VERBAVIA

How languages are actually learned: the Verbavia blog

Word frequency, what belongs in a lesson, and how this course is built.

Verbavia is a daily language course built on one idea: teach the words people really use, in the order they really use them, and explain the grammar instead of hiding it. These posts are about the reasoning behind that — what word frequency does and does not buy you, what belongs in a lesson, and where this approach runs out.

What this blog is for

Almost everything written about language learning is written to sell something, which is why so much of it is about motivation. These posts are about mechanism instead: what actually happens when you meet a word for the second time, why the first five hundred words of a language are worth more than the next five thousand, what a spaced-repetition schedule is really doing when it waits eleven days, and which of the things a language app does are for the learner rather than for the app.

Where the answer is uncomfortable it is written down anyway. Frequency ordering has real limits: the commonest words in every language are the most irregular, a word list cannot teach you which preposition a verb takes, and there is a point in every course where the useful next word is no longer the next most common one. A post that only listed the advantages of the way this course works would not be worth reading.

Who writes it

These are written by the person building Verbavia, about decisions that were actually made in it — including the ones that turned out to be wrong and were reversed. Nothing here is generated. When a post gives a number, the number comes from the course itself, and when a claim comes from research rather than from this course, it says whose.

If you would rather read about a specific language than about method, the hand-written language guides go deep on one language at a time, with sources. The frequency word lists are the raw material the posts keep referring to, and the two-minute vocabulary tests measure how far down them you already are. And the course itself is one lesson a day, free, and needs no account.