Absolutely essential words
It is a cold night here in England, the credit crunch is upon us, and with nothing much else to do, I looked through the logs for this site (not something I normally have the inclination to do).
For those who don't know, and I suspect that this is the majority, the the logs reveal all sorts of interesting information, including the search made to arrive here. Someone, somewhere, had typed 'absolutely essential russian words' into google and reached this site. Sooner or later, I will add this page :)
The internet is a strange and wonderful thing, but anyway I started wondering what the essential words to learn were in any language, and so I also typed in a related search term 'abslutely essential words' and to my surprise discovered that there were 504 of them. As it happens, there is a book entitled 504 absolutely essential words, which is designed for learners of English as a second language - and this is great, but the flipside is that this particular search term is now of no use for anyone who isn't looking for this book. (If it had a website, I would add a link).
After some searching, I did find an interesting link concerning Charles K Ogden who was interested in condensing the English language (something like 850 words is quoted). He may have had a point, when we now have something like one million or so English words without including place names or I believe all the medical, legal and scientific jargon.
Anyway, on this cold winters evening, I was thinking about essential words or absolutely essential words when learning a second (or third) language. The unfortunate reality is that it is difficult to acquire a large vocabulary in another language, and equally difficult to retain it unless you are actively using what you are learning.
This forces the language learner to pick and choose the vocabulary that they learn.
Now, we all need to learn certain essential words: yes, no, hello, goodbye (in their various forms) but we don't all need to learn biochemistry or easement in a second language.
So what is essential vocabulary?
The trick, and which I think distinguises in part efficient language learners (from the rest of us) is to learn the words in the middle which are relevant to you. There are many thousands or commonly used words.
I noticed for example, that Charles Ogden's original list contained the word 'copper'. The list was developed in the 30's but it is hard to believe that even then the word 'copper' was vital for communication. Perhaps it was important culturally and economically from a western perspective and so included. Either way, it shows that any word list, no matter how carefully compiled is to a degree arbitrary.
Peace
Frank. M
Check www.wordfrequencycounter.com for word frequency counting software.