[crazygringo]

I tried to organize vocab by difficulty level for an English language-learning app once.

It shocked me how there is absolutely no "right" answer.

If you are teaching English for travel, then you're prioritizing a lot of stuff around bathrooms, transportation, menu items, etc.

If it's for understanding TV, it's a lot of words like "murder", etc. Depending on which TV shows you want to understand.

If it's for reading the newspaper, you don't ever need to know "bathroom", but you sure do need to know words like "congressman".

While if you are living somewhere, it's really important to know a lot of basic supermarket items that you wouldn't prioritize for other usages.

Also, while it's easy to calculate word frequencies for stuff like newspaper articles, there aren't any good statistics (last I checked) around just normal everyday conversation. Because that stuff isn't getting recorded and transcribed. And the substitutes -- transcribed speech from TV, radio, podcasts, etc. -- is not the same context as the random stuff you say at home and during an average day.

[retrac]

> Also, while it's easy to calculate word frequencies for stuff like newspaper articles, there aren't any good statistics (last I checked) around just normal everyday conversation. Because that stuff isn't getting recorded and transcribed.

Linguists have resorted to spying on people in parks and shops and restaurants, to get "natural" language unperturbed by observer effects, audience tailoring, the filter of writing, etc. (In most cases that would not be considered ethical today!)

The gold standard is something like: get acculturated to the language community you wish to study, make some acquaintances and friends, somehow finagle an invite to their homes or workplaces or social venues, and then with their permission, record their conversations as unobtrusively as you can.

There is so little data on how language is really used it is quite bedevilling. As soon as people know you are listening they change how they speak.

[itsamario]

That's what I discovered religion is for, understand the language as it was created.

Ever wonder who decides what's self-explanatory and what resonates?

[HPsquared]

This is one upside of the digital panopticon, I guess.

[adrianN]

There is also a whole different language used to talk to toddlers and small children that native speakers know but very few adult learners ever pick up. And slang used among teenagers and young adults that often times not even their parents understand fully.

[dspillett]

The problem with adding slang to any organised education program is two-fold: some of it changes much more quickly than you course materials can, and much of it is quite localised.

[dadie]

Beware though that only learning words may leave you confused as in my experience Americans tend to overload the same word with a different meaning depending on the context. They also often resort to idioms and cultural references.

For reasons unknown to me, instead of using the word with the meaning they probably are trying to convey, they rather use vague analogies or metaphors.

It always made me question if Americans in contrast to the British are a bit afraid to be precise.

[alyeska2]

Interesting perspective, I'm used to seeing the exact opposite observation, that British people are famous for saying things meant as insults that sound positive at a surface level and that people are often unsure if they're being mocked/ridiculed or not.

Of course, American corporate-speak is unique from normal conversations, and people intentionally use vagueness to make sure there's general agreement before saying something concretely that might be contentious or cause problems.

[TheOtherHobbes]

Different context. One social register is extreme understatement, which may be laden with passive aggression, but could also be approving. "That's not a bad idea" is likely to mean "Good idea, let's do it, or at least consider it seriously." But "Interesting idea" is likely to mean "You're an idiot."

This is more corporate/middle class.

There's also a working class register which is very direct and sweary, and extreme insults are actually meant affectionately.

Even more confusingly, the two can overlap, and the same people will switch between them - sometimes in the same setting - with relative equals.

Americans don't seem to do understatement. "My business died" becomes "My incredible journey." Relationships are cross-bred with hustle, so you can be friends with someone and they'll ask you to invest in their MLM scheme.

Instead of using understatement US corporate speaks uses noise to act out hierarchy, to gaslight and to misdirect.

I was talking to someone today who was asked to produce a report. They sent it on time, and then the team lead called a meeting to ask why it hadn't arrived.

The report was literally sitting in their inbox unread. Everyone could see it, but they all went through the motions of pretending it wasn't there and developing an action plan for future delivery.

It's all very David Graeber. So far as I can tell the US seems to specialise in situations where corporate insanity is happening but the sharp edges have been filed off, so it looks like productive activity higher up the pyramid.

[conductr]

I always hear a phase that goes like “we have a word for it in Language, …”. You almost never hear it said where English is that language. We just don’t have many words or don’t like adding new ones very frequently, it seems.

[overtone1000]

Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra

[WalterBright]

I read years ago that:

1. TV vocabulary is 2,000 words

2. High school vocabulary is 10,000 words

3. College vocabulary is 30,000 words

4. English language has 1,000,000 words

This is good news - you can be proficient in a foreign language by learning only 2,000 words!

[theli0nheart]

Being proficient in a language is really less about memorizing words than it is pronunciation and grammar. Memorization itself is pretty easy.

[Guestmodinfo]

Please someone tell me where to get those 1 million words in decreasing order of difficulty or ascending order of usage along with their meanings and insinuations

[stevesimmons]

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Wiktionary:Frequency_lists

[bilegeek]

Also worth going through the references of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zipf%27s_law

[WalterBright]

Sounds like a job for LLMs.

[mahdi7d1]

After years of reading technical and scientific materials, listening to lectures and youtube tutorials and learning English exclusively through them I hit a wall when I watched a cooking youtube video for the first time.

I was pretty confident in my English but I couldn't understand half of the sentences since I didn't know any of the vocabulary related to cooking. From tools (spatula) to ingredients (parsley) or even actions (frying). My delusions of proficiency shattered as I found out my everyday vocabulary is smaller than an elementary schooler.

[DC-3]

I think a lot about this. It's funny how there are certain domains of language, familiar to all native speakers, but that you are simply not likely to learn as an adult language learner, at least not without diligent and focused study.

I live and work in a foreign country, and have a modest but functional grasp of the language here. Which is to say, I know how to say 'sustainability', 'union-negotiated collective agreement', and 'offensive conduct in the workplace'.... but if you asked me the words for 'cedar', 'robin', 'pond', or 'linen' I would be struck dumb. And yet presumably every ten year old I walk past in the street would know those words as comfortably as I knew them in English as a ten year old in England.

[flyingshelf]

It's kinda funny. My life switched to English when I was around 18 and, while my family still speaks my native language exclusively, everything I've learned since then I don't know how to say it in my native language.

Just earlier I was talking to them, trying to say "when life gives you lemons" and being unable to find an equivalent phrase. I hope they understood my lemons reference regardless.

[coliveira]

When you're a foreigner learning a language your experience is mostly from reading. There are words, however, that are much more common at home and in spoken language. So you'll probably never learn the words that a 10 year old kid knows.

[TacticalCoder]

I started learning english around 1984, when I began to learn programming. Back then most books were, by very far, in english. I also spent some time in the US (about one year altogether).

Copying lyrics from my favorite songs of the 80s was helpful. And then later on TV series and movies in english.

I've watched Friends, HIMYM and Californication* more than once (it's probably the reason I swear so much) and those really helped.

Now I raised my kid in english: from the beginning she was only ever allowed to watch TV shows in english. And she's always been to international schools, in english too.

The other day she taught me a simply word which, surprisingly enough, I didn't know: a "coaster" (a drink coaster).

My absolute favorite is when she uses english grammar and applies it to french: the rules about where adjectives do go vary between french and english and she regularly messes it up in french (supposedly her "native" language but at this point I wonder whether english ain't a first language, and french second).

And one thing she has that I'll never have is a beautiful, proper, english accent. Mine shall forever be a strong french one.

[watwut]

It is changing. A bulk of learners now get their vocabularies from youtube, netflix and podcasts. Watching kids shows is common recommendation (I disagree with it somewhat, but that does not make it not common), so I think people will learn also those 10 years old world words.

[Sam6late]

I tried to teach 'magicE vocab', sorting them by difficulty level for an English language plan, and got them easily arranged. For example, sham/shame and slide/slid are for hard to learn level, while ate, pale, kite, are for the easy level.

[ReactiveJelly]

Kinda like how there's no average-sized airplane pilot

[thaumasiotes]

> While if you are living somewhere, it's really important to know a lot of basic supermarket items that you wouldn't prioritize for other usages.

Why? Having spent a good amount of time living in Shanghai, I found it important to be able to understand menus. But there's no pressure to know the words for supermarket items; you can just go to the supermarket and look for the item.

Otherwise your point is correct; all semantic words are equally difficult and which ones you know depends on the things you like to talk about. Grammatical words are more difficult, and more important, but this is so widely understood that language-learning material already treats them as an entirely separate class of things to learn.

> Also, while it's easy to calculate word frequencies for stuff like newspaper articles, there aren't any good statistics (last I checked) around just normal everyday conversation. Because that stuff isn't getting recorded and transcribed.

(1) You seem to want COCA, which includes a bunch of transcribed telephone calls.

(2) Word frequencies are still the wrong concept. If you want to understand a particular document, you need to understand almost all of the words that appear in that document. (You'll be able to learn some of them from their use in the document.) If you decide to learn a list of "frequent" words, you're unlikely to be able to understand more than a couple of isolated sentences in any given document.

[WalterBright]

> you need to understand almost all of the words that appear in that document

I didn't learn English by reading vocabulary lists or dictionaries. Pretty much all was learned by context.