Why? For what purpose are you learning this language?

How you intend to use the language in question (Spanish or whatever the case may be for you) is very important in determining which words you should focus on, primarily this comes into play with regards to whether you’re more concerned about the spoken language or the written language. Most language-learners are far more concerned about being able to actually speak to native speakers of the language than they are with anything else, though there are exceptions (people who wish to be able to read certain specific technical journals, such as an engineer who only wants to be able to read the original German or Japanese instruction manuals and schematics for the devices used in his field and does not need to be able to actually speak the language) as well as certain special needs (someone who is most interested in spoken language, but they also need special emphasis in a certain area, such as the businessman who not only wants to speak basic everyday Japanese but also needs to learn certain business terms that are specific only to his job and wouldn’t be common anywhere else).

So…what are you going to use it for? Do you have any special needs or areas of interest that you would like to learn the terminology for in the language you’re learning? I’m a pretty big computer nerd, so in addition to everyday spoken Spanish, I might also like to know how to say things like “hard drive”, “TCP/IP”, “Python [the programming language]”, “blog”, “forum”, “social news”, “search engine”, “link”, etc. See what I mean? Don’t neglect areas like that, everyone has some–whether you’re into cars or rugby or chess or collecting dead insects, you’re likely going to want to know the words and phrases that are common only in those specific subjects.

Practical Application, or: What’s the point of all this?

Look, if you’ll use a quality SRS (Spaced Repetition Software) like Anki and spend 30-45 minutes a day studying vocabulary, you can very easily learn 20, 30, even 50 new words per day up to the point where you’ve got a couple thousand words in your target language within a month or so, it would be very easy. If you’ll do that, and maybe practice speaking a bit by watching subtitled movies and repeating after the native speakers (pause, repeat what someone just said, rewind and repeat as necessary until you’ve got it, wash rinse repeat, etc.) for a couple of weeks, you’ll be at the point where you’ll be able to start conversing with native speakers, albeit poorly (my favorite saying: “You learn to speak a language by doing so, poorly at first”). You’ll be awkward and slow but you will be able to muddle through, and you will pick up speed very rapidly if you’ll make it a habit to speak with a native for an hour or so a day, every day (remember: consistency!). I promise you’ll be conversationally fluent within a couple of months of the time that you started conversing with natives. Voila, you’re there. What are the best ways to do this?

The best way is with a one-on-one tutor, and for that I recommend a service called iTalki (you’re looking at about $8-15/hour for informal conversation practice/instruction, more for a formal course or test prep.). However, given that you’ll want at least 2-3 classes per week and that comes out to $16-$45 per week – or between $64 and $180 per month – that’s too expensive for many people and in that case I really recommend you check out a service called GoSpanish that provides unlimited online classes with a native speaker (live, on a video call similar to Skype) for as little as $39 per month (yes, that’s $39/month for unlimited 1-hour classes, you can take a dozen a day every day if you like). Their class size is typically just 3-5 students per teacher and, having taken classes with them myself, I can tell you they’re excellent. See my review of GoSpanish here for more information. Also, if you’re interested, I’ve reviewed iTalki as well.

Here’s a quote from someone commenting on that HTLAL thread I mentioned above:

“I can add from my experience that knowledge of about 1500 words allows you to get a fairly general picture of everything you read. This is the number of Hungarian words I learned since march. I write them all down on flashcards and count how much each day – that’s why I can pinpoint the number. At the same time it is obvious that my 1500 word vocab isn’t tweaked to efficiency in basic communication. I simply write down and translate everything I read and lately also the words I manage to pick up from radio. That’s why I know the hungarian word for “voter turnout” but I don’t know yet how to book a flight or hotel room :/”

And this leads into my last, and most important point: all of this is just a means to and end, and that end is speaking. You must speak. The whole point of figuring out all this word frequency crap is just so you can get away from it as fast as possible and into the realm of actually talking to native speakers, because that is where you really learn the language. Memorizing all the vocabulary and grammar rules in the world, as my friend Benny loves to say, will not ever get you anywhere near fluent. I’ll leave you with a quote from a native Czech speaker and fellow language nerd (it’s the last post in that HTLAL thread):

“Yesterday I met a woman who has been taking Czech lessons twice a week for two years. I asked her some very simple questions “Do you like coffee?”, “Are you Czech?” and she was completely tongue tied. The best she could manage was “Urm, arm, yes” to the first question, and “no” to the second. At first I imagined she didn’t know much Czech at all. I decided to probe into her vocabulary, and found it was quite extensive. She knew words like “octopus” and “hovercraft” in Czech. Yes somehow couldn’t say “To be honest, I prefer tea”. I gave her a two hour lesson in how to construct useful conversational phrases. Starting off with simple things like “I have to say that ..” and “Don’t be upset, but” and building up and chaining these things together into more complex sentences such as “That isn’t something I have given much thought to, but … now that I reflect on it, … my personal opinion is …” She told me it was a very uplifting lesson, since she now felt “fluent” in Czech rather than being frozen with a trapped vocabulary of thousands of words. In fact, she got back to me later that after the lesson, she went into the city and had sophisticated and stressless conversations in a couple shops and with a waitress in an ice-cream parlour. Of course, I was delighted to hear this, and it certainly gave my ego a boost. But, what was most joyful for me to hear is that it would now give her future learning a “usefulness filter”. She said that now she wouldn’t just remember lists of words, but rather filter them through how useful they would be in real conversations, and that real conversations, with real people, will help her get a reality check on this as she goes along.”

You can learn all the vocabulary in the world, but if you don’t learn how to use it, you’re never going to be fluent, and the only way to do that is to speak with native speakers. Again, I really recommend having a look at GoSpanish, they’re super cheap for what they’re offering. Check out my review of them here for more info and/or go to their site for a free trial if you like.

Additional Resources and Further Reading

Please be sure to persuse the whole “Basic Spanish Grammar Rules: Lessons & Explanation” category on my site, I have several other articles there that may interst you, especially What Spanish Verb Tenses You Should Learn First, and Why They’re So Important, a brief guide to regional variation of forms of address (tú, usted, vos, etc.) and my beginner’s guide to the Spanish subjunctive.

Professor Arguelles’ website on language-learning

Part 4 of Iversen’s Guide to Learning Languages: How many words do you need to learn?

Here’s the RAE’s reference corpus of current Spanish taken from a combination (says this site) of spoken and written sources (kind of a problem since it only gives you a very general idea of how common these words are and you can’t sort by spoken/written and, as we noted above, there can be some big discrepancies there between the two). The Real Academia Española (the “Royal Spanish Academy”) is by far the single most respected authority on the Spanish language; see the Wikipedia article on them for more information.

Somebody else did the pull-them-from-subtitles trick on their own and then made their data publicly available. Here’s the Spanish list published so you can read it online without having to download it first.

Here’s an excellent paper by Paul Nation and Robert Waring at the Notre Dame Seishin University in Japan called: Vocabulary Size, Text Coverage And Word Lists

Here are a series of lists on Wiktionary taken from subtitles of movies by somebody back in 2007. As they note, many of these are from translations of English-language movies and so won’t really give you the most accurate picture of what’s naturally used in Spanish.

Here’s a very widely circulated list of the 1000 most common words in English.