1,000 Words

Of the 1,000 most frequently used English words (click here), regardless of education most people use only 403 words in nearly 80% of their daily conversations.

So whether you're a PhD, an office worker or a waitress, your basic spoken vocabulary is about the same.

To me this means you could speak any language with comparative ease by learning only about 400 words.

The words most used are: the, of, and, a, to, in, is, be, that, was, he.

These provide one-sixth of a person's vocabulary.

And the first 30 to 40 words on the list constitute over half a person's everyday speech.

Here again you can see how easy it would be to get along in a foreign language, if we know which words to learn and how to hang them together.