You can say a surprising amount with ~300 words
This is part of my guide on how to start learning a language more quickly. You can find the guide homepage here.
You can express yourself surprisingly flexibly when you know 300 well-chosen words (and grammar) in a language. (By “words”, I really mean lemmas, i.e. I’m counting “run” and “runs” as one word.) When trying to talk about a topic, there will probably be some key words that you don’t know, but you can ask for or look up those words and then use them for the rest of the time that you’re talking about the topic. You can see an example of how using the 300 words works.
Here’s the list of 300. I hope it’s a useful guideline and starting point for you. I may revise it, so please refer to the original post for the most up-to-date version. In addition to these general words, there will probably be some others that will be among the most useful for you (e.g. “class” if you’re a student). When you find yourself using them again and again, learn them too.
* Note: You should really think of this as a list of concepts. Your goal isn’t to translate each word to a word in your target language, but to figure out how to express that concept in your target language. In some cases, a concept may translate to multiple words (for example, I listed “you” as a concept, but in some languages there are different words for “formal you” and “informal you”). Some concepts may translate to no word at all, but rather a certain grammatical structure (for example, Russian doesn’t use the verb “have”; to say “I have a cat” in Russian, you say “at me there is a cat”).
Use a dictionary to find out how to express these concepts in your target language (for some subtleties, you’ll need to google or ask in a forum). After that, I suggest memorizing the words by making yourself a Memrise course with the words and going through the course. Learn to be able to go from the concept to the word in your target language, not the other way around; you want to be able to produce the word, not just recognize it. You should also learn how to pronounce your target language. To hear native speakers pronounce words in your target language, check out Forvo.
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This list has been translated into: Cantonese, Finnish, French, Spanish.
Version 1 of this list, which had 200 words, was translated into: Afrikaans, Czech, Dutch, Esperanto, Finnish, French, German, Hungarian, Icelandic, Mandarin Chinese, Norwegian, Swedish, Thai.
If you’d like to translate this list into another language, please feel free! :) Just include a link back to this post, and let me know when you’re done so that I can link to your list here.
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First Verbs
be
there is
have
do
go
want
can
need
think
know
say
like
speak
learn
understand
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