Stop Learning Common Words. Learn Your Words.
Word lists are a trap. There's a much better method to learn.
I didn’t know where to start when I first began learning languages on my own. I was lost and followed textbooks. I then turned to content for learners and finally to native content. It worked but it wasn’t always fun.
I still remember the 2 weeks I spent learning 320 kanji for an exam I wanted to take, ignoring completely the fact I’d likely forget them all during the summer.1
Nowadays, the internet is filled with information about how to learn languages. And one all-too-common tip is to use “most common words” lists.
These, in theory, are useful. In practice, they are a waste of time.
You don’t need to learn the most common words.
You need you own words.
You’ll know them anyway
The ten most common words in English are: the, be, to, of, and, a, in, that, have, I.
No matter what you start with, these will appear in no time. They are, after all, the most common. But what about how to use them? Will knowing what they mean help you understand of, to, or that in context? Their meanings change all too often in sentences.
Now if you want to know the most common verbs in a language, do you need to know all their forms? Do you need to know 行く、行きます、参ります、いらっしゃいます, and their other forms in Japanese ? What about all the tenses in French or German?
Following a list doesn’t make sense because it either gives you way too much, or way too little.
Languages aren’t words. They’re meanings.
If you don’t have the correct word but you communicated well enough the idea, then that’s good enough.
My sister-in-law doesn’t speak French fluently but any noun or verb she forgets, she turns them into sounds or mimics to make us understand and that works.2
In the long run, all the true most common words will appear in front of you and you’ll get to know them. Don’t focus on them.
Instead, focus on what matters.
You know what you need
Deep down, you know.
Even if you’re learning your first foreign language, you already know the verb “to expect” is likely not at the top of your must-know verbs. But maybe “environment” or “project” are because of your job. Or maybe you need to know the word “baby” because you just had one while the next person doesn’t need it urgently.
Each learner has their own path to a conversational level.
While everybody will know these words at a high level, what you start with varies when you just start.
It’s not about becoming an all-rounder from the get-go. It’s about knowing enough.
What matters most
No matter if you still choose to go for the overall most-common words or your own most needed words, one aspect is more important than anything else.
Did you learn context?
It’s all good to know the word “baby” in Japanese but if you don’t know that saying “I had a baby” feels unnatural in Japanese （赤ちゃんがいた）and that the better version is 子供が生まれた (literally “A child was birthed"), then there’s no point.
This is also why no matter the tools and resources you used (please don’t use Duolingo though), you need to take the time to think about how you can apply them to sentences you’d need.
If you can figure out how to create a sentence about your life with what a textbook tells you, you’ll master it much faster.
Nothing sticks better than learning sentences, except learning sentences you created yourself.
My favorite method
What I’ve just started doing with Italian is to take sentences my textbooks teach and transform them into simple version that fit my life. I then turn them into longer and longer versions.
This is a technique called elaboration.
As the name indicates, the goal is to elaborate little by little to make more complicated sentences and therefore learn to combine more and more words into difficult sentences.
I wrote in details about it here but here’s a more developed example than what I can create with my basic Italian:
I work in Paris
I work in Paris as a freelance.
I work in Paris as a freelance since 2021.
I work in Paris as a freelance since 2021 but I can work from anywhere.
I work in Paris as a freelance since 2021 but I can work from anywhere so I also lived in Korea in 2023 for a year.
I work in Paris as a freelance since 2021 but I can work from anywhere so I also lived in Korea in 2023 for a year and I loved it.
I work in Paris as a freelance since 2021 but I can work from anywhere so I also lived in Korea in 2023 for a year and I loved it so I hold this memory dear.
Add some future tense, some past, some particles, or even another sentence linked to the original.
The goal is to have fun and find more words and expressions you need.
And for whatever you’re not sure about, turn to native speakers friends or on HiNative or use AI to double-check your new sentences.
Elaboration is a mentally-taxing technique but it works wonders. There’s been multiple studies about it directly (this one or this one for instance) and about why learning needs to be difficult (such as this one).
So even if it’s hard, why not try it? And if you’ve already tried before, do you have more recommendations or did you struggle to keep at it?
Cheers for reading,
Mathias
An average polyglot
Which I did but, luckily, I got so much exposure and study after that they came back to me over time.
On top of being funny when she says “tap-tap” and mimic the movement she’d do with the mosquito electric flyswatter.
I've been using elaboration myself for a while, but I had no idea it had this name. I called it "sentence expansion".
I definitely agree that learning a list of words is pointless, because language is not a list of words, but it's made up of sentences. However, I do think that focusing on understanding the most common patterns is very important at the beginning, learning how to form sentences with "because", "but", "therefore", how to ask questions. That is in my experience much more important than learning the words for various objects. Because functional words like "because" can be used to talk about anything. But "umbrella" can only be used to talk about umbrellas, so its usefulness is very limited.