That’s the truth. We love Amazon Prime but the language options (what there are) stink badly.
NetFlix is far superior and we seldom have a complaint (for French) though a friend told me this doesn’t reach some languages like Korean.
I’m curious about the 3000-5000 frequently used words list. What list do you use for French? What is your process?
My main list has been one of the main ones from the Anki (free) web site – searching for French and 5000 should find it.
As to process, a LOT more detail is in my thread linked below.
Mostly I start a new language with that list and PUSH really fast through the first few thousand up to 5000 words so that I can read effectively and begin to consume other media.
It took a little over 1 month to make it through th 5000 word list 1st pass. Which is releasing a very large number of words each day (166) due to words coming due back into the list. A hundred cards per day isn’t so bad but it quickly grows even if you handle over 95% correct each day the ones you know come back too.
At the peak, it was about 800 reviews per day and around 600 for the “worst” 10 days or so. (ANd yes that is a very large number, more with 5% misses)
It was a couple of months before virtually all of them were solid and the time was no longer worth the effort vs doing other things.
Thank you that is very helpful. I started using Anki deck for my laptop after reading your post.
Some criticize the idea of learning vocabulary to “learn a language” but remember that for most us that is NOT the goal:
We are gaining rapid familiarity with enough vocabulary to read (near) fluently (about 3000-5000 known words will usally do it depending on difficulty of the matieral) and to understand some of what we hear, or have material for what we want to say.
This is the reason for the rapid initial push – I really don’t care about the last 5-10% of words that will still give me trouble after about 2 months.
They’ll either be incorporated from reading or they probably aren’t that important.
With 1000 words I can read simply stories and maybe children’s books. By 5000 most popular young adult and general novels are readable.
Also note these are mostly “head words” not the inflected form word counts we see in LingQ.
Nothing wrong with the LingQ count method as long as you realize the numbers are not directly comparable.
My advice, push as quickly as you are able to get through at least the first 1000, and preferably all 5000 until you can read something you actually enjoy…
I am taking your advice! I’m cranking through them now