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Learning to Learn

(kevin.the.li)
320 points jklm | 1 comments | 22 Oct 24 00:01 UTC | HN request time: 0.442s | source
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dinobones ◴[22 Oct 24 03:39 UTC] No.41910980[source]▶
I've been wanting to try this approach for learning a language.

In English for example, learning the 800 most common words, you can understand 75% of the language: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-44569277.

I'd love to start fresh on a new language, take 800 new words, try to learn 10 a day, and see where I get after 3 months. Can I really understand 75% of text if I have perfect recall of those 800 words?

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1. kebsup ◴[22 Oct 24 10:39 UTC] No.41912979[source]▶
800 is definitely too little. I'm building a language learning app based around this exact strategy. Right now, I've around 7000 German lemmas tracked in the app and still regularly encounter sentences which I don't understand, because I lack the vocabulary.