Language at Its Core
It's quite difficult to learn to speak a language fluently in a classroom setting. People have studied for years only to discover that they can't get much beyond two or three hundred words.
If our goal is functional fluency, (meaning the ability to navigate basic social interactions such as asking directions without fumbling or mangling grammar), might it be best to focus on the most essential words for basic conversations? After all, there is strong evidence that vocabulary follows a power-law distribution -- that is, 80% of everyday speech uses about 20% of a language's total vocabulary. This is especially true if you look not at individual words, but "word families" -- all the words produced by a single stem (sing, sang, sung, singing, song, etc).
If our goal is functional fluency, (meaning the ability to navigate basic social interactions such as asking directions without fumbling or mangling grammar), might it be best to focus on the most essential words for basic conversations? After all, there is strong evidence that vocabulary follows a power-law distribution -- that is, 80% of everyday speech uses about 20% of a language's total vocabulary. This is especially true if you look not at individual words, but "word families" -- all the words produced by a single stem (sing, sang, sung, singing, song, etc).