Start out with High-Utility Words 🗝️

When we start learning a new language, it is important to make the process as sustainable as possible and develop a good studying habit so that we can continue to study for a long time without giving up. That is eventually the only way to get to fluency.

In the first few months, however, it is important to build ourselves a strong foundation in the language, on which we can build our way to fluency later. And a strong foundation in my experience is a good understanding of how to use high utility words. As I always say, we should learn sentences and not single words, so I’m not advocating for learning a list of words. We should focus on how to use high-utility words in a sentence.

Now, what are these words? 🧩

High utility words go hand in hand with high frequency words. These are words which appear often and which I call the building blocks of a language. These words can be used in many situations, in many sentences, and it is almost impossible to say a sentence without using them, giving them a high utility. These are high frequency adjectives like “good” or “bad”, conjunctions like “because” or “but”, high frequency verbs like “eat” or “go” or “think” and pronouns like “I” and “you”.

What about nouns? ♟️

Notice that I did not include nouns in this. That is because most nouns have a low utility, because you can only use them to describe a specific object. You can only use the word “scarf” to talk about a scarf, which gives it a low utility. Learning how to say “scarf” contributes very little to building yourself a foundation in the language. Perhaps it helps you understand what words in this language generally sound like or how to form the plural, but it is not a word that you can use to talk about various things like you can with “I think that”.

But conjunctions, high frequency adjectives and pronouns are in my experience the building blocks of a language. Of course, eventually you will learn all the words and knowing as many nouns as possible is essential, but that is essential for reaching fluency, not for building yourself a foundation in the language.

Why do I say this? 💡

Because course after course, resource after resource, teaches you early on certain nouns like “scarf” or “jacket”, giving them just as much importance if not even more importance than a conjunction like “because”. Of course, we can focus on any word, any additional word brings us closer to fluency. But in the early stage it is important to build the foundation, the structure, and we can do that with high utility words.

It's like a wine barrel. We first need to build the structure of the barrel. Once that structure is in place, we can start filling it with wine, throw word after word in there with consuming lots of content, with speaking and practising, thereby filling the barrel.

Of course, we will learn some low frequency nouns also while building the structure, that is unavoidable when we learn sentences. But those should not be our focus.

Have a great day and happy mersing! 🌞🪁