The 100 Crucial Words

Reading Tony Buzan’s book, “Using Your Memory” a while back, he mentioned something that I found strange: people only use up to 100 basic words in conversational speech, the rest of them being fillings. The number seemed awfully low, but as the author explained his reasons for reducing this to 100 words, it started to make sense. Truth is, we could get a conversation going with just these words, although not a very good one. These 100 crucial words do not include technical words, adjectives or slang, obviously.

When you’re starting out with learning a new language, these 100 crucial words should be your base point. From there on you can build up on your vocabulary, work on your grammar and polish out your pronunciation, slowly eliminating all the mistakes that can affect your language learning process. But what’s the most efficient method of memorizing these words? Does the phonebook method actually work? Or is it better to try and learn them in context. I’d say both techniques work and both have advantages and disadvantages:

Phonebook Method Pros and Cons

The phonebook method basically has you learning words from a vertical list, just like you would learn the numbers from a phonebook. Each word should have its corresponding translation on the same line and you should read the list by focusing on each word and its translation at a time, for around 10 seconds and trying to push it in your memory.

Usually, language specialists recommend against using the phonebook technique when trying to learn vocabulary, because if you’re dealing with a large list of words, by the time you manage to actually go through the list, you will have already forgotten the words at the beginning. However, seeing how we’re only dealing with a list of 100 words, the phonebook might just work.

Contextual Learning Method Pros and Cons

Learning words by deducting them from their context is a great way to improve vocabulary, but when you’re dealing with such a small word base as the crucial 100, it might be harder to create the context needed. Instead, what you could do is take sentences consisting mostly of words from the 100 list and try to contextually understand the OTHER words.

Both methods work quite well with the list and some people even prefer combining the two for great results. Personally, I find that both have flaws and tend to try and learn vocabulary through more diverse means, but if you think traditional learning methods may apply to you, then the above mentioned techniques should hold most of your focus, at least for the first 100 words.