You’re seventy-nine times more likely to talk about your mother than your niece. Why not learn mother first and niece later? Grammar books and language classes don’t follow this principle, in part because it’s easy to plan lessons around themes like “family” and “fruit.” As a result, you’ll find niece and mother in the exact same place in your grammar book, regardless of their relative utility. In language classes, you’ll learn words for apricots and peaches when your time would be much better spent learning about laptops, medicine, and energy. These are the words of our lives. Why not learn
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