Start with 30 English words you can use today. Every word has a short, easy meaning. Every word also shows you how to say it.
In English, we often do not say a word the way we write it. So we start with sound. Then meaning. Rules come last.
Every word shows you how to say it, so you do not have to guess. Say the word out loud one time. Then it stays right.
First you learn hellos, common things, and the few verbs that are in almost every English sentence. We teach the most used words first. These same words are useful in every language — see the first 100 words to learn in any language.
You learn a little grammar at a time, inside sentences you can already say. You do not have to learn rules first. Here is why words come before grammar.
Learn these 30 words. Then you can understand simple, everyday talk — and take part in it.
The pronunciation shown is a simple respelling, not a phonetic alphabet. Capital letters mark the stressed part of the word.
Eight sentences. They are enough for most of your first conversations in English.
A simple plan for your first weeks of English.
Learn ten words at a time. Say each word out loud. Use the sounds written next to the word. Five to ten words a day is enough, so this takes less than a week. Say the words again a few days later — this is what makes them stay.
Full sentences are easier to remember than single words. And you can use them right away.
Learn numbers, the days of the week, and how to say the time. Then you can go shopping, travel, and make appointments.
Choose a person, a verb from the list, and a thing. Short and correct is better than long and wrong.
English is the most widely taught language in the world, which means there is more advice about it than about anything else — and a lot of that advice is wrong for a beginner. Everything below is the short version of what actually changes your first few months.
English has an enormous dictionary and a very small core. Estimates put the total at over half a million words, but the first 100 words alone account for roughly half of everything written and spoken in ordinary English, because they are the words that hold sentences together: the, be, to, of, and, a, in, that, have, I. The research behind those numbers is in how many words you need to speak a language.
The thirty words on this page are survival level. Around 500 words covers most routine daily exchanges, which is the A0 to A1 range. At 1,000 to 2,000 high-frequency words you can follow most everyday conversation and read simple texts without stopping every line. The size of the dictionary is irrelevant to you; the shape of the frequency curve is everything.
These are levels from the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages, the scale used across Europe to describe what a learner can actually do. A0 means absolute beginner, with no prior English assumed. A1 means you can introduce yourself, ask and answer simple questions about where you live, people you know and things you have, and understand someone who speaks slowly and clearly. What A1 level actually means walks through the descriptors in full.
English exams do not all use this scale, which confuses a lot of beginners. Cambridge A2 Key is the usual first certificate, and IELTS and TOEFL use their own band scores and start well above beginner level. If you are at A0 or A1, no exam is urgent yet.
English grammar is unusually forgiving for a beginner. Nouns have no gender. Adjectives do not change. There are no cases. Verb endings are almost non-existent in the present tense — you add an s for he, she and it, and that is the whole story.
The spelling, on the other hand, is genuinely irregular, because English kept the spelling of words it borrowed from French, Latin, Norse and everything else it touched. Through, though, thought, tough and thorough share four letters and no sound. This is why every word on this page comes with a respelling: learn how a word sounds at the same moment you learn how it is written, and you avoid a habit that is painful to undo later.
In German, Spanish or Portuguese, the ending of a word often tells you its job in the sentence, so the order can move around. English threw most of its endings away and put the job into position instead. Subject, then verb, then object — almost always, and almost without exception for a beginner.
That has a practical consequence worth knowing on day one: The dog bites the man and The man bites the dog use identical words and mean opposite things. Getting the order right matters more than getting the tense right. A beginner who says Yesterday I go to the shop will be understood perfectly; the order carries the meaning and the wrong tense costs you nothing.
Everything here is taught in English, which is the right approach once you have a few hundred words but a slow one on your very first day. Explanations land faster in the language you already think in, and there is no prize for refusing help.
That principle is the whole idea behind our sister sites, which teach German rather than English but in the reader’s own language: alemánbásico for Spanish speakers and Alemão Básico for Portuguese speakers. If Spanish or Portuguese is your first language and German is also somewhere on your list, they run the same method you are using here — high-frequency vocabulary first, grouped by theme, with daily review instead of long study sessions.
Reading a word list again feels productive and mostly is not. What moves a word into long-term memory is retrieval: trying to recall it, getting it slightly wrong, and being corrected. Spaced repetition schedules those attempts at the moment you are about to forget, so each review does the most work possible. The full method is in how to memorize vocabulary faster.
Ten minutes of that every day will beat an hour of highlighting at the weekend. Consistency is not a motivational slogan here; it is the mechanism.
English is easier than its reputation in grammar and harder in spelling. There are no genders, no cases and almost no verb endings, so simple sentences come quickly. The difficulty is that written English does not reliably tell you how a word sounds, which is why beginners should learn pronunciation and spelling together from the first word.
With 15 to 20 focused minutes a day, most beginners reach A1 in roughly two to four months, a little faster than for languages with more grammar to absorb. What decides the pace is consistency rather than session length.
Vocabulary first. English word order is simple enough that a few hundred words already let you build sentences people understand. Grammar is most useful once you have material to apply it to. The longer answer, with the point where the balance shifts, is in vocabulary or grammar first.
Five to ten new words a day is a pace almost anyone can sustain, and it adds up to well over a thousand words in a year. Reviewing old words matters more than adding new ones, so keep the new-word count low enough to leave time for revision. How many words to learn per day explains why the ceiling is that low.
These six guides are language-neutral — they cover the method rather than the words, so they apply whichever language you are starting.
Every course begins at absolute beginner level.