How to Focus on Relevant Vocabulary: Using Zipf's Law for Efficient Language Learning

Published on: May 14, 2024

Introduction

Have you ever wondered why it's so hard to improve your vocabulary in a language you are already quite familiar with?

The Initial Rush: Fast Progress When Starting a New Language

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 Science Behind It: Zipf's Law

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.

The Pitfall of Random Word Selection

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.

Focusing on the Words That Matter

The 20-volume Oxford English Dictionary contains roughly 170,000 words, but a native English speaker only uses about 5,000 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.

Maximize Your Learning Efficiency with VocabGenerator.com

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.

A Strategic Approach to Vocabulary Learning

We suggest the following three simple steps:

1. Automatically generate flashcards for:
   • A specific topic
   • The words in a PDF
   • The highlighted words of a book page
   • Screenshots of subtitles
2. Export your flashcards to Anki or in the form of a printable PDF
3. Learn your flashcards

Watch Our Video Tutorials

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:

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.