Vocab Vaults: My Personalized Phrasebooks I’ll give you two techniques to apply the Pareto principle to your language learning. You don’t need to learn every single word as you come across it in your target language. I extend this to slightly more common words: at the moment I don’t believe I know how to say “shoelace” in any of my target languages, although I’d recognise that word based on seeing and hearing it previously a few times and especially based on extrapolating thanks to the context and perhaps word etymology. If you compare two natives of a language, where one knows the word armadillo and the other doesn’t, then will their lives really be that different given the same circumstances? Many words like these are so uncommon and unlikely to show up! Not knowing them will make no difference at all in your life. If you don’t know how to say “aardvark” or “armadillo” in French or Chinese, then your level simply isn’t good enough. How to Apply the Pareto Principle to Learning the Vocabulary You Need?Ī non-Pareto approach to language learning would imply that you need to know everything before you can speak. ![]() There is also a huge quantity of words you don’t need to start speaking a language. As a beginner, however, it’s not necessary. There are things like grammar and pronunciation that I have worked on much later in my language learning, and I have been able to get these to a very high level. You might think that if you don’t get the accent perfect at the start, you’ll never get it right because you can’t teach an old dog new tricks.I personally know this is absolute nonsense. You do have to get a certain level of pronunciation so that people can understand you, but a lot of people get obsessed with trying to have native-like pronunciation. The sentence structure might not be perfect, but the meaning is clear.Īs an absolute beginner, grammar is not going to make a big difference in your ability to communicate.Īnother thing that fits in this unnecessary 80% of language learning is obsession with pronunciation. If you say “me not go”, you are at least communicating. If you’re starting off, it’s fine for your grammar to be choppy. Grammar is not something I suggest that you learn initially, or at least that you don’t put that much effort into as an absolute beginner. When beginners start learning a language, a lot of them get bogged down with complicated things like grammar. How to Apply the Pareto Principle to Language Learning This is what you need to keep in mind: most of the end-results from a fraction of what you put into something.įrom another point of view, you could argue that a certain percentage of a language (80%) is simply irrelevant to me in my day to day dealings (when about 20% of the language is used). While there is some merit to using the number 80, the actual quantity doesn’t interest me too much. You don’t have to be exact about the 80/20 part of the principle. I’ve done something similar with language learning. I figured out what was the smallest amount of effort that I could apply to this business to launch it as quickly as possible. When I decided to start my blog, I could have aimed for perfection and decided I needed to get as much expertise in writing blogs as I possibly could.īut did I spend years researching how to blog? Or took a degree course on how to become a writer? I didn’t do that. I have used the principle in my personal and business life. Juran, a management consultant, developed the term and concept while studying Pareto’s works. In fact, the “Pareto Principle” was named after Vilfredo Pareto (1848-1923), an Italian economist who pointed out that about 80% of Italian land belonged to only 20% of the population. Other interpretations of the numbers are also possible: for example, 80% of the wealth of a country typically belongs to 20% of its population. In other words, you get 80% of the results from 20% of the work. In its simplest form, the Pareto principle states that roughly eighty percent of consequences come from twenty percent of causes.
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