[ozh]

Neat idea, but the article also made me discover Basic English and its 850 words. Didn't know about that, I think that should be mentioned when you learn English.

Does anyone know of similar general purpose word sets for other languages?

[jaynos]

>Does anyone know of similar general purpose word sets for other languages?

This would be great. All my attempts at learning a new language are thwarted by the seeming daunting nature of the task. 850 (or so) words? I could see myself doing that (and then continuing on to another few thousand words.

I believe Tim Ferriss did something like this for learning Japanese. He made the list himself, but published it for others. It's in "The 4 Hour Chef" and probably on his website.

[jaynos]

Self reply, I hope that's okay.

I looked into this more (had an urge to learn Spanish today). Frequency dictionaries might be a good place to start. Here's the Spanish one I found [1]. It's a dictionary sorted by frequency of use (in a 20 million word text survey) instead of alphabetically. I imagine you can find a similar dictionary for other languages.

[1] http://speak-spanish.ru/wp-content/uploads/A-FreDictSpan.pdf