An Economists’s Perspective on Expanding Vocabulary

Published on: November 17, 2024

Introduction

This article explores an economist’s approach to vocabulary learning, viewing language acquisition through the lens of economic and mathematical principles. By applying these concepts, you may be able to grow your vocabulary more effectively.

Zipf's Law and the Pareto Principle

Zipf's Law states that in any natural language, the frequency of a word is inversely proportional to its rank in a frequency list. Simply put, a small number of words are used very frequently, while most words appear rarely.

With this in mind, a practical approach to vocabulary improvement would be to identify high-frequency words in your target language that you don’t know yet. Learning rare words, like anthropomorphize, may be interesting, but it offers little advantage in everyday conversation due to its low frequency. An economist, for example, would consider learning words like anthropomorphize inefficient due to its minimal payoff.

Maximizing Vocabulary Learning Efficiency

Beyond focusing on high-impact words, we can view vocabulary acquisition in terms of “cost”—the time and effort it takes to learn each new word.

The process can be broken down into four main steps:

1. Identifying unknown words: Finding unfamiliar words while reading books, watching movies, or exploring topics that interest you.
2. Retrieving meanings or translations: Automatically provided by Google Translate.
3. Creating flashcards: Exportable to Anki or as a printable PDF.
4. Reviewing and memorizing: Anki’s proven system helps millions of students and language learners review words efficiently.

The goal of VocabGenerator.com is to minimize effort across each of these steps.

Worth the Effort?

You might wonder if using VocabGenerator.com is worthwhile. In truth, VocabGenerator.com, like many things in life, follows a pattern of diminishing returns. Each new word learned adds a bit less value than the last.

The first 500 words you learn with VocabGenerator.com may noticeably impact your language skills and confidence. After a few thousand words, though, the next addition will likely be less frequent in daily conversation and may feel less impactful.

So, aim to master your first 500 essential words, and then consider how much further you’d like to go as the returns gradually diminish.

Explore https://vocabgenerator.com

Ready to start your Flashcards Journey with VocabGenerator?

Create your language learning flashcards:

1. For the highlighted (marked) words of book pages
2. For specific words in screenshots of subtitles
3. For your topics of interest (e.g. your field of work)
4. For words of your PDFs with a specific word frequency.