How To Learn Vocabulary Fast: The Power Of Zipf’s Law
The human brain is wired to look for shortcuts, and in language learning, one such shortcut is figuring out how to learn vocabulary quickly. As I have found, you can get by very well despite having a strong accent and no knowledge of grammar – but, alas, not without words. Therefore, every time I start learning a new language, I begin with learning its lexicon. I purposely ignore all other aspects of the language until I have grasped the basics of vocabulary.
Obviously, such an approach puts you in a very awkward position, and you want to get past this stage as quickly as possible. There are three questions to be asked in order to radically cut down the time spent memorizing vocabulary:
What words should I learn?
In what order should I learn them?
How should I learn them?
These three questions should be dealt with in the above order. The reason is simple. No mnemonic technique or spaced repetition app will save you much time if you mindlessly memorize every new word you encounter. It is counterproductive, as you will soon see.
What's productive is to follow the good old Pareto principle. In economics, 20% of efforts bring 80% of results, and the same goes for language learning because human language is constructed this way.
So if you wonder how to learn vocabulary quickly, you need to define what's worth learning in the first place. Here's how.
Zipf’s Law
In the 1930s, American linguist George Kingsley Zipf was studying the distribution of words in natural languages when he noticed a curious phenomenon. Just over one hundred English words account for almost half of both spoken and written language. The linguist dove into studying this topic and came up with a power law that continues to amaze both linguists and statisticians:
The frequency of a word is inversely proportional to its frequency rank.
If you, like me, have a blind spot in this area and have trouble with mathematics, let me simplify it for you. The most frequent word (it’s “the” in English) shows up twice as often as the second most frequent word (“of”). Similarly, the latter occurs twice as often as the fourth (“and”); that one – twice as often as the fifth, and so on.
The real-life application of Zipf’s law is quite impressive. If you were to take any English book and count the frequency of each word, you would find that the first 135-138 most frequent words account for about half of the book. The same holds true for spoken language: 50% of our conversations are made up of just two hundred words.
Zipf’s law is not limited to English. The same holds true for many other languages. So, if you want to know how to learn vocabulary fast, master items that give you access to the heart and soul of your target language. How?
Get your hands on a frequency list.
Frequency lists
“What the f***?”
That was the only thought that came to my mind when I first looked at a Spanish frequency list. How can this help me learn Spanish to any degree?
And indeed, what can you do with these words as a learner of Spanish, English, or French:
10 Most Frequent Spanish Words 10 Most Frequent English Words 10 Most Frequent French Words de the de la of la que and le to et en à le la that les los is est se six de l' a that le les los it est se des du
Seriously, what the hell is "de"?
The reason "de" is number one on the list is precisely because it has one hundred and seven various usages that cannot be explained without reference to the Routledge Dictionary of Language and Linguistics. Similarly, how would you explain what "the" is to a learner of English? This word just wouldn’t make sense to native speakers of languages that don’t even have definite articles (I can testify as a native speaker of Russian).
So why do these seemingly meaningless words hit all records of frequency?
Three Levels of Frequency
The frequency lists of different languages are essentially the same in nature. The same structural pattern reveals itself over and over again as the Zipf’s curve progresses from its upper to the middle to lower parts.
Words that make up the upper portion of the curve have the same function in all languages where Zipf’s law applies. The same goes for the middle and lower segments. So, what are those functions?
Upper segment - function words
The upper part of the curve comprises function words: determiners, prepositions, auxiliaries, and conjunctions. All these words are there only to serve as syntactic cement, so to speak. They help us put a sentence together in a grammatical manner because it would be hard to build phrases without them.
Middle segment - basic concepts
If we were to weed out the most frequent (read: function) words from a language, we would hit the first content words. These are words that have concrete semantic meaning and refer to a specific concept in your mind, such as time, like, more, and people. Middle-segment words refer to these basic categories and concepts essential to human nature.
At the same time, the middle segment is context-dependent. Words that form this part of Zipf’s curve tend to change depending on the text or the topic of conversation. Words like "scuba," "dive," or "buoyancy" can reveal surprising frequency if you're reading the PADI Divemaster manual but not so much in a book about finance, for example.
Lower segment - low-frequency words
Finally, everything that is not a functional word or a basic concept falls into the third category: low-frequency words. The larger the language corpus, the lower its frequency. This is because they neither carry a syntactic function nor hold broad semantic meaning. Such words have a rather restricted application. If words like "thing" can crawl into any sentence, how often would you utter something like "mouthwatering" or "onomatopoeia"?
By this point, the mystery of how to learn vocabulary fast should begin to unveil. Your 20% of effort that brings 80% of results here is learning words from the upper and middle segments of the frequency curve.
How to Learn Vocabulary Quickly
o be as efficient as possible in vocabulary learning, it is useful to think minimalist. The fewer words you have to learn consciously, the better.
The main reason for this is that vocabulary learning is simply boring. Each word requires multiple repetitions, and you will have to go through numerous recall sessions before something sticks. People - la gente. When - cuando. I go - voy. How exciting! Nevertheless, you can't avoid such "artificial" learning at the first stage because you need something to start with.
Your goal, however, is to pass this stage as quickly as possible and turn on your subconscious incidental learning mechanism. This way, your brain acquires vocabulary automatically while you read, listen, or do other fun things in your target language.
This can be done in three steps.
Step 1: Conscious Learning
Start by memorizing just 150-200 of the most frequently used words.(Lexiteria has free 200-word frequency lists in 40 languages.) Typically, these words make up half of any book in any language. For the first 1-2 weeks, this is the best investment of your time.
As you learn these words, they become accessible to automatic processing and activation. This means that every time you hear or see one of them, your brain recognizes it and recalls its meaning. The more often you encounter each word, the easier it is to recognize it. Similarly, the more often you use a word or a phrase in your speech, the easier it becomes to use it on the next occasion.
So it makes sense to start using them, right?
Step 2: Transition
Once you have mastered the first 200 words, it's time to shift toward immersion. Spend the next 2-3 weeks learning another 200-300 words from the frequency list, but supplement your vocabulary diet with a daily dose of input. Find a podcast, a YouTube channel, or a blog in your target language and commit to listening, watching, or reading it for 30 minutes a day.
It's okay if you don't understand a big deal. The idea is to get your brain used to hearing, seeing, and trying to make sense of the language. Plus, with this routine, you get into a naturally spaced repetition cycle that allows you to refresh the vocabulary you have already mastered.
Step 3: Immersion
Your next step is to put your flashcards down and open yourself to as much target language input as possible. With this goal in mind, I usually buy any of my favorite books available in that language, both in paperback and in audiobook format. Then, each morning, I simultaneously read and listen to it for one hour.
It's an extremely effective method for gaining vocabulary en masse. When you read and listen to large amounts of foreign language input, your brain automatically collects statistics on word frequency. If a word is frequent enough, you can't fail to notice it. Once I see that a certain word shows up in the text repeatedly, I quickly look up its definition and continue reading.
As a consequence, I end up not learning but acquiring the middle segment words without much conscious effort on my part. Needless to say, going over my favorite novels makes the process very pleasant.
Zipf's law is a powerful tool for those who want to know how to learn vocabulary quickly. It frees up your hands and allows you to learn the language naturally. Obviously, you can still complete a deck of flashcards with the 5000 most frequent French words if you feel like doing so. But because of the frequency effect, you would learn the same 5000 words having finished several books. So, what do you prefer?
