4.1.1. Which vocabulary items should I learn first?

Learning a language means learning thousands of vocabulary items. During your kick-start phase of language learning, you might aim to learn your first thousand vocabulary items. Remember, you will start out as a poor speaker and gradually improve. So the first vocabulary you'll want to learn will be the vocabulary that even a poor speaker would know. Think of English for a moment. Some words would be important even for a poor speaker, while other words would be suitable only to a more advanced speaker. Consider the following words for facial expressions or facial movements: blink, grimace, smile. Which of those would be the most important for a poor speaker to learn first? Which would be least important? If you are like me, you feel that smile is more important than blink which in turn is more important than grimace. I can almost bet that you feel exactly the same as I do about this. In using English, people use smile more frequently than they use blink, while they do not use grimace very often at all. Native speakers of a language will probably have a good sense for which words are high frequency words, and which are less frequent, and, hence, less important. Hopefully, you'll be able to convey to your LRP your desire to learn high frequency words at first.

Even without the help of your LRP, you will have some sense of what words are important. If you are aware of some area of vocabulary that you will have the opportunity to use in the near future, that will be a good area of vocabulary to work on. Suppose that vegetable vendors come to your door every day. Then it would make sense to learn to recognize the words for all the vegetables they sell. Buy a few of every vegetable, and use them in your sessions until you easily recognize all of their names. You are then free to speak them to the vendors, even if it is just a matter of showing the vendors what you have learned. While you are doing your daily planning, it is good to ask yourself what specific areas of vocabulary you can work on that are relevant to daily activities.

However, you cannot limit yourself to vocabulary items that obviously fit into your daily activities, or you will never learn a lot of high frequency, important vocabulary. For example, unless you are doing medical work, you may not need to talk about body parts all the time. But what sort of a “speaker” would you be if you didn't know what a foot or hand is called? Follow your own instincts and those of your LRP in deciding what are the essential vocabulary for even a poor speaker like you. (Perhaps instead of calling you a poor speaker, I should call you an on-the-way-to-becoming-a-good-speaker, or maybe a temporarily challenged speaker.)