To get to a native speaker level, one must know at least 10.000 base words automatically, and to be truly fluent, one must know over 35.000 base words automatically, which is writer level! Vocab videos with hundreds and thousands of words are the best and fastest way to learn the actual words, so I highly recommend focusing mostly on vocab as a beginner, and also watching at least one video with subs in the target language a day or regularly, starting with the ones for beginners, and also memorizing as many lyrics as possible! There is no way around it and no shortcut, if one wants to get the words learnt fast to be able to follow subtitles in the target language, vocab videos are the most efficient way to learn the actual words, even though they aren’t the most fun to watch and rewatch! I started learning languages on my own about one year ago and learning 15+ languages at the same time, and I am already upper intermediate level in Icelandic and Norse and German and advanced level in Norwegian and upper advanced level in Dutch and intermediate level in Welsh and mid intermediate level in Swedish and French and Italian and Portuguese! The key to being a successful polyglot is choosing wisely, that is, only choosing to learn the pretty and easy languages, and also, learning as many pretty and easy languages as one can handle at the same time, as it’s way more fun and it saves so many years, and using the best language learning methods such as spaced repetition and memorizing + analyzing many song lyrics and watching every single video and movie with subtitles in the target languages!
I highly recommend learning the prettiest and most refined and most magical and most poetic languages ever Norse / Icelandic / Dutch / Norwegian / Gothic / Faroese / Danish / Welsh / Breton / Cornish 2gether, as they are as gorgeous as English and are way too pretty not to know, plus these languages are the most fun to learn and speak and hear and see and are naturally motivating, so all should be learning and prioritizing the prettiest languages, and German should be learnt on the side as it isn’t as fun as the prettiest languages ever, so it’s better to learn it only once or twice a week - I highly recommend learning languages such as German / Swedish / Italian / Portuguese / Galician / French / Gallo / Spanish / Catalan / Latin / Occitan / Slovene / Finnish / Latvian / Venetian etc on the side, while prioritizing mostly the prettiest languages, and, one should also be aware of the fact that it’s easier to learn German if one learns Dutch first or if one knows Dutch, so I highly recommend prioritizing Dutch more than German, as Dutch is the easiest to learn (after English which is the easiest language ever in every way) and can be learnt way faster, as starting with the prettiest and easiest languages and prioritizing them the most is also one of the most efficient ways to learn new languages!
This video is only the second time (in 5+ years) that someone told me that most common sentences have some uncommon words, in addition to the "most common 800" words. Boy, does that affect language learning! This was verified for a bunch of different languages, in a research study I read about.
I'm also confused why people don't mention this. It seems like there's a push to "learn what's valuable" aka what unlocks "more" of the language, but you realize how dry language learning can be if you don't engage with specific topics or parts of a language!
I've seen this mentioned quite a bit. But this video did a fantastic job of explaining it!! Yeah, the problem is that for every person that talks about this issue you have around 50 people telling you that 1000 words = ~90% of the words and you can understand most of what people say . No 1000 of the most common words is still pretty useless for understanding sentences. Once you know maybe ~2500-3000 of the most common words (which some say is maybe around 97% for some languages) things start getting a little more interesting. Would love to see examples. Some sample sentences with the 100 most common words left in, 1000 most common words left in, 2000 most common words left in, 3000 most common words in, 5000 most common words left in, and 10,000 most common words left in. That would be a cool video!
0:58 in case anyone is learning Japanese 購読する (koudoku suru) means subscribe to a mailing system like a newspaper. 登録する (touroku suru) means subscribe to a youtube channel or register your name for something. 登録しました〜
I'm the reverse. I want to master the basic grammar before mastering the common words. Having lots of vocab but no way to use them was a weirdly frustrating feeling when I started learning Japanese.
Grammer is to language like math formulas are to math. Your subconscious cannot use them, only your conscious can as you plug the right bits in here and there.
I can't tell you how much I agree with this! Despite knowing more than 2,000 words in Japanese, if I watch a relatively easy anime like Gochuumon Wa Usagi Desuka, the number of words that I don't know per sentence is shockingly high! If I only knew 100 words, the entire show would be incomprehensible to me. So I have been frustrated by the promise that you'll know a certain percentage of the language by knowing a number of words. Personally, I only like taking words in context, which means I always add the sentence that I found the word in into my Anki deck. This is, unfortunately, more time consuming, but it is my preference. My biggest impediment to progress, though, is a lack of consistency. I miss far too many days to learn efficiently, and then forget previously learned words after I haven't reviewed for a long while. But this, and the 10,000 words video, is very motivating for me, so thank you!
Perfectly explained. I didn't make any real progress in Russian until I got away from the idea that I needed to master the frequency wordlists and case system first. Instead, I just went after the history and science books, podcasts and videos that interested me and (slowly) learned the grammar by ozmosis along the way. Oh, and I just subscribed to your channel! Great stuff!
To get to a native speaker level, one must know at least 10.000 base words automatically, and to be truly fluent, one must know over 35.000 base words automatically, which is writer level! Vocab videos with hundreds and thousands of words are the best and fastest way to learn the actual words, so I highly recommend focusing mostly on vocab as a beginner, and also watching at least one video with subs in the target language a day or regularly, starting with the ones for beginners, and also memorizing as many lyrics as possible! There is no way around it and no shortcut, if one wants to get the words learnt fast to be able to follow subtitles in the target language, vocab videos are the most efficient way to learn the actual words, even though they aren’t the most fun to watch and rewatch! I started learning languages on my own about one year ago and learning 15+ languages at the same time, and I am already upper intermediate level in Icelandic and Norse and German and advanced level in Norwegian and upper advanced level in Dutch and intermediate level in Welsh and mid intermediate level in Swedish and French and Italian and Portuguese! The key to being a successful polyglot is choosing wisely, that is, only choosing to learn the pretty and easy languages, and also, learning as many pretty and easy languages as one can handle at the same time, as it’s way more fun and it saves so many years, and using the best language learning methods such as spaced repetition and memorizing + analyzing many song lyrics and watching every single video and movie with subtitles in the target languages!
I highly recommend learning the prettiest and most refined and most magical and most poetic languages ever Norse / Icelandic / Dutch / Norwegian / Gothic / Faroese / Danish / Welsh / Breton / Cornish 2gether, as they are as gorgeous as English and are way too pretty not to know, plus these languages are the most fun to learn and speak and hear and see and are naturally motivating, so all should be learning and prioritizing the prettiest languages, and German should be learnt on the side as it isn’t as fun as the prettiest languages ever, so it’s better to learn it only once or twice a week - I highly recommend learning languages such as German / Swedish / Italian / Portuguese / Galician / French / Gallo / Spanish / Catalan / Latin / Occitan / Slovene / Finnish / Latvian / Venetian etc on the side, while prioritizing mostly the prettiest languages, and, one should also be aware of the fact that it’s easier to learn German if one learns Dutch first or if one knows Dutch, so I highly recommend prioritizing Dutch more than German, as Dutch is the easiest to learn (after English which is the easiest language ever in every way) and can be learnt way faster, as starting with the prettiest and easiest languages and prioritizing them the most is also one of the most efficient ways to learn new languages!
Along the lines of “learn words that interest you” for a whole year, My Spanish reading was BBC science and tech articles: space, animals, human ancestors, the environment, and even though I only understood 60% of the article, I was able to get the gist. I learned a lot of new words and phrases (maybe mostly not helpful for everyday use), but more importantly- I had fun. My goal was, and still is, exposure. Sure, I only understood 50% of less of the article about nuclear reactors, but I DID understand 50% of it. And learned new things. Win/win in my book And because I had fun and there were a variety of topics, I never had burnout and looked forward to relaxing in the evening and reading an article
@@OneWordataTime1 a fun German channel is Bob Brickman. He’s building a LEGO city, so I guarantee you’ll pick up a lot of new vocab… if that interests you at all
Right!? I’ve been thinking about this as I learn Spanish. I’m in between my first semester and second, so I’m doing some practice on my own and remembered the most common word thing. First I thought it meant I’d understand 50% of all conversations, but now that I k ow enough to start understanding some podcasts etc., it’s more like I don’t know 50+% of like each sentence! Alas, too bad it is t that easy!
My German vocab came mostly from the books that I've read. This English list of vocab comes mostly from a Python package call "wordfreq" but there are sites that will give you the frequency lists for different languages if you search "german word frequency list"
People claiming that you can understand 50% of content when you learn 100 words in a language are utterly ridiculous 😂 Thanks for debubunking that myth in a fun way ^^ BTW I love the little wordplay you did with the name of your channel🥳
This is a well-researched and very insightful video, thank you for tackling this "X words is enough" notion. I think the problem with today's language learning content is that if promises newcomers great results for significantly less effort than one would expect when learning a new language. And while I believe that learning a language is easier than some people may think (mostly because the "school way" of learning a language is not the most efficient one out there), it still requires a considerable investment of time and effort, and this fact is omitted by some. I can tell a lot of effort went into making this video and I'd love to see you upload more. Keep up the good work!
preliminary thoughts before watching: unlikely imo. there's a difference between learning individual words/characters versus seeing them in context for starters. and 100 seems too low to start with. if it does work, perhaps it works with european languages and not so much others.
I've seen videos very similar to this one that use 1000 words (i.e. around 80-90%) and it is still a very similar result, i.e. you may know 80-90% of the words but you do not understand 80-90% of the meaning.
I disagree with this video. I find concentrating on those top 100 words is really helpful. They're not the only words I'm learning, but concentrating on learning those words early makes learning other words easier. Think about it this way, you're going to need to have some core set of words that will give context to surrounding words. So, early on, do you want to learn 2,000 words to give context to the "grammar" words like--- is, to be, here there, what, with, etc.? Or is it worth learning those 100 words early on, that you can use over and over again, to help give context as you start building a vocabulary of thousands of words? Personally, I like learning a vocab word, and then learning that vocab word in a sentence that is using a few of those core 100 words used all the time.
True, that's why they're called "frequency" lists. Because you will meet them very often. So whether you like it or not, you will have to know them sooner or later (and learning it sooner will save you more time as you will have a "base" for future sentences).
Also like you can learn 100 words in no time. In school we had to learn 50 English words every lesson which were also tested before class by translating 10 random word pairs out of those 50.
Most polyglots and language learners will tell you get the most commonly used words the top 100 easily for free (meaning you'll learn these super quickly by just being exposed to the language. So, most of them say that there is no reason to explicitly focus on them. So no one is saying the top 100 words are not useful -- they just say they show up so often -- you'll learn them through aquisition. The most commonly used words are stuff like "the", "and", "you", "I". Believe me you learn these super quick because they show up over and over again.
If you're curious about my process for learning vocab, here's how I learned 10,000 words in German: ruclips.net/video/OpvzujGKInI/видео.html
Would you like to share 10000 anki decks with me Brother i am also learning German it will help me a lot please .
To get to a native speaker level, one must know at least 10.000 base words automatically, and to be truly fluent, one must know over 35.000 base words automatically, which is writer level! Vocab videos with hundreds and thousands of words are the best and fastest way to learn the actual words, so I highly recommend focusing mostly on vocab as a beginner, and also watching at least one video with subs in the target language a day or regularly, starting with the ones for beginners, and also memorizing as many lyrics as possible! There is no way around it and no shortcut, if one wants to get the words learnt fast to be able to follow subtitles in the target language, vocab videos are the most efficient way to learn the actual words, even though they aren’t the most fun to watch and rewatch! I started learning languages on my own about one year ago and learning 15+ languages at the same time, and I am already upper intermediate level in Icelandic and Norse and German and advanced level in Norwegian and upper advanced level in Dutch and intermediate level in Welsh and mid intermediate level in Swedish and French and Italian and Portuguese! The key to being a successful polyglot is choosing wisely, that is, only choosing to learn the pretty and easy languages, and also, learning as many pretty and easy languages as one can handle at the same time, as it’s way more fun and it saves so many years, and using the best language learning methods such as spaced repetition and memorizing + analyzing many song lyrics and watching every single video and movie with subtitles in the target languages!
I highly recommend learning the prettiest and most refined and most magical and most poetic languages ever Norse / Icelandic / Dutch / Norwegian / Gothic / Faroese / Danish / Welsh / Breton / Cornish 2gether, as they are as gorgeous as English and are way too pretty not to know, plus these languages are the most fun to learn and speak and hear and see and are naturally motivating, so all should be learning and prioritizing the prettiest languages, and German should be learnt on the side as it isn’t as fun as the prettiest languages ever, so it’s better to learn it only once or twice a week - I highly recommend learning languages such as German / Swedish / Italian / Portuguese / Galician / French / Gallo / Spanish / Catalan / Latin / Occitan / Slovene / Finnish / Latvian / Venetian etc on the side, while prioritizing mostly the prettiest languages, and, one should also be aware of the fact that it’s easier to learn German if one learns Dutch first or if one knows Dutch, so I highly recommend prioritizing Dutch more than German, as Dutch is the easiest to learn (after English which is the easiest language ever in every way) and can be learnt way faster, as starting with the prettiest and easiest languages and prioritizing them the most is also one of the most efficient ways to learn new languages!
This video is only the second time (in 5+ years) that someone told me that most common sentences have some uncommon words, in addition to the "most common 800" words. Boy, does that affect language learning! This was verified for a bunch of different languages, in a research study I read about.
I'm also confused why people don't mention this. It seems like there's a push to "learn what's valuable" aka what unlocks "more" of the language, but you realize how dry language learning can be if you don't engage with specific topics or parts of a language!
I've seen this mentioned quite a bit. But this video did a fantastic job of explaining it!! Yeah, the problem is that for every person that talks about this issue you have around 50 people telling you that 1000 words = ~90% of the words and you can understand most of what people say . No 1000 of the most common words is still pretty useless for understanding sentences. Once you know maybe ~2500-3000 of the most common words (which some say is maybe around 97% for some languages) things start getting a little more interesting.
Would love to see examples. Some sample sentences with the 100 most common words left in, 1000 most common words left in, 2000 most common words left in, 3000 most common words in, 5000 most common words left in, and 10,000 most common words left in. That would be a cool video!
0:58 in case anyone is learning Japanese
購読する (koudoku suru) means subscribe to a mailing system like a newspaper.
登録する (touroku suru) means subscribe to a youtube channel or register your name for something.
登録しました〜
Same problem for the Chinese...
I'm the reverse. I want to master the basic grammar before mastering the common words. Having lots of vocab but no way to use them was a weirdly frustrating feeling when I started learning Japanese.
Grammer is to language like math formulas are to math. Your subconscious cannot use them, only your conscious can as you plug the right bits in here and there.
I can't tell you how much I agree with this! Despite knowing more than 2,000 words in Japanese, if I watch a relatively easy anime like Gochuumon Wa Usagi Desuka, the number of words that I don't know per sentence is shockingly high! If I only knew 100 words, the entire show would be incomprehensible to me. So I have been frustrated by the promise that you'll know a certain percentage of the language by knowing a number of words.
Personally, I only like taking words in context, which means I always add the sentence that I found the word in into my Anki deck. This is, unfortunately, more time consuming, but it is my preference. My biggest impediment to progress, though, is a lack of consistency. I miss far too many days to learn efficiently, and then forget previously learned words after I haven't reviewed for a long while.
But this, and the 10,000 words video, is very motivating for me, so thank you!
Perfectly explained. I didn't make any real progress in Russian until I got away from the idea that I needed to master the frequency wordlists and case system first. Instead, I just went after the history and science books, podcasts and videos that interested me and (slowly) learned the grammar by ozmosis along the way.
Oh, and I just subscribed to your channel! Great stuff!
That's awesome - hopefully I'll get to Russian at some point. Thanks for the sub!
After seeing two of your videos I can see a channel with a sceptical, statistical approach to language learning :D I'm waiting for more.
Are content creators cutting it down to 100? Back when I started studying languages and it was all about the most common 1,000
fluent in 3 months
@@InappropriateShorts Benny always was the edge case of edge cases
@@DavidWoodMusic based on his initial failings, I doubt it
To get to a native speaker level, one must know at least 10.000 base words automatically, and to be truly fluent, one must know over 35.000 base words automatically, which is writer level! Vocab videos with hundreds and thousands of words are the best and fastest way to learn the actual words, so I highly recommend focusing mostly on vocab as a beginner, and also watching at least one video with subs in the target language a day or regularly, starting with the ones for beginners, and also memorizing as many lyrics as possible! There is no way around it and no shortcut, if one wants to get the words learnt fast to be able to follow subtitles in the target language, vocab videos are the most efficient way to learn the actual words, even though they aren’t the most fun to watch and rewatch! I started learning languages on my own about one year ago and learning 15+ languages at the same time, and I am already upper intermediate level in Icelandic and Norse and German and advanced level in Norwegian and upper advanced level in Dutch and intermediate level in Welsh and mid intermediate level in Swedish and French and Italian and Portuguese! The key to being a successful polyglot is choosing wisely, that is, only choosing to learn the pretty and easy languages, and also, learning as many pretty and easy languages as one can handle at the same time, as it’s way more fun and it saves so many years, and using the best language learning methods such as spaced repetition and memorizing + analyzing many song lyrics and watching every single video and movie with subtitles in the target languages!
I highly recommend learning the prettiest and most refined and most magical and most poetic languages ever Norse / Icelandic / Dutch / Norwegian / Gothic / Faroese / Danish / Welsh / Breton / Cornish 2gether, as they are as gorgeous as English and are way too pretty not to know, plus these languages are the most fun to learn and speak and hear and see and are naturally motivating, so all should be learning and prioritizing the prettiest languages, and German should be learnt on the side as it isn’t as fun as the prettiest languages ever, so it’s better to learn it only once or twice a week - I highly recommend learning languages such as German / Swedish / Italian / Portuguese / Galician / French / Gallo / Spanish / Catalan / Latin / Occitan / Slovene / Finnish / Latvian / Venetian etc on the side, while prioritizing mostly the prettiest languages, and, one should also be aware of the fact that it’s easier to learn German if one learns Dutch first or if one knows Dutch, so I highly recommend prioritizing Dutch more than German, as Dutch is the easiest to learn (after English which is the easiest language ever in every way) and can be learnt way faster, as starting with the prettiest and easiest languages and prioritizing them the most is also one of the most efficient ways to learn new languages!
In French we say “s’abonner” when speaking of a RUclips channel.
Along the lines of “learn words that interest you” for a whole year, My Spanish reading was BBC science and tech articles: space, animals, human ancestors, the environment, and even though I only understood 60% of the article, I was able to get the gist. I learned a lot of new words and phrases (maybe mostly not helpful for everyday use), but more importantly- I had fun. My goal was, and still is, exposure. Sure, I only understood 50% of less of the article about nuclear reactors, but I DID understand 50% of it. And learned new things. Win/win in my book
And because I had fun and there were a variety of topics, I never had burnout and looked forward to relaxing in the evening and reading an article
That's awesome. I did the same thing with a few German astronomy channels that were so engaging, I couldn't stop watching.
@@OneWordataTime1 a fun German channel is Bob Brickman. He’s building a LEGO city, so I guarantee you’ll pick up a lot of new vocab… if that interests you at all
Right!? I’ve been thinking about this as I learn Spanish. I’m in between my first semester and second, so I’m doing some practice on my own and remembered the most common word thing. First I thought it meant I’d understand 50% of all conversations, but now that I k ow enough to start understanding some podcasts etc., it’s more like I don’t know 50+% of like each sentence!
Alas, too bad it is t that easy!
Great content I will use to improve my learning in German - Obrigada!! - Vielen Danke
Great Content! where did you get this list of vocab? i'm interested in learning german! thanks a lot!
My German vocab came mostly from the books that I've read. This English list of vocab comes mostly from a Python package call "wordfreq" but there are sites that will give you the frequency lists for different languages if you search "german word frequency list"
People claiming that you can understand 50% of content when you learn 100 words in a language are utterly ridiculous 😂 Thanks for debubunking that myth in a fun way ^^ BTW I love the little wordplay you did with the name of your channel🥳
This is a well-researched and very insightful video, thank you for tackling this "X words is enough" notion.
I think the problem with today's language learning content is that if promises newcomers great results for significantly less effort than one would expect when learning a new language. And while I believe that learning a language is easier than some people may think (mostly because the "school way" of learning a language is not the most efficient one out there), it still requires a considerable investment of time and effort, and this fact is omitted by some.
I can tell a lot of effort went into making this video and I'd love to see you upload more. Keep up the good work!
10000 words is enough to unlock a foreign language especially if its related to the one you already know 😂
just be exposed to natural language content, you will naturally acquire the most used words, grammar, vocabulary, verbs…😊
eye opening lol
preliminary thoughts before watching: unlikely imo. there's a difference between learning individual words/characters versus seeing them in context for starters. and 100 seems too low to start with. if it does work, perhaps it works with european languages and not so much others.
I've seen videos very similar to this one that use 1000 words (i.e. around 80-90%) and it is still a very similar result, i.e. you may know 80-90% of the words but you do not understand 80-90% of the meaning.
Yes. Kiswahili
Is your deck public?
hey - the 10,000 word German deck I just got put up on Ankiweb: ankiweb.net/shared/info/1421625316
it definitely doesnt work like that haha
I disagree with this video. I find concentrating on those top 100 words is really helpful. They're not the only words I'm learning, but concentrating on learning those words early makes learning other words easier. Think about it this way, you're going to need to have some core set of words that will give context to surrounding words. So, early on, do you want to learn 2,000 words to give context to the "grammar" words like--- is, to be, here there, what, with, etc.? Or is it worth learning those 100 words early on, that you can use over and over again, to help give context as you start building a vocabulary of thousands of words? Personally, I like learning a vocab word, and then learning that vocab word in a sentence that is using a few of those core 100 words used all the time.
Agree
True, that's why they're called "frequency" lists. Because you will meet them very often. So whether you like it or not, you will have to know them sooner or later (and learning it sooner will save you more time as you will have a "base" for future sentences).
Also like you can learn 100 words in no time. In school we had to learn 50 English words every lesson which were also tested before class by translating 10 random word pairs out of those 50.
Most polyglots and language learners will tell you get the most commonly used words the top 100 easily for free (meaning you'll learn these super quickly by just being exposed to the language. So, most of them say that there is no reason to explicitly focus on them.
So no one is saying the top 100 words are not useful -- they just say they show up so often -- you'll learn them through aquisition.
The most commonly used words are stuff like "the", "and", "you", "I". Believe me you learn these super quick because they show up over and over again.