Now that you’ve chosen the language you want to learn, let’s move on to the first part of the methodology, the most important aspect of a language: words.
Like everyone else who has gone through the education system, you have without a doubt had experience learning vocabulary. At school we have to learn thousands of words in different languages, but in a real life conversation we’re not usually able to use them. Why is this? The answer lies in the fact that we memorize these words for just a second and then we move on to learn some other words. The whole problem can be summarised as follows:
a) we usually study the completely wrong words, without considering what would be useful and what would not.
b) we use fundamentally wrong methods to memorize these words.
On second thoughts, we usually don´t employ any methods at all, and this is where the problems begin.
What would be the solution, therefore? The answer is actually quite simple – firstly, you have to understand that in everyday conversations we use a very small part of the whole vocabulary of a language. So, if you learn the most commonly used words in a given language and if you repeat these over and over again, then it is possible to understand a language really quickly. It’s true!
Now imagine a situation where you start to learn a totally new language from zero. You will learn the 300 most common words in the language and know them by heart. And now you take a newspaper article about a subject that you are personally interested in and you try to understand it. Research says that in a situation like this you will understand about 50-60% of this article from the overall context. This is wonderful, isn´t it? And at the same time quite logical as well. But what happens when we learn more words from the list of most commonly used words?
If we look at the research then it tells us the following:
the 75 most commonly used words make up 40% of occurrences in real life situations
the 200 most commonly used words make up 50% of occurrences in real life situations
the 524 most commonly used words make up 60% of occurrences in real life situations
the 1257 most commonly used words make up 70% of occurrences in real life situations
the 2925 most commonly used words make up 80% of occurrences in real life situations
So, you can see that if you hit the 3000-word mark, then you are indeed very close to being absolutely fluent in the language in almost ANY situation that you may find yourself in. That means that if you compare this with a usual dictionary, which contains some 40 thousand words, then you can see that the large majority of the words in dictionaries are absent from everyday language situations. And going even further – if you just know the small part of the language that is used the most, then you can handle whatever life-situation that may occur in the foreign language!
When you´re starting from scratch with a language, the 3000-word limit is a tall order and we need to simplify the learning experience a whole lot. Therefore – as you see from the stats above – if you know just the 200 most commonly used words you can handle 50% of real-life occurrences in the foreign language. That’s a great start!
On the other hand, if you already have in place a small foundation in the foreign language in question and you would like to make big strides in the language, then we advise you to take a larger list of words, for example the 1000 most commonly used words. Make sure to check the list and find out which ones you already know and which ones you don´t.
If you already have a nice foundation in place in your language but you want to really build upon it fast, then take an even larger part of the most common words list and see which are new.
Now let´s take a look at the list of most commonly used words in your chosen language:
STEP 1: Go to the LIVE web-environment. Open www.livelanguagelearning.eu – select “SIGN IN” from the main menu and sign in.
STEP 2: Choose the language that you want to learn (you can always change it later on if you want to learn another language)
STEP 3: After you have made the language selection, a page will open and hover on the image “Most common words” and click on the “View More” button to find the list of most commonly used words in your language.
STEP 4: Scroll down the word list and discover which ones are new acquaintances, and which ones are already old friends.
Now you know which words to learn, we turn our attention to what is the best way to learn them.
HOW TO MEMORIZE WORDS?
There are several ways to learn words efficiently. In our LIVE-methodology we use two powerful approaches ‒ memorization tools and mnemonic techniques ‒ together to get the best possible results.
HOW TO USE MEMORIZATION TOOLS?
A memorization tool is