80/20 Rule in Language Learning

General discussion about learning languages

How does the 80/20 Rule work with Language Learning?

80% of the benefit comes from the first 20% of the work.
13
65%
80% of the benefit comes from the last 20% of the work. *
7
35%
 
Total votes: 20

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einzelne
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Re: 80/20 Rule in Language Learning

Postby einzelne » Sat Jan 21, 2023 3:28 pm

This is the screenshot from the Russian edition of Grund- und Aufbauwortschatz Latein — a frequency dictionary of Latin (sorry, I don't have the original German edition):

Latin corpus.png


Basically, it states that if we take the corpus of Classical Latin texts, it has about 50 000 unique words, of which 1400 cover 80% of words in a text, and 2700 - 90%, that means that the last 10 percent cover 47k words. (Well, the authors make a silly statement that the percentage of known words immediately translates into understanding of the same percentage of text, but let’s not dig into that). But yeah, to a certain degree it is true. You master grammar and core vocabulary in a year and then spend the rest of your life fighting with the last 10%.
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