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.