Learn Hebrew in only 10,000 easy steps!!

Hasn't it already become kitsch that 10,000 of something can get you mastery over something else, or something?  Well, I'm no linguist (and my friends will tell you how slow I am at learning languages), but it seems that quite less than that number of words can give you a significant chunk of a language.  How many less and how much of a chunk?  Read on.

I looked into this because I wanted to boost my Hebrew skills, but i didn't know which words were the most important to learn, and in what order.  I was memorizing words randomly and quite arbitrarily, picked up from books, conversations, and the like, and often would never hear the words in usage again.  This felt frustrating and futile.  It is often said (and makes perfect sense) that the most beneficial words to study are those that are used the most often in speech.  This led me to a quandary, because I couldn't find any ready resource with a list of the most common spoken words in modern Hebrew.

I was discussing this with a friend over lunch one day and we came upon an idea: text subtitles in movies are nearly 100% dialogue, so movie subtitle files are perfect candidates for looking at frequency of spoken word usage.  Luckily, my friend is an avid movie hoarder, and offered me a large supply of movie subtitle files on the spot.  By aggregating enough such files together, we figured it should be possible to parse out individual words and get a pretty good idea of how often different words are used in bone-fide, modern, spoken Hebrew.  So that's what I went ahead and did.  

Aside from being extremely useful for my own studies, I found the results of this little experiment to be rather fascinating.  To see why, take a look at the most common Hebrew words that came up on my list, in order from 1st to 36th:

hebrew word		meaning (google translate)	pronunciation	cumulative % of word usage covered
לא		Not / no	loh	2.8
את		You (f) / *	at / eht	5.4
אני		I	anee	7.9
זה		It / that	zeh	9.8
אתה		You (m)	atah	11.1
מה		What	mah	12.4
הוא		He	hoo	13.2
לי		To me	lee	14.1
על		About / On	al	14.9
לך		To you	lekhah / lakh (m/f)	15.5
כן		Yes	ken	16.1
של		Of	shel	16.7
יש		There is	yaysh	17.2
רוצה		Want	rotzeh / rotzah (m/f)	17.6
טוב		Good	tov	18.1
כל		All	kol	18.5
אבל		But	a-vahl	19.0
בסדר		OK	beseder	19.4
אם		If	eem	19.8
שלי		My	shel-ee	20.2
עם		With	eem	20.6
יודע		Knows	yo-dey-ah	21.0
היא		She	he	21.4
היה		Was	hayah	21.7
שלך		Your	shelkhah / shelakh (m/f)	22.1
הם		They	hehm	22.4
אותך		You	oh-takh	22.8
אז		Then / so	ahz	23.1
אותו		Same	oh-toh	23.4
רק		Only	rahk	23.7
אנחנו		We	ah-nakh-noo	23.9
יותר		More	yoh-tair	24.2
יכול		Might / Can	yah-kol	24.5
אותי		Me	oh-tee	24.7
למה		Why	lamah	25.0

(the * is for the 2nd meaning of the word 'eht,' which is as an article for direct definite objects.  For example, to say "I ate the banana" in Hebrew, you would say something like: "I ate eht the banana"..).

Note the last column in the table, which marks the cumulative percentage of total word usages (out of >600,000) that are accounted for by each individual word plus all the words preceding it on the list.  The amazing thing is that with only 36 words, we have covered 25% of total word usages in the language!

That's 36 words.  How much comprehension will we have if we dutifully study and learn, say, 10,000 words?  The answer is: around 80%.  If you learn words in the order they appear on my list, here's how much more Hebrew you will have gained from your effort in learning each individual new word (i.e., the marginal amount of Hebrew gained per word):

It looks pretty good up until around 100 words, at which point you're already drowning in an abyss of seemingly futile vocabulary.  Of course, this is somewhat misleading, since multiple forms of the same verb will come up separately on this list, and there's also much more to learn in a language than just vocabulary.  Despite usage frequencies, not all words are equal.  For example, if you're visiting Israel, you'll probably be most interested in knowing how to say 'bathroom' (sheh-roo-teem) and 'food' (okhel), among many others.  But even so, if you want to put in minimal effort to get maximal lingual return, you're probably best off with my list. 

If you want this list for the top 10,000 words in Hebrew (actually more), you can download it as an excel file by clicking HERE.

Enjoy!