The most frequent words aren’t the same in every language; you won’t need Republican to learn Russian, and collective Soviet farming community doesn’t show up in Spanish very often. Each language has its own frequency list (the best frequency dictionaries are published by Routledge), and they are fascinating, both because of the words they include and the words they don’t. Unfortunately, these lists can be cumbersome. At least in the beginning, you’re looking for words that are easy to visualize—words like bus and mother. You could find them in your language’s frequency list, but you’d have to
...more
