Frequency word lists

The most common words in every Verbavia course, each with its English translation.

A frequency list is the least glamorous and most useful thing in language learning. The words at the top of one of these lists are not chosen for a theme or a chapter — they are simply the words that come up most, which means they are the words standing between you and understanding an ordinary sentence. A few hundred of them will carry you a surprising distance.

Every list here is ordered by real frequency, and every entry has its English translation. These are the same lists Verbavia teaches from, in the same order.

Not sure how far down a list you already are? The two-minute vocabulary tests sample these same lists and estimate how many of the words you know.

Why the order is the whole point

Word frequency in every language studied falls away steeply rather than evenly. The commonest few hundred words account for a large share of everything said in a day, and the curve keeps flattening from there: each new thousand words buys you less than the thousand before it. That is why the order of a list matters more than its length. Learning the first five hundred words of a language in frequency order and the second five hundred in alphabetical order are not two similar pieces of work — the first is most of conversational comprehension and the second is a hobby.

It is also why a themed chapter is a poor way to start. A unit on fruit and vegetables teaches you fifteen nouns you will use a few times a year, and none of the twenty function words that hold every sentence in the language together. Those function words are dull to learn and they are what you are missing when a sentence goes past and you catch three words out of nine.

What a list cannot do

A frequency list is a syllabus, not a course, and on its own it has three problems.

The first is that the commonest words are the most irregular ones. In every language on this page, the verbs at the very top of the list — to be, to have, to go — are the ones that refuse to follow the rules, because words used constantly are worn smooth by use and preserve older patterns. So the first hundred words are simultaneously the most useful and the least learnable by rule.

The second is that a word in isolation is not usable. Knowing that a word means to take does not tell you which preposition follows it, whether it needs a reflexive pronoun, or which of its six meanings is the one people actually use. That is the work a sentence does and a list cannot.

The third is memory. Reading a list top to bottom feels productive and leaves almost nothing behind a week later, because recognising a word you have just read is not the same act as retrieving it when you need it. What these lists are genuinely good for is checking your own coverage — read down one and mark the first fifty you cannot produce, and you have an honest picture of where you are.

How these lists were built

Each one is ordered by how often its words occur in ordinary use, with the entries a learner cannot act on removed rather than left in to pad the count. A grammatical particle whose English gloss is a description of its job — a question marker, a classifier, a topic particle — has no translation you can be tested on, so it is marked as something to explain in a lesson rather than presented as a word to memorise.

Where a language is not written in the Latin alphabet, every entry carries its pronunciation. The Mandarin list carries pinyin with tone marks; the Shanghainese list carries a romanisation and, because its characters are Mandarin's and tell a reader nothing about how they are said, a recording of every word in a Shanghainese voice.

These pages are free, need no account, and are the same vocabulary the courses teach, in the same order. If you want the words in the order above with the grammar that makes them into sentences, that is what a Verbavia course is: one lesson a day, and the list is the spine of it.