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0.0 - Absolute Beginner: This level features very basic vocabulary and phrases, accompanied by clear visuals and context. It is suitable for individuals who have no prior knowledge of the target language.
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0.5 - Intermediate: At this level, sentences become more complex and vocabulary expands. Some idioms may be present, which would require a bit more foundational knowledge.
0.6 - Upper Intermediate: This level contains specialized vocabulary and concepts related to specific fields. To fully comprehend the content, viewers should possess a solid understanding of the target language.
0.8 - Advanced: The video incorporates sophisticated vocabulary and intricate sentence structures. It may involve nuanced discussions that demand a high level of proficiency in the language.
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Assistant: Caption: If you are learning Spanish,
you have to focus on the most common words in spoken Spanish.
Perhaps you have heard of the Pareto principle.
This principle says that with only 20% of the effort
you get 80% of the results.
Something similar happens with Spanish words.
Spanish has tens of thousands of words.
In fact, only in the Spanish spoken in series and movies
there are more than 150,000 words.
But the most common thousand words
gives you almost 80% coverage of spoken Spanish,
and the most common 5,000 words gives you almost 90% coverage.
Now where can you find those common words?
There are many lists on the Internet.
And of course, having a list is better than having nothing.
But these lists are generally not based on spoken Spanish.
For example, the CREA list, compiled by the Royal Academy,
is based on books, magazines and newspapers published since 1970.
Other lists available on the Internet are based on movie subtitles.
This is a little better for the student of Spanish,
since the language of the movies
is a better reflection of the Spanish that they will hear in conversations.
The problem is that those lists
are based on Spanish subtitles of English movies.
So these lists do not come from a native Spanish corpus or database,
but from English translated into Spanish.
That's why in these lists you can find names
like John, Washington, Charles and Mary among the first 2,000 words.
Another problem with the Spanish word lists that you can find on the internet
is that they are based on the frequency of a word.
That is, how many times that word appears in the corpus.
You may be wondering: And why is that a problem?
After all, if a word appears more times in a corpus,
that word should be better known among native speakers
and therefore should be a more important word
for foreign students. It seems obvious.
But the reality is different.
In 2006, a study showed that there is another criterion
more important than frequency: Contextual diversity.
That is, in how many different contexts does a word appear.
When a word appears in a wide variety of contexts,
that word is more likely to be known
to native speakers of a language.
And if you think about it a bit, it makes a lot of sense.
If a word is used many, many times
but is only used in a specific context like school or the legal field,
then that word may not be well known to the general population.
And on the other hand,
maybe a word is not that frequent, maybe we don't repeat it a lot,
but if it appears in many different aspects of our lives,
then it is very likely that the general public does know that word.
The creators of the 2006 study
used an experiment called the "Lexical Decision Task."
In that experiment, a person sees a word
on a screen and has to decide as quickly as possible
whether that word is a real word in their native language or not.
The time that the person takes in this decision
is called the "lexical decision time".
The study found that it is the contextual diversity of a word
and not the frequency of a word
that explains the lexical decision time of a word.
In other words, it is the words with high contextual diversity,
not the most frequent words,
that are more familiar to native speakers of a language.
A 2013 study, done with children, confirmed these results.
That study found that it is the contextual diversity of a word,
and not its frequency, that has an effect
on children's ability to quickly recognize that word.
Another study from 2017 with Chinese speakers confirmed these findings.
They did the experiment with Chinese words.
They measured the lexical decision times of native speakers
and compared these results with various word lists,
including one based on newspapers, one based on novels,
two based on movie subtitles,
one based on web pages, and one based on Google data.
Which of these lists do you think was the one that best
predicted the lexical decision times of the experiment?
Yes, it was the list based on subtitles, ordered by contextual diversity.
That is, by the number of different shows and movies in which a word appears.
This list was the one that best predicted
how quickly study participants could identify words.
And this despite the fact that this list was based
on a corpus of only 33 million words,
while the list based on web pages
was created with a corpus of 358 billion words.
These results have been repeated again and again.
Thanks to these studies, two things have been confirmed.
First, that a word list based on movie and television subtitles
is a better reflection of the language native speakers know
than a list based on books, newspapers, and web pages.
Second, that the different number of contexts in which a word appears
is a better predictor of whether or not that word is known
than the frequency of that word.
Now, what do the results of these studies mean for you
who are learning Spanish?
If you want to optimize your study time,
you have to focus on the most common words
that native speakers find in movies and TV series.
Regardless of your opinion about Hispanic movies and shows,
the reality is that the most common words in that content
are the ones that native speakers know best.
And when I say most common words, I mean the words that appear
in the biggest number of different shows and movies.
That is, the words with the greatest contextual diversity.
So the best would be to find a list based
on a corpus of subtitles of Hispanic shows and movies,
not a list based on books, newspapers and web pages,
and not a list based on translations of foreign films.
And the best would be to find a list that ranks the words
by contextual diversity, not by frequency.
A list created in this way would be a gem for Spanish students, right?
Well, I have good news and bad news for you. Which one do you want to hear first?
Well, the bad, then.
The bad news is that I haven't been able to find such a list
for the Spanish language anywhere.
And the good news is that since I couldn't find it,
I decided to create it myself, and in a moment I'll give you the link to download it.
In 2020, at the time when we couldn't even go out to the corner,
I compiled thousands of subtitles from Spanish-language shows and movies,
both from America and Spain.
I only included movies and series that had the original audio in Spanish.
In total, I compiled a corpus of almost 29 million words of spoken Spanish.
After downloading the subtitles,
I converted them to plain text files and merged them based on contexts.
A television series is a single context,
since the names of the characters, situations and places  repeat.
Each film was considered as a separate context.
I then loaded all those files into a corpus analysis software
so I could find the most common words.
The main criterion for ordering the words in the list
was contextual diversity, which is the most important, as we have already seen,
and the second criterion was frequency.
So if two or more words have the same contextual diversity,
the frequency breaks the tie.
The words you are seeing on the screen are the 100
most common words of this corpus according to the criteria that I have just detailed.
So if you are just starting to learn Spanish, it
would be a good idea to familiarize yourself with these 100 words
to have a solid foundation of spoken Spanish.
Would you like to know how common or how rare
are some words that usually appear in Spanish courses?
Let's see.
Pimsleur's first lesson teaches you to ask
"Es usted norteamericano?"
But "norteamericano" is not a very common word in Spanish.
It's the 13,172nd word, according to the stats I got.
It is definitely not a priority for you to learn this word.
It would be more natural if you could ask "¿Usted es de Estados Unidos?"
Because Estados and Unidos are common words.
In fact, they are among the 2,000 most common.
Another Spanish course includes the words biblioteca,
arqueólogo and coordenadas in the first few lessons.
But as you can see, these words are not a priority for a beginner,
since none of them are among the 5,000 most common.
So you can ignore them without any problem.
And lesson three of another Spanish course
includes words like Guanajuato, ruinas, and olmecas.
Guanajuato and ruinas are not even among the
10,000 most common words in spoken Spanish,
and "olmecas" only appears once in the entire corpus.
Go figure!
A word that only appears once in a corpus of almost 29 million words,
that is, an extremely rare word that not even native speakers know,
is included in a reading for people who are just beginning to learn Spanish.
It doesn't make any sense.
Instead of talking about archaeologists, ruins, Guanajuato,
libraries, coordinates, and Olmecs,
those courses could focus on much more common words,
like airport, doctor, coffee, pizza,
and include well-known place names that a student
needs to learn to pronounce well, such as Mexico, Spain and the United States.
Thus, a student would know that every minute
invested in the course is a minute well spent.
On the other hand, no matter what Spanish course you're using,
On the other hand, no matter what Spanish course you're using,
what book you're reading or what series you're watching on Netflix,
it would be nice to be able to quickly check
if a word is common or not in spoken Spanish, right?
That way you would know if that word is worth learning or if you can just ignore it.
That is why I have decided to publish the list of the 5,000
most common words in spoken Spanish obtained from the corpus that I compiled in 2020.
You can download it for free and you will have the link in a moment.
This list has five columns.
The first column is the ranking of the word.
The second column is the contextual diversity of the word,
that is, the percentage of contexts in which it appears.
The third column is the frequency per million of this word.
The fourth column is the word itself.
As you can see, this is a list of word forms, not lemmas.
This means that words like soy, eres, fui and somos
are considered different words,
even though they are all under the headword "ser" in the dictionary.
For a student who has not yet mastered Spanish verb conjugation,
it is much better to look at each form of a verb separately.
If you need to identify which verb a form belongs to,
you can always consult the online dictionary of the Royal Spanish Academy.
The fifth column of the list is the cumulative coverage.
That is, how much coverage of spoken Spanish you could have
if you knew all the words up to this point.
Something that you will notice in this list is that many times
a more frequent word, but with less contextual diversity,
is below a less frequent word,
but with greater contextual diversity.
As I have already explained, this is because there are very frequent words
that only appear in certain contexts.
Remember that Spanish has many dialects and this corpus includes
European, Mexican, Argentinian, Chilean, Colombian, US Spanish and more.
There are words that are super frequent in one dialect, but not in others.
As a Spanish student, you should focus on the words
that are common to the greatest number of dialects.
Because the Spanish Input list
is sorted primarily by contextual diversity,
you'll know which words are most common around the world
and won't waste time learning words that are too regional.
For example, "chido" is a common word in Mexico,
"guay" is common in Spain,
"guita" is common in Argentina, and "parcero" is common in Colombia.
These words are frequent, but they are not common,
that is, they do not have a high contextual diversity,
if we consider the entire corpus of movies
and television series in Spanish.
Therefore, these words
are not among the 5,000 most common words on this list.
Not because I have taken them off the list,
but simply because this is what the statistics tell us.
This list is a completely unfiltered list.
In fact, it does include some regional words.
For example, vos, vosotros, güey, sos, vais, mirá, are on the list,
because they are words that are present in so many different contexts
that they reached the top 5,000.
This list also includes words that you might not want to learn, so...
be careful.
So if you are reading something, watching a TV show
or studying with your Spanish course and you see a new word,
you can open this list,
use the search function, and if the word is not there, you can ignore it.
You don't have to learn it,
unless that word is important to you for other reasons.
For example, if you are learning the lyrics of a song,
then you cannot ignore any words.
Now, would it be a good idea to take this list and try to learn
all the words one by one, from the first to the last?
Yes and no.
On the one hand I say yes, because knowing a lot of words
is the most important thing to learn a language.
Let me tell you a personal experience.
In 2015 I was determined to improve
my level of Chinese, which until then was very basic,
and one of the things I did was study like crazy
the words of a list extracted from movies and shows,
ordered by contextual diversity.
I put those words in an SRS, that is, a flashcard software
so that I don't forget them, and every day I spent between three and five hours
studying and reviewing Chinese characters and Chinese words.
The following year I spent a month in China
and although I had contacts there, I was able to explore on my own, without getting lost.
I was able to get to the Great Wall, alone, by public transport
using a map app in Chinese, since Google Maps does not work there.
A year later, in 2017,
I passed the HSK level 5 exam, which was the second highest level at the time.
The two things that helped me the most to pass my exam
were studying words from a list using an SRS so I wouldn't forget them,
and doing transcription exercises to train my ear,
as I explained in the Language Reactor video.
So, on the one hand, there is a use in learning words from a list,
if you already have a good foundation in the language,
if you can find example sentences,
if you already have your own mnemonic methods, if you are disciplined,
if you can dedicate to this project several hours a day
and if you consume a lot, a lot of content in that language.
On the other hand, this is very difficult for most language learners.
Also, the most common words in a language
are often very abstract and have many meanings.
Some words have no meaning on their own,
but only have meaning in context.
So even though polyglots recommend time and time again that you have to focus
on learning the most common words, in reality it's not that easy to do so.
This is the reason why I am creating the
Spanish Input course, a Spanish course from zero,
which will teach you the most common words in spoken Spanish, always in context.
The first level of the course focuses on the 100
most common words in Spanish that you saw a moment ago,
and also includes some other very common words.
This is a video course that will be available to members of this channel
and you will be able to study from any device that has YouTube.
It will also have Anki flashcards so you don't forget what you learned.
The course will not only teach you the most common words,
but also the most common n-grams or word combinations in the Spanish language.
So subscribe and turn on notifications so you don't miss
the launch of the first level of this course in the coming months.
By the way, you can download the word list from spanishinput.com/words.
Title: Learn Spanish faster: Focus on COMMON WORDS!
Description: Download a FREE PDF with the 5000 most common words in spoken Spanish from Gumroad:
https://spanishinput.gumroad.com/l/commonspanishwords
00:00 The Pareto principle
00:41 Frequency lists
02:09 Contextual diversity
04:00 A Chinese study
05:29 Optimize your study time
06:43 How I created my own word list
08:05 Uncommon words in Spanish courses
09:59 Contents of the Spanish Input word list
12:05 Don't waste too much time with regional slang
13:41 Should you learn from a word list?
15:47 Coming soon: Spanish Input Level 1

Don't waste your time learning uncommon words!
Assistant: