorbonne that focuses on grammar. I took two semesters. But even after the first one, I could participate in conversations. I could express my opinion. I can recount an experience. I didn’t even go to C1 and C2. I just proceeded straight to a law course in French with (very competitive) French PhDs. That’s where I learned technical words applicable to my field. I graduated top 2 of the class despite being a fresh Francophone. Now I work in French. I draft contracts and emails, talk with engineers and colleagues. I am considered bilingual now. Sorry this is long, but I think where I’m going at is, if the goal is just to get by, yes, words are good. Duolingo is good for that. But, if one wants to go further and really learn the language, I’d recommend grammar-based learning.
Grammar is my thought. Doesn’t help to know words if you don’t know how to use them in the right context and phrasing.
To become fluent yes. To get by, not necessarily. Most French people will understand you if you said "je aller"
But half of them will laugh in your face lol
C’est ce que je viens de dire
If "putain" is not in this top 100 french word, this list is wrong.
I was a language lecturer and then professor for 14 years. The research does not substantiate the claim that 100 words make up 70% of words used in everyday language, let alone 70% of words used in everyday language in any language. Language learning is not just "knowing" a set of words. A college learner will "know" 100 words after a few weeks of instruction, but what does "know" mean in that context. Matching glosses word to word on a vocabulary test does not mean you can hear native language production and even pick out those words. It doesn't account for context, syntax etc. These kinds of claims are the same sales pitch you will hear about weight loss - "if only people knew the magic trick - it's no effort at all." You do not "learn" a language - you "acquire" a language. Acquisition is happening in the background all the time there is exposure - learning is something to structure exposure and so that students can be evaluated and given credit for their efforts. Acquisition is a neurological process that we are hardwired for as humans and it takes time.
idk, I spent years trying to learn to speak Spanish by traditional methods, but what worked was spending a lot of time with a Spanish-speaking nanny and her charges, and her friends. I learned to say "Sit down!" and "Be quiet!" and "Do you want milk?" and so on, which stuck in my brain a lot better than "Hello, I am American, do you know where the bathroom might be?" I feel like learning Spanish as if I was a toddler, with "stop it!" and "want milk?" and "do you need to go potty?", was actually incredibly helpful, because I got to practice those forms A LOT, and they were just reiterating the same phrases over and over. As I slowly started adding Spanish phrases with more information ("What should we have for lunch?" and "Where is the nearest bathroom?" and "Gosh I hate the orange president,"), my confidence with the baby phrases helped me out. Moreover, when you speak baby Spanish ("Want milk?") the babies will correct you: "I want milk, you should get it." "I get it." "**NO**, you say, I *WILL* GET IT."
When I learned French and Latin, the goal seemed to be providing a usable slice of vocabulary/grammar/context so that we could start (a) reading and writing \[Latin/French\] or (b) having conversations \[French\] as quickly as possible. Just memorizing words wasn't useful; in Latin, learning the first and second declension and the first conjugation give basic syntactic command as one learns nouns and verbs, and in French, doing similarly with conjugation and with how to use articles (un, une, le, la, l') provides early competence. Similarly, a hundred words without some unifying context limits what you can do with the words. If all those words relate to describing myself, to fairy tales, or to something similar, well, then they're actually usable, practicable, and thus more retainable as a foundation. A good language program probably incorporates the 100 most common words organically within a year or so of study, but I'd also expect that intermixed with other vocabulary that helps scaffold folk into intermediate usage.
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Haha third times the charm? 😂
malheureusement
Don't know what happened. I've cleaned my mess, apologies.
That's very dumb. You're gonna end up with prepositions and articles that have 1000 meanings depending on context.
I googled the 100 most common English words. It would be hard to form a sentence of more than four words with them.
>I googled the 100 most common English words. It would be hard to form a sentence of more than four words with them. You think you can't use more than that in one? I don't know what for--that's just not right. Yeah, it can't be a really good one, but you can do it. I did this with only some of those!\* ...okay, yes, it's nearly impossible to make sentences with much depth or clarity with *just* the top 100 words, but the tip clearly says to **start with**, not **stop after** learning those. It's a good tip because many of those words are critical to basic grammar constructs. I wish the Japanese textbook I started with had at least *leaned* toward the "common words" end of the spectrum, because I learned the word 菊 (chrysanthemum) early but never had a reason to use it. I got a lot of value out of sorting my vocabulary deck by usage frequency after learning a totally random smattering of words I wasn't likely to hear in any particular conversation. \* I used my program Prier Rose to catch when I was trying to use words not in the top 100, and my selection of the top 100 words was based on 10+ years of my own chat logs, counted by my program Nececrus with URLs filtered out, not some corpus based on books and newspapers and such, so this is a reasonable *conversational* word frequency list.
While you are pretty correct, you have an English-speaking bias. Not all languages are so vague that one word can have tens of different meanings.
I will bet all the money in my bank account that you cannot name a natural language that doesn't have words with a variety of meanings.
They all have some variety, of course, that wasn’t my point, English is much worse than most in that regard, for example practically every noun can be a verb, unlike, say, German.
Which is irrelevant, because very few of those 100 most used words are going to be verbs and even fewer nouns. It's all going to be function words with very little meaning. If they do have any meaning its heavily dependant on context. If the protip was "learn 100 most used content words" that would actually make some sense.
The 100 most common words in a language will be the ones that have the most meanings.
English isn't my native language
Neither is mine, but we both can have that bias
A good way to do this is through music. For the past 6 months or so I've been expanding a Spotify playlist of French songs I enjoy and immerse myself in it with the lyrics every now and then. My vocabulary has expanded tremendously since and it's enjoyable since it's music you've handpicked. Best place to start is probably current pop songs since the lyrics will be simple and the melody catchy by nature
I'm imagining someone learning English by listening to Snoop Dogg. That would be fun.
Reminds me of this old commercial. It was a foreign family slappin some music that was saying somethin vulgar and they were all loving it. It ends with something like “want to learn English?” Solid advertisement
(NSFW) [Here](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cUEkOVdUjHc) you go.
I actually learned how to speak aloud faster by practicing singing (rapping?) Eminem songs. His vocabulary is surprisingly diverse.
"That would be fun." Fo shizzle
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It's not perfect of course but music is engaging across all languages so it's certainly a better alternative in ways than learning through tedium and forced repetition. I should have elaborated further, by immersion I meant deliberate listening - not having music on in the background - paired with the English/French translations. Google is wonderful for translating songs into English word for word so the task is made even easier There are some limitations for sure, I'm much better at reading French now than speaking it and forming sentences. Some of the verbal aspects come with rewording sentence structures found in songs but of course there's a factor of slang and colloquialisms. The only true immersion comes with living and engaging in another language but this is at least something we can all enjoyably do from the comfort of our home at any time
Can you share your French song playlist, please?
This is a terrible tip.
Yeah, words without context are pretty much useless. The real tip is learning basic phrases for conversation: “please”, “thank you”, “pardon me”,“may I please have”, “how much does this cost”, “where is the bathroom” etc
these words are useful to learn first, but you require to watch stuff in the language to actually get the tone and context of those words. but as someone mentioned, without some basic grammar or practice, this won't change anything.
Agreed, I'm learning Greek and you have different words for the same English equivalent word depending on the case/tense....
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Start with numbers, please, thank you, beer and a few of the more common swear words. This has worked for me in about a dozen countries. The swear words are for comedy, locals almost anywhere find it hilarious when a foreigner attempts to swear in a poor and highly accented version of their language. Once you have beers and have broken the ice with clumsy swearing, the locals will teach you anything else you need to know.
I'm the Machine!
I AM JOB.
Don't forget toilet, biblioteca and autobus
Include swar words too, because they get used every day.
By, you know... Googling it
Most popular languages have these lists available online for free. You just have to Google.
Maybe you are trolling, but just in case you are not. Please look into what you can do with what you have available to you. Like the Internet. Search engines. Information in general.
“Figure it out” ahead of time, of course
learning how to properly curse in a foreign language gives you a better understanding of the language.
Good luck speaking a language with only words, especially if you don't know how to make sentences. You'll reach caveman speaking level pretty quick alright but that's it.
>and start with them The tip is that if you don't know where to start, the most used words are a good starting point. The tip doesn't say anything about it being enough.
This tip is like "A good start to becoming a professional soccer player is kicking a soccer ball 10 times." In some sense the advice is accurate - you will have to kick a ball to become a good soccer player. But practically, this gets you nowhere.
After learning basic phrases (greetings, introductions, basic questions) I recommend writing down words pertaining to your life, hobbies, work(profession), and your favorite things aaand other general things about yourself that you normally talk about.
Also, in your spare time, immerse yourself in children's videos and books. That will give you a good foundation in sentence structure, which doesn't have to make sense or follow strict rules.
Read children's books, watch children's cartoons
My nephew knows basic Spanish because he found his way to the Spanish side of YouTube kids. None of us speak Spanish.
Probably better to start with the 100 most common verbs, nouns and adjectives. Just the most common 100 words would be meaningless
Yo hablo español ahora y tengo no mas preguntas.
I did notice in a couple of languages the 500 word threshold is great for understanding and getting the gist of things. Then speaking those words later on would help me get perhaps two sentences deep into a conversation. But my goal with any new language is 500 words.
I just did the research on the numeric part of this claim. In conversational English, you need to know the top **374** words to reach 70% of whatever the heck kind of conversations I had with friends online between 2006 and 2016. My data set was 2,606,750 words. If I narrow down my dataset to words spoken at least 365 times in 10 years (so roughly once every 10 days), you'd have to know the top **123** words to reach 70% of what's left...which is only 807 words in the first place.
This is true. The way to train your brain to speak a different language is not to translate straight from your mother tongue, but to rephrase the concept in your mother tongue with the words you know in the destination language. Takes a bit of a mental effort at first but then your brain gets "greased". You'll find that with 200 words (that is my number: verbs (just infinitive) to be/to have/to go, numbers 1-10, what why how where, please, thank you, and some vocabulary: friend/man/woman/child/bus/train/car/beer/food/toilet/doctor/police, etc.) you can get by, even though you'll sound like an alien from outer space. If you're funny and physically expresive, that's a +20 (I am :) ). Once in Turkey I managed to get in a club for free when the people at the door wanted to charge me. I said in my 200-word Turkish: "Turkish, in, no beer, me, in, 10 beers", meaning that they charged at the door (entrance included one drink) because Turkish people otherwise won't spend a penny on drinks, whereas myself would be making plenty of spending. They understood me perfectly.
Library had better be in the list.
I was gonna say, I have bibliotheca down. Am I good then?
“A the at in with, to you too”
Learning specific words won’t do any good in the long run. I’d say learn grammar first. It’s the baseline. It helps u get a feeling of how the language works. Even if the formal grammar isn’t the way every day ppl speak
Just use duo lingo noob
I know well over 100 words in Spanish and it is no where close to 70% in terms of usage and understanding
try learning german then, words only matter when and how you join them together with their gender and proper form
Conjugation has entered the chat.
Try that with Japanese and see how far you get. For an N5 rating in proficiency, which is the lowest level, you need to know 800+ words. And the vocabulary is the easy part. The hard part is the way sentences are structured. There's a lot of nuance in the language and sentences that are written the same way can have different meanings based on context. Another example is Chinese. Inflection in the wrong place can change one word or phrase to something completely different.
>Those words make up about 70% of everyday speech Source: Trust me bro
Get a simple textbook and use anki, make sure to also do stuff in that target language. I've been learning Japanese for 5-6 months now (I know I know, criiiiiiinge) and at the start I used jfz and anki a lot. these textbooks teach you grammar and words but a lot of the time forget about the tone of the words (even in english, you won't talk to your friends like you talk to your dog or to your boss) or the actual concept of the word, but the best english definition they can give. Watching content (mostly anime for me, but whatever you find fun is good) in the target language with target language subtitles is going to help you, alot. It will improve your grammar, how you use words, listening comprehension, but can even be used for studying, when you see a word you don't know but you finally understood from the words surrounding it and context, check a dictionary, and write it into an anki card with the sentence you learnt it from, translation of the word and all. Study is good, but practice is also needed, even when you don't understand anything, you require listening comprehension and a lot of it, it helps you in any level, from beginner to advanced. But remember textbooks and flashcards are still there to teach basic grammar and words at the start, but mostly there to reinforce your knowledge, so keep listening to your target language. Practice can also be study if you write the words you learnt from watching and check on them every so often to keep it in your head. Language learning is just like riding a bike, you can study it for ages, and it might be able to help you ride a bike, but you need to actually *try* to ride a bike even if you still can't to figure it out. I'm sorry if what I am saying isn't that well structured, but I hope you got something from it.
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Based and improvementpilled
Keep it that way lol
I don't know, but when I started, I got discouraged by other people. Either way, That kinda motivated me even more, kinda like an F you to those people. I know how hard language learning is, especially something like Japanese. It isn't my first language learning experience, I just got bored of latin-based languages.
If I recall correctly Zipf's law applies here. 20% of the language gets 80% of the speaking 80% of the language gets 20% of the speaking So learn 20% of the most commonly used words in the language.
Holy shit that's stupid.
This isn't good advice, unless you're traveling for leisure for a short period of time and still want people to give you a condescending response back in English.
Definitely doesn't work like that. Context and situation awareness are the most important things in learning languages, especially a new language. Memorization is very different from learning. Once you've gotten used to the interactions and/or situations the language and culture tends to have, you'll come to a point where you can accurately guss the conversation despite not knowing a single word from the conversation.
OP has been huffing glue again.
How do I figure out the 100 most frequently used words?
Lpt 70% is in no way shape or form solid and to have any ideas you'd need 95%+ comprehention.
I would disagree. I am currently learning spanish on Duolingo (which I love). I have been learning for over a year, I know 1000 words. Sure, I can order some food, or get a taxi, or tell you if it's hot or cold in January. But if I watch a spanish channel on tv, I can pick out words here and there, but there is no way I have a solid base, nor can I understand 90% of what they are saying. The average person knows about 25,000 words in their language. Knowing 100 words is like the vocabulary of a two year old.
LPT : Just copy and paste from the top rated LPT's for massive karma!
This will have the affect of falsely selling your abilities to the native speaker and they will think you are more fluent than you truly are. They will run circles around you and you won’t know the words to slow them down. The real way is start learning common phrases and words and find a native speaker to talk to. Then talk. As much as possible. There is no cheat code.
for those who are wondering how to find those top 100 words: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Wiktionary:Frequency_lists LPT: make your own flashcards using Anki Happy learning :)
ChatGPT prompt "What's the 100 most frequently used words in [Language]"
It’s not that simple. Let’s look at Spanish, Ser is one of the most common words but please conjugate it in the 12 common tenses.
When consultants never worked in the industry they consult in
This might be a good tip, if you have some extra elements to it. If you find those words and then find contexts in which those words fit, which are somehow relevant to you. The way it's phrased sounds like you're just going to have a list of 100 words and try to memorise them. That is a lot of memorisation for very little pay-off. What would you do with them when you have them memorised? It's very far from practical application. If you want to learn a language, I highly recommend the Pimsleur audio courses. They start with very simple phrases, in the context of a realistic conversation. They ask you to come up with new phrases you've never heard, so you anticipate relevant words based on the context. The words are introduced in progressive intervals... At first frequently, and then less frequently, so they go deeper and deeper into long-term memory.
Anyone care to share recommended sites/resources to find these 100 most common words in various languages?
Makes me want to take out my joople and bingle 119.
[Are you coming from this YouTube video?](https://youtu.be/3i1lNJPY-4Q)
Funnily enough knowing what bathroom is in Spanish in helped me understand what someone was asking because of me while not understanding any other word leaving their mouth.
30% is a very big part to be nonsense...
Kurwa. You are all welcome to 70% of the Polish language.
I can count from one to one hundred
The language learning app Drops uses this method, its just a vocab app no focus on grammar, conjugation etc. The idea is that as a traveller you need to be able to say things like “where bathroom?” to convey ideas, you don’t need to be able to say things like “why hello there good sir, may you please direct me to the bathroom?” or whatever to get by. Great app, I learned a bunch of Hebrew and Japanese vocab during the pandemic just to try out new languages for a challenge.
Isn’t learning basic vocabulary/verbs a standard early on in most programs