One of the first walls you will absolutely hit in language learning is vocab. And while I did say and I stand by the fact that learning vocab is not as important as making conversation, a basic amount of vocab is fundamental. But which words to learn? I strongly recommend starting with 100-1000 words, depending on how difficult the language you’re learning is. It is absurd, how much we can communicate with only 100 words. If you think about it, the words that are important in day to day life are not that many: ‘hey how’s it going?’ ‘Good, how are you?’ Keeps on walking past you. An extreme example is Dr. Seuss’ ‘Green Eggs and Ham,’ a book he wrote when his friend bet him he couldn’t write a book using only 50 distinct words.
80% result with 20% effort
If your target language is somewhat related to your native language/s, then I would start directly by learning the 1000 most common words in a language. 1000 seems daunting, but it really is not that much. For instance, if you are Italian, and you are learning French, you will be amazed at how many French words are easily intelligible just by knowing Italian. It cuts your learning by a lot. If you are English, and you want to learn German or Dutch, same deal applies. Obviously, you gotta be a bit creative. The words are not always going to be dead giveaways. For example, the English verb to prevent translates into Dutch as voorkomen. Maybe it’s not obvious right away, but pronouncing the word, you realize it sounds like fore-come which logically makes a whole lot of sense. You prevent something by coming ‘fore it. The reason for these kinds of intelligibilities are because of common linguistic roots, and they really help you out! Often, a word in German, or Dutch is just going to be an archaic way of saying things in English. Here’s a video and a cool video on the similarities between Italian and Spanish, on a channel by Bahador Alast.
If the language is not related at all to your own, or it uses a completely different alphabet, then I recommend starting with 100 words.
How to hack your learning
Learning 1000 words is easy… with the right tools. The answer is using spaced repetition. Now, there is a lot of research to be read on spaced repetition---those of you who are keen enough can start on this page. What it ultimately boils down to is that you end up practicing the words you need to more than the ones you thought were easy. It’s not rocket science, especially with technology.
The spaced repetition app I recommend you pick up is Anki (it means memorization in Japanese) for your laptop and AnkiDroid for your android and AnkiMobile for your iPhone . It’s community run so it’s absolutely free (yay communism but it's not free on iPhone for some reason) and a fantastic resource for learning. Here you can download flashcard decks made by others. Not only that, some of the decks include voice recordings by native speakers so you can learn the word and its pronunciation which, if you ask me, is fundamental. You can make your own of course which is super helpful if you have some specific phrases or words you want or need to focus on. The whole time, the magical cogs inside your computer and phones will make sure you are making the most of your time, meaning, you are learning the words or phrases you found the hardest.
TL;DR (Too long didn’t read)
1. Download Anki on your computer and/or phone.
2. Make an account so Anki syncs your flashcards throughout your devices.
3. Download a deck in your target language.
4. Practice every day.
Pro tip 1: practicing every day for 10-20 minutes is what is going to make the words stick. If you wait too long with Anki, you’re going to accumulate a lot of vocab reviews, and that’s no fun. So, to keep things easy, I recommend you try to incorporate vocab learning into your schedule so you can get rid of it quickly.
Pro tip 2: you can use Anki for anything, and I meant it. Language learning is just one of the things you can use it for. I learned all the US state capitals in a week (purely trivial knowledge). But a lot of medical students and law students use it. Hell, there’s even some picture-based flashcards made for amateur Dutch birdwatchers (did somebody spot that Eurasian Jay!?).
Stick around, next week we’ll get into hacking your language learning by learning sentences and phrases. Happy learnin’!
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