Learn to notice

I think knowing the most 100 popular verbs (and things like that ) in the language will boost the capability of noticing the language

Hi Yasser2050, once I’ve heard that same advice from a polyglot (just with the 100 most common words intead of verbs). I mean it’s certainly useful, but let’s say that it’s gonna be just the first step. As Steve has said many times, you still have to put the time, actually a lot of time listening and reading the language to develop that skill of noticing, of being aware of what’s going on in the language. Good luck.

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Octavio is right, through the listening and mostly in the reading, you slowly develop the ability to notice the ā€œstyleā€ of the language … but I think that slow process happens for your first second language only.

After that you can pretty much notice patterns right away from day one, learning a new language. I’m just experiencing this right now, learning Chinese (my third language), after have developed the ā€œnoticingā€ thing from studying English before.

Sure…That is I meant…Thank you

I hope you to be fluent in Chinese…Good Luck

Well yes but it depends.

  1. You can’t just sit and learn them from a list. It might work if you have super memory, but you still won’t have seen them in context. Context is king because you see them as they pop up in real usage. It’s natural.

  2. The words used in Chaucer will be different to the words used on the street, or between two children, or in a monologue from a film. You should learn words as they come up in the material that you’re interested in. That’s my opinion.

I was hammering the ā€˜French History’ podcast on here but there is just so much vocabulary that will NEVER be needed for any purpose of communication that i will ever use that i ditched it. I’m never going to use passĆ© simple in real life, i’m never going to use some of the constructions or phrasing, i’m never going to use some of the verbs. They are just too obscure to bother learning if your primary focus is on eventually speaking and listening to real people in real life situations.

Of course if my goal was to read complex literature then this would be the material that i would stick to.