Reviewing the 500 words approach

I had to backtrack a little - the list from opensubtitles has some issues:

1. There's a lot of slang and duplicates, and it took a lot of effort to try and remove these
2. Conjugation is more complicated than in a lot of other languages, so it's hard to pull apart all the different verbs into their infinitives
3. Serbian is a slavic language and they decline adjectives and nouns, as well as gendering adjectives, meaning a lot of work to try and unpack these into nominative masculine form

I started from scratch and built a word list from https://fastlanguagemastery.com/400-most-common-words/

I've removed a few words as some of them don't make sense (the/a etc), and some duplicates, and it comes to around 350 words. I've done all the verbs and already this feels a lot more useful, and once I've got the nouns and adjectives down I'll feel a lot more comfortable.

There's another thing I've forgotten about, and that's how hard it is to keep motivated at the start. The first month is the worst, so finding other ways to keep motivated is very important here. Variety helps, and anything tangentially related is going to be somewhat useful.

You need to listen

It doesn't matter how well you speak a language, if you can't understand other people then you can't really communicate with anyone. Expanding your vocabulary is an important step, but the next biggest thing is getting used to hearing the language as spoken.

I'm taking a dual approach here - cartoons to hear things I have a chance of understanding, and radio to get used to hearing day to day conversations, even if I won't understand most of the words.

SBS radio have an archive of Serbian podcasts, so I've been listening to those as background noise while I'm doing things around the house. When I want to sit down and watch something, I've been watching Peppa Pig (Peppa Prase in Serbian) as the dialogue is pretty simple and matches what's happening on the screen.

Still in this early useless stage, but it feels good so far - I'm up to 150 words and am being mainly held back now by how quickly I can make new flash cards.

Learn 500 words

The first step to learning a language is vocabulary. You can get the grammar, you can recognise spoken words, but if you don't have vocabulary then you can't understand or speak.

There's different measures of what counts as a minimal vocabulary. Simple English Wikipedia ranges from the most common 500 to the most common 1000 words. Thing Explainer is a small encyclopedia of cool scientific things in the most common 1000 words.

In the past I've found 500 is an absolute minimum - you get some common verbs, connecting words, pronouns, and enough to get you doing something useful with grammar. I can cheat a little as I'm fluent in Polish, but 500 is still a minimum before anything else is really valuable.

I've taken the Serbian frequency list from opensubtitles and gone through word by word. I'm up to 200 made into flashcards so far. There are a couple of important things to do to tidy things up though. Firstly, when translating, realise that these words are from subtitles and the most common words, so we need to make sure we're using the most likely translation (likely a conjugation/declination of something fundamental). Secondly, after the first 100 words we can start stripping out the conjugations and declinations and combine them into one word (infinitive/accusative). Thirdly, there are lots of words that are similar, and you *must* make sure the translations are easy to tell apart, otherwise you'll get frustrated as hell with false negatives on your testing.

I'll post some links later, but for now this is the start. I'm up to 100 words learned, and need to get the flashcards built up to 500 and get them all done as soon as possible.