Language learning
Choosing your first 200 words in a new language
The standard advice — learn the most frequent words first — is right about the top hundred and misleading after that. Frequency lists are dominated by function words that you cannot use until you have content words to put around them, and by nouns that belong to somebody else's life. A better method for the first 200: take the function words wholesale, take the verbs that carry sentences, and let your own week choose the nouns.
Why a frequency list alone fails a beginner
Frequency lists are genuinely powerful. A few thousand of the commonest words account for the overwhelming majority of everything written or said in a language, and that fact should shape any vocabulary plan.
It fails as a beginner's order for two reasons. The very top of the list is almost entirely function words — the, of, and, to, is — which do essential work and say nothing on their own; a beginner who learns the first fifty in order can produce no sentence at all. And the nouns further down are the nouns of the corpus, which usually means newspapers. "Government" outranks "spoon" in every frequency list ever built, and "spoon" is the one you needed this week.
A shape for the first 200
| Group | Roughly how many | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Function words: pronouns, articles, prepositions, conjunctions, question words | 40 | Small closed set, enormous coverage, needed for any sentence. |
| High-value verbs: be, have, go, come, want, need, know, say, give, take, make, do | 30 | Verbs carry sentences. Thirty of them cover most of what a beginner tries to express. |
| Numbers, days, times, quantities | 25 | Shopping, timetables, appointments. Immediately usable. |
| Social formulas: greetings, please, thank you, sorry, yes, no | 15 | The first words you will actually say out loud. |
| Common adjectives: big, small, good, bad, hot, cold, new, old, cheap, expensive | 20 | They combine with everything and make short sentences possible. |
| Your own nouns | 70 | The ones your life contains. This is where a personal list beats every published one. |
The exact split matters less than the principle: the first 130 are structural and nearly the same in every language, and the last 70 are yours and should not be borrowed from anybody.
How to find your own 70 nouns
Spend a week noticing. Every time you cannot say something you needed to say, write down the English word — not later, at the moment it fails. After seven days you will have a list nobody could have generated for you, and it will contain the words you will use hundreds of times.
The lists differ enormously and that is the point. Someone with a small child needs the words for nursery, nappy, and playground before they need the word for invoice. Someone freelancing needs the reverse. A published beginner list serves neither of them well.
In MemDecks this is what the Translator is for: type the word, get a card with a translation, a picture, audio and — for a non-Latin script — a transliteration, and save it. Add your first words covers the mechanics.
Where curated packs fit
The structural 130 are exactly the part worth taking from someone else, because they are the same for everyone and assembling them yourself is pure overhead.
MemDecks ships 21 topic packs covering 1,302 distinct English words, and new accounts start subscribed to the Starter pack — 20 words of greetings, courtesy, simple answers, numbers and colours. Subscribing to a pack does not add cards; it feeds the pump, which offers the next word each time you press Next word in the Translator, in difficulty order.
A reasonable setup for month one: Starter plus one or two topic packs matching your life, and your own typed words alongside them.
How far 200 words actually gets you
Further than it sounds for speaking, and not far at all for reading. Two hundred well-chosen words let you ask for things, buy things, arrange a time, apologise, and be understood in short exchanges. They will not let you read a newspaper — that needs thousands of word families, and the gap between the two is the long middle of language learning.
So treat 200 as the point at which the language becomes usable in small ways, not as a milestone that ends anything. It is where the compounding starts: once you can hold a short exchange, the exchanges themselves start supplying your next words, and the list stops being something you have to plan.
A concrete first month
- Week 1. The Starter pack and the social formulas. Carry a note for words you could not say.
- Week 2. Function words and the thirty verbs. Boring; do it anyway. Play one game a day with what you have.
- Week 3. Numbers, times and adjectives, plus the first half of your own noun list.
- Week 4. The rest of your nouns. Switch to a game that asks you to produce rather than recognise — in MemDecks that is Word Type — and find out which words you only thought you knew.