How Far 100 Words Will Get You - by Catee
One little known fact about languages is that most of the usage lies in only a few of the words. If you could learn these commonly used words first, then you would be able to understand a greater proportion of the language much more quickly. Unfortunately, most of the time we don't learn these "common words" when we start learning a foreign language. Often we will learn the names of various items around the classroom that aren't very useful in a real setting. Know the secrets of language -- learn the most useful words first!
As a demonstration of how common these "common words" are, we're going to answer to question: How many words does it take to read Shakespeare's Macbeth?
Computers are great because then you can do cool stuff like count up how many times words appear in large swaths of text -- like Macbeth. In our case, we're going to see what percentage of Macbeth you could recognize if you just knew the 1 most common word of English, the 2 common words of English, the 3 most common words...and so on.
And the results are in!
| Percent recognized | Word |
| 4.7% | the |
| 8.2% | and |
| 10.7% | to |
| 12.9% | of |
| 15.0% | i |
| 16.6% | a |
| 18.2% | macbeth |
| 19.6% | that |
| 20.9% | in |
By just learning these 9 English words you will be able to recognize nearly
21% of the words in MacBeth! That's amazing! NINE words! Let's keep going...
| Percent recognized | Word |
| 22.2% | my |
| 23.3% | is |
| 24.4% | you |
| 25.4% | with |
| 26.4% | his |
| 27.3% | not |
| 28.2% | it |
| 29.0% | be |
| 29.8% | but |
| 30.5% | your |
| 31.3% | have |
And by learning 11 more, we can recognize almost 31% of the text! Knowing only 20 words, we can read 31% of Macbeth. Well, what if we keep going? I'm not going to list out every word and percentage here, but I will give you a plot of percentage understood vs. vocabulary size.
By just learning 500 words you will be able to read nearly 80% of MacBeth.
Now, that's a lot of MacBeth! To tell you the truth, I'm not even sure if I could understand much more than 90% of MacBeth. After all, Shakespeare isn't exactly easy to read -- plus I'm a cat.
The trick here is to learn the RIGHT words. Of course, the larger your vocabulary becomes, the less useful each word becomes ("the law of diminishing returns" as economists would say). Also, we haven't talked about grammar, and the arrangement of the words definitely carry some meaning.
However, the proof is here. You don't need a huge vocabulary to effectively learn a foreign language. You need the RIGHT vocabulary. Learn the right words. This effect is amplified when learning foreign languages. The English language has the largest vocabulary out of any language with 1,000,000 words by some estimates. Most other languages do not come near that vocabulary, so there's less to learn to get the same "bang" with foreign languages.
As Scrooge McDuck used to say, "Work smarter, not harder."
