Neat idea, but the article also made me discover Basic English and its 850 words. Didn't know about that, I think that should be mentioned when you learn English.
Does anyone know of similar general purpose word sets for other languages?
Does anyone know of similar general purpose word sets for other languages?
This would be great. All my attempts at learning a new language are thwarted by the seeming daunting nature of the task. 850 (or so) words? I could see myself doing that (and then continuing on to another few thousand words.
I believe Tim Ferriss did something like this for learning Japanese. He made the list himself, but published it for others. It's in "The 4 Hour Chef" and probably on his website.
I looked into this more (had an urge to learn Spanish today). Frequency dictionaries might be a good place to start. Here's the Spanish one I found [1]. It's a dictionary sorted by frequency of use (in a 20 million word text survey) instead of alphabetically. I imagine you can find a similar dictionary for other languages.
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Neat idea, but the article also made me discover Basic English and its 850 words. Didn't know about that, I think that should be mentioned when you learn English.
Does anyone know of similar general purpose word sets for other languages?
This would be great. All my attempts at learning a new language are thwarted by the seeming daunting nature of the task. 850 (or so) words? I could see myself doing that (and then continuing on to another few thousand words.
I believe Tim Ferriss did something like this for learning Japanese. He made the list himself, but published it for others. It's in "The 4 Hour Chef" and probably on his website.
Self reply, I hope that's okay.
I looked into this more (had an urge to learn Spanish today). Frequency dictionaries might be a good place to start. Here's the Spanish one I found [1]. It's a dictionary sorted by frequency of use (in a 20 million word text survey) instead of alphabetically. I imagine you can find a similar dictionary for other languages.
[1] http://speak-spanish.ru/wp-content/uploads/A-FreDictSpan.pdf