I read years ago that:
1. TV vocabulary is 2,000 words
2. High school vocabulary is 10,000 words
3. College vocabulary is 30,000 words
4. English language has 1,000,000 words
This is good news - you can be proficient in a foreign language by learning only 2,000 words!
Being proficient in a language is really less about memorizing words than it is pronunciation and grammar. Memorization itself is pretty easy.
No, memorize many noun most important. Grammar less Important. Can do food, can do travel, can do tax. Because, noun most important.
Working with ESL people makes it clear that grammar isn't so important. One of my friends would say, instead of "go shopping", would say "make some shoppings". Instead of "it's time to go", he'd say "time for go". All words that started with 's' were pronounced 'ehs', as in "gas ehstation".
The other people at work soon picked those lines up, and we used them regularly amongst ourselves. I still use them decades later!
> This is good news - you can be proficient in a foreign language by learning only 2,000 words!
Depends what you mean by "proficient". I currently know ~6k Spanish words and would hesitate to self-apply that word. Others might, but damn languages are hard.
Please someone tell me where to get those 1 million words in decreasing order of difficulty or ascending order of usage along with their meanings and insinuations
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Wiktionary:Frequency_lists
Also worth going through the references of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zipf%27s_law
Sounds like a job for LLMs.
Only if you mean llms finding already compiled lists on the internet. Since they would be too inefficient for actually compiling a list themselves.