The same hundred meanings sit at the top of the frequency list in almost every language. Learn these before anything else, and everything you meet afterwards becomes partly readable.
Pronouns, question words, the twenty commonest verbs, connectors, position words, small numbers, basic time words, courtesy formulas and about ten everyday nouns. That is the hundred, and it is roughly the same hundred whichever language you are starting.
Word frequency is wildly lopsided. A very small number of words does an enormous share of the work: in English, the hundred commonest words account for something close to half of everything you read or hear, and the pattern holds across languages because these are the words that hold sentences together rather than the words that fill them.
Learn them and something specific happens. You stop hearing an undifferentiated stream of sound and start hearing a sentence with gaps in it — and a sentence with gaps is something you can guess at, ask about, and learn from. That shift is the single biggest return available in a language, and it takes about two weeks.
These are meanings, not translations — look each one up in your language and learn it there. Two notes before you start: learn nouns with their article if your language has gender, and learn each word as a sound before you learn it as a spelling.
I, you, he, she, it, we, they, me, my, your, this, that
who, what, where, when, why, how, which, how much
be, have, do, go, come, want, need, can, know, think, say, see, give, take, make, get, like, live, eat, drink
and, but, or, because, if, so, with, without, for, to, from, of
in, on, under, here, there, up, down, next to
one, two, three, many, few, all, more, less, big, small
now, today, tomorrow, yesterday, always, never, sometimes, day, week, year
hello, goodbye, please, thank you, sorry, yes, no, excuse me, good, bad
water, food, house, money, person, name, time, place, thing, work
No colours, no animals, no fruit, no items of clothing. Beginner courses open with these because they are easy to illustrate, not because they are frequent. You will use the word for because a hundred times before you need the word for giraffe.
There is also no grammar here, which is intentional. At this stage the words are labels attached to meanings, and they will function perfectly well in the wrong order. Word order and endings can wait until there is something for them to arrange.
The meanings are near-universal. How much work each one costs is not, and it is worth knowing where your language will surprise you.
| Language | What to watch for in the first hundred |
|---|---|
| German | Every noun arrives with a gender, so learn the attached to it from the start. Several of these verbs are irregular in the present tense, which is worth absorbing as fixed forms rather than as a rule. |
| Spanish | There are two verbs meaning be, used for different things — learn them as two separate words with different jobs rather than as one word with an exception. Verb endings carry the subject, so the pronouns are often dropped. |
| Portuguese | Much like Spanish in structure, but the sounds are further from the spelling. Prioritise audio from the first day or you will build a hundred words you cannot recognise when spoken. |
| English | The easiest of the four for this list: no gender, almost no endings. The difficulty is the opposite one — many of these words have several unrelated meanings, so learn one meaning each and add the others later. |
The second hundred is where lists start losing their value, because your own life begins to diverge from the average. The most useful next step is not another list at all: take the words from something you actually want to read, watch or say, because those are the words that will come round again.
Keep the pace low — five to ten a day — and put the effort into review rather than intake. Getting to a thousand words is mostly a matter of turning up on enough days, and the first hundred are the proof that turning up works.
The meanings are, near enough. Every language needs ways to point at people, ask questions, join clauses, count small numbers and be polite, and those functions sit at the top of the frequency list everywhere. What changes is how a language expresses them — some pack several of these into a single word, others spread one across three.
Order within the hundred matters much less than mixing. Take a few from different groups each day rather than finishing one category before starting the next — similar words learned together interfere with each other, and question words are the worst offenders.
Learn one to ten in the first month, but they do not belong in the first hundred. Numbers feel essential and are used far less often in ordinary conversation than pronouns and connectors, so they are better treated as a quick separate exercise.
Not yet. Learn one form of each word and use it everywhere, even where it is wrong. You will be understood, and the correct forms are far easier to attach later to a word you already own than to learn alongside it.
Not when you can recognise them — when you can produce them without pausing. A fair test: write ten short sentences about your day using nothing but words from this list. If you can do it without looking anything up, the hundred are yours.
The rest of the beginner questions, answered the same way.