Published on: May 14, 2024
Have you ever wondered why it's so hard to improve your vocabulary in a language you are already quite familiar with?
When starting to learn a new language, you make progress very fast and feel great while doing so. However, when learning a foreign language in which you are already familiar with a substantial amount of vocabulary, progress is often much slower.
The answer to the question lies in the concept of Zipf's Law. Zipf's law states that the frequency of a word in natural language text is inversely proportional to its rank in the frequency table. In simpler terms, it means that a small number of words will be very common, while the vast majority will be used infrequently.
To make things more obvious you can think of the worst strategy of learning vocabulary: randomly selecting words from the dictionary and learning them. A randomly selected word from the dictionary is likely to be used very infrequently, wasting time to learn.
The 20-volume Oxford English Dictionary contains roughly 170,000 words, but a native English speaker only uses about 5000 words on a regular basis. To fluently understand a language you need to recognize roughly 20,000 words. The tools on VocabGenerator.com help you to identify the remaining part of those 20,000 words (the part which you don't already know), sparing you from the less beneficial task of learning the other 150,000 less commonly used words.
The functionality behind VocabGenerator.com allows you to learn precisely the most common words which you don't already know so you don't waste time on words you're unlikely to encounter frequently in the future.
We suggest the following three simple steps:
To see exactly how to use our vocabulary flashcard generators, check out our video tutorials. These videos will guide you through each step, showing you how to get the most out of our tools:
How to Generate Flashcards from Highlighted Words (Video 1/3)
