Vocabulary, Vocabulary, Vocabulary - a thought and a tool

When you're starting to learn a language, one of the trickiest things is building a core vocabulary. For one thing, while you can find word frequency lists, these tell you what to recognize for reading, but not what you actually need to know for basic communication. Speaking of basic communication, a long time ago, CK Ogden proposed Basic English, a subset of English with 850 words that should be sufficient for everyday communication, with the suggestion that for any particular specialty another 100 words of so should be sufficient for specialized communication. This has led to standards for, eg, aircraft manuals, since there needs to be a way to be sure - very sure! - that a non-native has a better than average chance of understanding perfectly for certain technical subjects.

If you're learning English, the Basic English vocabulary makes a darn good core to start with. But it's particular to English (and to a lesser extent to Germanic languages) in its assumptions about how ideas can be combined to form new meanings without an overly burdensome vocabulary. So if you're building a core vocabulary for a new language, the list can give you inspiration for figuring out the sorts of things you'd like to be able to say but haven't thought of looking up yet, but a one-to-one translation into a different language may prove more interesting than useful. Still, the ideas behind Basic English may, as I said, give some sense of how you want to put together your own studies to build a core vocabulary for the language you're learning.

The 850 items in Basic English are here. The Wikipedia article on Basic English and with lots of links to other efforts to simplify English is here.

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I stumbled across a great website the other day - and how could I not, it's at the top of the Google listings for online dictionaries - but I hadn't used it before and have been greatly impressed since I started: WordReference.com. It has the Oxford dictionaries for Spanish, French, Italian, German and Russian, but since you're searching online, not flipping through paper pages, you can get a ton of words, phrases and other entries to look up with a minimum of effort. What I like best of all is it's ability to make recommendations when you give it two or three word phrases for translation. If you're trying to translate idiomatic English and just can't remember which specialized verb+preposition combination does what in the Romance language you're working in, it's great (at least that's been my experience with French and Spanish so far).