One thing that strikes me as illogical, looking back on my high school French lessons, was how damned irrelevant the vocabulary we learned was!
Maybe I’m exaggerating a little bit… but when you can name 15 different professions in French before you can tell a girl she’s pretty, you’ve probably got your priorities mixed up (unless of course you are a girl, or you’re training to be a careers advisor. In which case, carry on).
There are what, 40,000 Spanish words you’ll need to learn to get to almost maximum fluency? (that figure’s off the top of my head by the way, correct me if I’m wrong). You probably only need 75% to get by perfectly well living in Spain (again, just making these figures up to illustrate my point), but of these, how many would you use on a daily basis?
According to this page, men speak 6,073 words per day, and women 8,805*. Now, many, many of those will be repeat words. Considering the high volume use of certain words like ‘the’, ‘and’, etc., the actual number of different words used per day is going to be WAY lower than this!
Obviously, you need to overshoot the mark because you never know when you’ll end up sat on a bus next to a careers advisor; but my point is made. You’ll reach fluency much more quickly by focusing effort on the vocabulary that is most likely to be used. That means the 100 most common spoken and written words, and from there, the words related to the things you’ll be using your vocabulary for. So think about what you’ll be doing with your Spanish and prioritise your learning from there.
Another interesting thing from the article cited above, are the most common words used by men and women:
MEN – fucking, er, the, yeah, aye, right, hundred, fuck
WOMEN – she, her, said, n’t, I, and, to, cos
That’s pretty interesting. Men talk about fucking, and three of our most common words are affirmatory (i.e., used while listening). “Yeah, aye, yeah, right. Fuck!” Hundred’s a weird one though??
Women, on the other hand, talk gossip about themselves and each other “She said to her…”, and also ‘cos’ (because) is a process word, so they discuss the meaning of things more often.
Anyway – there are some words to start with!
* They explain this difference with a joke:
A husband looking through the paper came upon a study that said women use more words than men.
Excited to prove to his wife that he had been right all along when he accused her of talking too much, he showed her the study results. It read “Men use about 15,000 words per day, but women use 30,000?.
The wife thought for a while, then finally she said to her husband “It’s because we have to repeat everything we say.”
The husband said “What?”
