Master of Memory: Accelerated learning, education, memorization - MMem 0502: How to master a language with very little vocabulary

Episode Date: February 9, 2016

In this episode, I demonstrate that mastering a language is NOT about having an enormous vocabulary; it’s about becoming extremely comfortable with the right vocabulary. I demonstrate with some sample vocabulary and phrases in English. What do you want to learn? Leave your question at http://MasterOfMemory.com/. Music credit: Maurice Ravel’s String Quartet, 2nd movement, performed by the US Army […]

Master of Memory 502 Welcome to Master of Memory. I'm Timothy and I'm here to answer your accelerated learning questions every day and to inspire and empower you to learn anything you want to learn faster than ever. Today we're going to talk about the value of focusing on a very small amount of vocabulary when learning a language. Many people are familiar with the teachings of Tim Ferriss in regards to the fact that if you learn the top 2,000 words in terms of frequency in a language, you can come to about 90% of the language. Whereas in order to get to, say, 95% comprehension in a language,

it takes thousands and thousands of more words, so you get diminishing returns. But actually, that's not what I'm talking about today. What I'm talking about is focusing on as few words as possible, maybe just about 100 or 200 words in your language, and not even going beyond that until you've mastered those so well that you basically sound like a native speaker or as close as possible using just those words. If you do that, then you've really learned the language

already, and all that remains is to integrate more vocabulary into this language that you've now learned. There's a lot that you can do with just about 150 words, and as an example, Dr. Seuss wrote green eggs and ham with only 50 words. Now, those specific 50 words are not ideal for teaching the English language because they include a bunch of basically useless words for new learners, such as boat, box, car, eggs, fox, goat, green, ham, house, and so on, which really don't come up in day-to-day conversation. My own list of 140 words includes the top 140 words out of the list of English frequency based on subtitles, and for example, the top 18, me, what, is, in, this, know, the version with a k as in how to know something, I'm, for, and, know, the other version, which is a negative.

Now, it's not enough just to learn these words. Again, you have to learn how to use them as effectively as possible until you really sound like a native speaker. So for example, applying them idiomatically in phrases that just are made constructs that don't mean what the individual words mean does not come naturally. You have to learn this. For example, using the phrase, you know, the way that native speakers do. And that's most of the task in learning a language. Learning a word is easy enough, but learning how to use the words in phrases is really difficult. So I'm going to present a dialogue, a very short dialogue that

I just put together for this episode that uses only the top 140 words in the English language. In fact, it doesn't use all of them. It just uses several of them, but put together in very idiomatic ways. So imagine what it would be like if you heard someone using these phrases that you're about to hear, but since they're using them the way that you're hearing me use them, you think, wow, that must be a native English speaker. And yet they haven't learned any more words than these. That's a pretty big win in language learning. So here's the dialogue. Basically, somebody walks up to a friend. His friend had told him about a party and he had previously declined.

But now he decides that he might want to go with him. So the friend walks up and says, hey, how are you? Doing well. What are you here for? Just not doing much right now. What are you up to? I'm about to go. Oh, right. I would like to go with you. Okay, then get in. Do you know where we're going?

Yeah, I think so. What time are we going to get there? I can't tell, but can we get going now? Sure. So that's their first exchange. Now imagine that they're on the road and they're driving along and then the guy goes when are we going to get there not too much more i think by the way what's that thing over there oh you don't want to go there it's not good really i don't know much of anything about it well you see that little thing way up there? That has something to do with it. Oh right, I get it. So that's just a little bit more dialogue, and you see how a lot of these phrases are very idiomatic, like that has something to do with it, or that little thing way up there. When we teach the word way or do, we aren't necessarily thinking of them in those ways, but this is how native speakers use them, and this is what's truly difficult to learn when

you're learning a language using the top 150 words in idiomatic ways. One more exchange. Let's imagine that they've arrived at a nice house and our main character realizes that this is a party and he's not a fan of huge crowds. So the other guy says, we're here. Where are we? Do you like it? Well, I love it, but I'm not sure where this is. You said you know where we're going. Sorry, I didn't mean that because, I mean, I didn't mean it that way. I just wanted to come with you. What? Well, come on, get out. It's time to go in. Are we on time? Yeah. That man you know isn't going to be here, is he? Well, maybe. I'm not sure.

He's mean to me. You should have let me know. Mean? In what way? I really don't think I would have come if you'd said he'd be here. Well, I'm sorry, but how was I to know I'd love it if you could try to get to know him he's not so bad really I'm not sure well you don't have to come in you could just be out here oh okay I'll go in are you sure yeah I'll get by now also keep in mind that this is just a very small sampling that I threw together of a bunch of silly phrases that you can use.

I mean, it's a silly arrangement of phrases, but all of these are phrases basically that are used all the time by native English speakers. And we don't even realize how often we're using these just so few words. There are about 50,000 words in the English language, and most native speakers know about, you know, 25,000 of them. But the fact is that you can speak like this, like this entire conversation, with just 140 words, granted, of course, that you're not thrown off too much by the other person speaking, but at the same time, even the other person who's speaking is going to be using these words all the time, so they're the most valuable to know, just to get to know the parts of the language that are used the most frequently, so that you can speak and listen

to most things without too much vocabulary, but mastering the essential skills first. For more on language learning, I would suggest checking out Accelerated Spanish, which is our free Spanish course at Spanishin1month.com. You can apply the principles to any language, but it's just a good place to get started and see how both mnemonics, which I talk about in other episodes, and the exclusivity tactics that I talked about in this episode come into play in a very practical way when you're learning a language. Now, what do you want to learn?

The world's knowledge can be yours. Leave your learning request at masterofmemory.com slash question, and I'll talk to you again soon. What do you want to learn? The world's knowledge can be yours. Leave your learning request at masterofmemory.com slash question and I'll talk to you again soon.