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Learning to Learn

(kevin.the.li)
320 points jklm | 2 comments | | HN request time: 0.448s | source
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dinobones ◴[] 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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joshdavham ◴[] No.41911321[source]
> Can I really understand 75% of text if I have perfect recall of those 800 words?

This thing you're talking about is called 'word coverage'. It's the percentage of words you know in a given text. I've created lots of word coverage graphs in the past, and, as research has shown, you won't really be understanding much until you reach the high 90s in terms of word coverage. The famous number for being able to read English texts extensively requires a word coverage of around 98%. And while it depends on the text, in order to reach 98%, you generally need to know around the top 5k words in a language.

Funny enough, when you understand 75% of the words in a text, you subjectively feel like you're understanding like 10% of what's going on.

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1. jamager ◴[] No.41913229[source]
This is exactly correct.

With graded readers, thou, you can have good reading experiences with around 3k words (ofc depending on language, book, etc).

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2. AlchemistCamp ◴[] No.41925049[source]
The Oxford Bookworms collection has a 400 headword level that includes quite a few interesting ~45-50 page stories. Their 700 headword level is more interesting of course, but for popular like English or Spanish there are a lot of options even for very early stage learners.