CHAPTER TWO

Pareto Principle and Core Vocabulary 

“Learning without thought is labor lost; thought without learning is perilous. ” - CONFUCIUS

If you have made the decision (and I hope you have), congratulations! I have never seen anyone who has decided to learn a language fail. In this chapter, we ate about to discover one of the most important factors that decides whether or not you can learn a new language in a short period of time. When it comes to language, most people will agree with me that vocabulary is at die top of the priority list. Without vocabulary, you definitely cannot hear, speak, or write. You are still able to communicate without proper grammar or with pool* pronunciation. But you can do nothing without words. Language is formed by words and the way words are put together logically. Nevertheless, have you ever asked: “How many words do I need in ordet to speak well?” Not everybody asks that question. Most people just start light away without realizing how far they will have to go and how long it will take to get to the end of the toad. That is not very good when you have a long journey. You will be more likely to reach the target if you have a map in your hand, or know die way you have to go.

There are approximately 600,000 different, words in English. This figure varies among languages from 400,000 to 1,000,000 or even more. Let‟s take a look at a dictionary. You will find that an average one win have 300,000 — 400,000 different words. You could have been learning a foreign language for sometime now. I do not know how many woids you‟ve got, but I am veiy sure that the number of wofds you have studied is much larger than the number of words you‟ve retained.

It may seem that there is a “hole” in your mind through which new words keep leaking out. Even though you have been trying to pick up new words every day, what you fetain doesn‟t seem to make the effort worthwhile. With 600,000 — 800,000 different words, even if we assume that you keep learning new words everyday and retain about 20 words per day (this is not a bad result at all!), it results in 7,300 words a year (365 X 20). You do the math! Fortunately, life does not have to be that hafd! Things in OU1' world are arranged by an interesting principle called the 80/20 principle.

This was found by an Italian economist named Vilfredo Pareto. That is why it is also called the Pareto principle.Pareto observed that 80% of the lands ate owned by 20% of the population. He found that this number is true in many other fields, as well. For example: • • • • • • 20% of the input creates 80% of the result 20% of the workers produce 80% of the result 20% of die customers create 80% of the revenue 20% of the bugs cause 80% of the crashes 20% of the featuies cause 80% of the usage And on and on...

In fact, die tate of 80/20 is rather a symbol than an exact number. In many cases, it could be 90/10 or 95/5.

20% of time

accounts for 80% of time

This principle became well-known because thanks to it people could decide what to put theif efforts (time, money, resources...) into in order to get the most results. Simply put,wol'k less and gain more. Don‟t you want to spend less time but get more results in learning a new language? The great thing is that the Pareto principle is also true in learning a new language. Even though die total number of different words in English comes up to 600,000, only a small portion of that number is used ill American daily lives. Shakespeare is known to be an author who used a wide variety of words and phrases in Ills works.

 If you ever read him, you will find many words that you would never use or even think of in your life. Yet, statistics shows that he has used only a total of approximately 20,000 different words in all of his works put together. How about that number in our daily lives? As early as the 1930s, George Zipf (1935) had made influential proposals about the statistical distributional properties of the lexicon, widely known as Zipfs Law. He researched various languages, including English. He found that each word has a different frequency of occurrence. In English, the word “THE” tops the frequency ranking with 7.5%, “OF” following with 3.5%, and ;so on. Amazingly, just 130 words make up 50% of occurrences.

Other studies show that Americans use around 2500 — 3000 most common words in their daily lives. The good news is that these 3000 common words build up more than 95% of the content in any conversation, telephone call, e-mail Of even books and newspapers.In other words, instead of learning 600,000 different words, you can focus on 3000 most common words but still understand 95% of all conversations, e-mails, newspapers and books. If you take 3,000 and divided it by 600,000, die result is 0.5%. These most common words belong to what we call the core vocabulary. Some linguists believe that die core vocabulary should contain 4,000 instead of 3,000 words. Others think it should be 2,000. But I think the exact number is not very important, because the bottom line here is that you will be able to master communication in your new language by focusing on this core vocabulary.

Some of my students feel rather uncomfortable with this fecommendation, as they want to fully understand (100%) all of die content they are exposed to. They do not want to lose the remaining 5% content by understanding only 95%. Yes! I totally agree with them. I am not saying that you should understand only 95% of the language you‟re learning. I am talking about where to focus first. After mastering the core vocabulary and understanding most of the language, no one can stop you firom discovering further to enrich your vocabulary. However, if you seek perfection in the very beginning, you will be scattering your time and effort in a wide area.

Unfocused effort will lead to no results for too long and make you tired. Long ago in China, Sun Tzu, a well-known strategist, talked about a technique for the minority to defeat the majority. The technique was to focus all the effort on the weakest point of youf enemy. You should use the same strategy for learning a new language. Another reason for you to focus on the core vocabulary is that in order to remember and be able to use a specific word you will have to be exposed to that word several times. Many linguists believe that a person will need to get exposed to a word 5 to 10 times to master it. That is why it is not a good idea at all to spread your efforts thin. Basically, almost every language in the world follows the same pattern in that a small percentage of the total number of words make up the core vocabulary of any particular language. However, different languages may have different total number of words leading to varying sizes of their core vocabulary. Below is an illustration of the word frequency distribution and core vocabulary in Russian (souice: www.how-to-leam-anv- language.com). 

Russian word frequency

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Word Fr*qus*>cy Ranh

The result is that: the 75 most common words make up 40% of occurrences the 200 most common words make up 50% of occurrences the 524 most common words make up 60% of occurrences die 1257 most common words make up 70% of occurrences die 2925 most common words make up 80% of occurrences the 7444 most common words make up 90% of occurrences the 13374 most common words make up 95% of occurrences the 25508 most common words make up 99% of occurrences Okay, so you have got the first secret in my second language learning process. However,

I have only mentioned the size of the core vocabulary. We do not know yet what words go in there. Well, if you run a search on the Internet or look at some language learning book, you would probably find lists of words that form die core vocabulary for your target language. On www.wiktionary. org people even have frequency lists for various languages. A friend of mine collected a list of 1500 most common words in English as he was trying to improve his English skills.

If this is the first time you are seeing such a list, chances are that you might be tempted to leam by purely memorizing it. Well, you can tty doing so if you want. But I am sure that it will not work! Memorizing a list of words out of context is one of the worst methods in learning a newlanguage. Being able to memorize it does not tnean you can use it. And when native speakers talk to you, you might not understand even though they speak using those words!

A number of second language learners do know about the existence of core vocabulary, but they do not know how to exploit it effectively. They do not know how to approacK it ptoperly. The main reason is that you need to acquire a language, not purely learn it, and you absolutely cannot memorize a language. Please don‟t worry about the concepts “acquiring” and “learning” yet, I will explain them later in the next chapter. Now, please be a bit patient, as I seem to be rambling on about this topic. This idea is so important that I would like you to fully get my point before introducing you to the next step.

 In the next chapter, I will be instructing you how to acquire the core vocabulary of the language you‟re learning and to master it confidently. Before moving to the next chapter, I would like to introduce a concept somewhat similaf to core vocabulary — core phtases. As its name suggests, core phrases ate the most common ways of putting words together. In other words, they are the most common sentences and phrases. This is the second reason why you cannot leam a language by just memorizing its core vocabulary list. The idea is simple: you cannot speak a language if you know the words but don‟t know how to put them together. Core phrases are just as important as core vocabulary. They will help you master die listening, speaking and writing skills in a new language more quickly by recognizing and mastering whole phrases instead of individual words.

Let me give you an example: In everyday English, you would normally say: “I‟ll be light back”. It means that you are about to go somewhere and will return shortly. You rarely use any other way to express this idea when you speak. If a learner of English tries to memorize individual words and then tries to remember how to put them together, it will not be as efficient as memorizing the whole phrase. In fact, it is easier to memorize and recall a long phrase or sentence than a single word.

 This fact is especially true when developing listening skills because you will be more likely to recognize and understand a long phrase than a single word. It is just like listening to a song. If I play only a few sounds, you might not be able to recognize which song it is. But the job will be much easier if I play a longer piece of melody.

The same thing happens when you speak. If you use common phrases when you speak, native speakers will be more likely to understand what you want to say although your pronunciation may not be ĩeally good yet. Fot example, if I asked an American: “is youf health good?” as an opening remark, he would not understand. It is simply because Americans do not say it that way, even though the sentence is correct in terms of grammar.

In other words, the sound in this case is not familiar to them in this particular context. However, if I say: “how are you?” Of “how are you doing?” people will understand immediately no matter how bad my pronunciation is. In short, leam the way native speakers speak; learn the common phrases and sentences they use. That is the fastest way to communicate effectively in a new language. I call it “take the agssgassB^ whole bundle” technique. Now, let‟s move on to the next chapter and discover how you can quickly absorb the core vocabulary!