You only need ~200 words to talk about everyday things
This is part of my guide on how to start learning a language quickly and efficiently. You can find the whole guide here. Please fill out this quick survey to let me know whether you’d like a Memrise course based on the guide.
If you learn just 200 well-chosen words in your target language, then you can talk about most everyday things. (By “words”, I really mean lemmas, i.e. I’m counting “run” and “runs” as one word.) When trying to talk about a topic, there will probably be a few key words that you don’t know, but you can ask for or look up those words and then use them for the rest of the time that you’re talking about the topic. You can see an example of how using the 200 words works.
* Note 1: Being able to speak doesn’t mean that you’ll immediately be able to listen to and understand the language. See note #2 on the guide. However, you can have conversations if the other person slows down and speaks simply, and you can also practice writing.
Here’s the list of 200. I hope it’s a useful guideline and starting point for you. I may revise it, so please refer to the original post for the most up-to-date version. In addition to these general words, there will probably be some others that will be among the most useful for you (e.g. “class” if you’re a student). When you find yourself using them again and again, learn them too.
* Note 2: You should really think of this as a list of concepts. Your goal isn’t to translate each word to a word in your target language, but to figure out how to express that concept in your target language. In some cases, a concept may translate to multiple words (for example, I listed “you” as a concept, but in some languages there are different words for “formal you” and “informal you”). Some concepts may translate to no word at all, but rather a certain grammatical structure (for example, Russian doesn’t use the verb “have”; to say “I have a cat” in Russian, you say “at me there is a cat”).
Use a dictionary to find out how to express these concepts in your target language (for some subtleties, you may need to google or ask in a forum). You can then use Anki to memorize the words. Learn to be able to go from the concept to the word in your target language, not the other way around; you want to be able to produce the word, not just recognize it. You should also learn how to pronounce your target language. To hear native speakers pronounce words in your target language, check out Forvo.
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This list has been translated into: Afrikaans, Dutch, Esperanto, Finnish, French, German, Hungarian, Icelandic, Norwegian.
If you’d like to translate this list into another language, please do! :) Just include a link back to this post, and let me know when you’re done so that I can link to your list here.
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Verbs
To start, I suggest memorizing the infinitive form of these verbs and their present and past tense “I” conjugations.
- be
- there is
- have
- do
- create (aka “make”)
- cause (aka “make”)
- go
- say
- speak
- know
I’ll be doing this later.
