Nowadays, it is common to see/hear people making statements about how you only need to learn 500 (or 50 or 1000 or whatever) words in order to achieve some kind of basic fluency. This claim is related to the fact that most speakers of most languages do indeed use a relatively small pool of the same words throughout most of their conversations. There are people who suggest that 85% or even 90% of the words in an everyday conversation come from that same small pool of just a few dozen or a few hundred words. The implication is that you could spend three or four weeks cramming in this vocabulary and then 'get by' in the language.
There is some truth in these ideas, as there so often is when people offer 'hacks'. This is what makes these solutions seem so attractive. But here is the thing: how many people do you know who have spent three or four weeks learning vocabulary and then been at all fluent in Gaelic? I would guess that the answer is very few, if any.
So why does this not really work? The problem with having a laser focus on the most frequent 85% or 90% of vocabulary and expecting to get fluent based on that is that the other 10% or 15% of the conversation is most likely the key information in the conversation you are having. The reason why that small pool of vocabulary is so over-used is because it often has functional rather than communicative use in conversation. Consider the following sentences:
I was at the bus stop.
I was at the museum.
I was at the point of giving up.
I was at the middle of the book.
The shared vocabulary between them is tremendous. But a learner of English who knew I was at the and didn't know bus stop, museum, point of giving up or middle of the book would have absolutely no idea what any of these sentences meant. Moreover, that person could easily be misled into thinking that the sentences were all similar in meaning. In fact, I was at the is doing slightly (or very) different things in all four sentences. The key information or communication is the part of the sentence you didn't know.
If you find yourself in a conversation with a fluent speaker or a native speaker of Gaelic, the chances of running into a scenario like the one above are reasonable. You might very well know the first four or five words in the sentence. But if you don't know the next one, the entire meaning of the sentence could turn into something completely different from what you predicted.
Is it useless to focus on high-frequency words, then?
No, it isn't. What we need to do here is make a distinction between input and output. From the point of view of output, we can indeed often get by with quite a limited vocabulary. More often than not, when we are new to the language, we will tend to use far fewer words than the total number we 'know'. We will have words we favour: our 'comfort zone vocabulary'. This is quite normal.
However, when it comes to input - i.e. our ability to hear and recognise the language - we have no choice about the words that are used. Of course, we can ask people to be mindful of our status as someone still learning Gaelic, and most speakers will do their best to help. But they have no way of knowing what words you will recognise, and it is surprisingly difficult to modify your word selection to accommodate someone else's vocabulary. If you want to be able to understand the bulk of an everyday conversation, with a wide range of different speakers, you have no option other than to learn a lot of words.
But how do I do that?
We should have another blog on that topic, shouldn't we?
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