80/20 rule: learn any language with the Pareto principle
Hi, today I want to talk about the Pareto principle, or the 80 20 principle, and
how it applies to language learning.
We often hear it said that a small number of words, 500, 1000,
account for 70 80 percent of the vocabulary in any given language.
And therefore people suggest that if we focus in on these high frequency
words that we will be able to short circuit our language learning.
So that's what I'm going to get into.
First let's look at the Pareto principle, where it came from.
So Pareto, Vilfredo Pareto was a professor of economics at the University of Lausanne
in Switzerland back in the early 1900s.
And he discovered that in Italy, 80 percent of the land was owned
by 20 percent of the people.
He then noticed that the same was true in other countries.
And of course, inequality of wealth, inequality of incomes is a factor of
life today, and I'll show you these two maps, one for income distribution,
which is a little different from the maps of wealth distribution, but
in all countries, when it comes to wealth, 20 percent of the population
controls between 60 to 80 or more percent of the wealth in that country.
So that's.
Still is the case today.
However, the Pareto principle and this 80 20 rule has become more important
or more people pay attention to it today as a means to address problems
in production and quality control.
And that's because of a professor Juran immigrant from Romania, who in the
United States, States started using this 80 20 principle to address engineering
issues and quality control issues.
And he talked about the most useful 20%, but then also accepted the fact
that the remaining 80 percent were still important or at least helpful.
And that again, has application to language learning in terms of how we
deal with high frequency words and the very important low frequency words.
But insofar as the 80 20 principle, we've seen it applied
in so many different situations.
A small percentage of criminals.
Commit most of the crime, a small percentage of the population are
occupying most of the hospital beds.
In computing, it was said that if you can fix the 20 percent most serious
bugs in a piece of software, You'll have dealt with most of the problems.
Conversely, it said that 80 percent of the code can be
written in 20 percent of the time.
But the corollary to that is you spend 80 percent of your time trying
to finalize that 20 percent of the code that has to be written.
And so this again has application for language learning, where we will
end up spending most of our time dealing with low frequency language.
Words, even though the high frequency words account for the bulk of the
content of any particular context.
Let's move on then to how I use the 80 20 rule in my own language learning.
And I'm going to refer to my Turkish, but I think it applies to all languages.
So first of all, let's deal with the idea of vocabulary.
So the most frequent 500 words, 1000 words account for 70, 80%.
Of any given context.
What can we draw from that?
What I draw from that is I needn't make any special effort to focus in
on those high frequency words, because they're going to show up anyway.
I know that down the road, I'm going to have to focus and spend a lot of time on
learning the Less frequent words, the high frequency words I needn't worry about,
they're going to show up and I'm going to gradually get used to them anyway.
To some extent, the same is true with structures in the language.
You could Google and look at, the application of Pareto principle or
80 20 rule to language learning.
You can Google the most frequent errors or difficulties that people have in Spanish,
English, Chinese And you can say, okay, I'm going to look at examples of other
people who focus in on the main problems that they experience with the language.
But here again, my experience is basically in the Slavic languages.
I know it's cases it's aspects of verbs of motion that caused
me difficulty in Turkish.
It's the verbs.
There's so many different forms of the verbs.
I think verbs are usually there as a major area of difficulty,
but prepositions, case endings.
Pronouns, there's any number of different things that can cause the bulk of the
problems that we encounter in grammar.
But again, my experience has been that I will eventually come across
those in all kinds of different contexts and gradually get used to
them so that focusing in on those specifically may be of limited benefit.
However, 20 rule in my language learning is to tell myself, how
am I going to spend my time?
I have spoken before of what I would call big picture learning.
Input learning, consuming a lot of the language, top down learning.
And then there is this bits and pieces focusing in on, it might be
the case endings in Slavic languages.
It might be verb endings in Romance languages or pronouns in
Italian or whatever it might be.
It's not that I don't do that.
I do some of that.
I do look up grammar explanations online or in a book.
I have my lessons with my tutor.
So I do spend time on the nuts and bolts.
But 80 percent of my time is spent absorbing the
language and acquiring words.
And the reason for that is that if I have a lot of words, then I can
access more interesting content.
I can actually understand some of the examples of structures in the language.
So that as I go forward in the language, what's holding me back Is lack of
words and the words, which includes a lot of low frequency words, they are
acquired through the 80 percent big picture, top down input based learning.
So it's not that I don't do any sort of bits and pieces learning.
I do some, but I try to limit the amount of time.
I spend on that, for example, with my Turkish learning.
So I started back in 2018.
You can see from this graph that in an initial period, I
spent a lot of time listening.
You can see my statistics from my playlist that I've listened to the mini stories.
In fact, initially I spent most of my time with the mini stories to get a sense of
the language, to get some words in me.
to get a toehold in the language, listening 30, 40 times to the same
mini story, not at the same time, but eventually, because I go back
to them and I go back to them.
And so that was in a way, big picture learning because
the language was new to me.
So I was just bombarding my brain with the language, occasionally
looking at explanations.
Of course, I bought grammar books, but that was five years ago.
Now, when I started up again in preparation for my trip to Turkey,
I'm saying, I've got to dramatically increase my vocabulary because I want
to be dealing with things of interest.
And so that my major emphasis for the last little while has
been on increasing my vocabulary.
And yet, when I talked to my tutor, I realized how much difficulty I have
in some of the most basic patterns in the language, how much difficulty
I have in producing, verb forms.
As I'm now a month away from going to Turkey, I've decided to spend a little
more time on the bits and pieces.
And I do that by going back into my mini stories, where there's a lot of
focus on verbs, high frequency verbs.
And so when I go to them now again, I'm discovering things, noticing
things that I didn't notice before.
Because after a while, if we're listening to the same thing over and over
again, We are noticing less and less.
So after an absence, then I go back.
Another thing to remember is, even if back five years ago, I thought I had learned
something, or thought I could remember a verb, or a word, or a verb form,
chances are, I can't remember it now.
So we have to be aware of the fact that whatever we do, It's a little bit elusive.
We won't necessarily be able to grab it and hold onto it.
And so therefore I think it's very important.
And I always make sure that I mix the big picture with the bits and pieces.
So even now, when I say I'm going to spend more time with my mini stories,
it's still a small amount of time because by the time I'm on my third mini story,
my brain isn't paying much attention.
So when I switch back to my history of the Turks or the novel Havanen itch.
Cause even though I don't understand it all that well, I'm more motivated.
I'm more, I'm hanging onto the words and then I can go through them in LingQ.
Another thing that's useful, I find, again, varying that big picture
with the bits and pieces is to do, the sentence review where I
have to reassemble the sentence.
That's particularly good with the mini stories because the
mini stories sentences are short.
I have heard them many times and then I can start to put those sentences together.
It's a form of being focused in on how the language works.
How the verbs work, how the genitive works, all these things that I have.
So I try to maintain a good balance between big picture learning
and bits and pieces learning.
And perhaps beyond the idea that I want to maintain a balance of 80 whatever
it might be, between big picture and bits and pieces learning, at the same
time, I asked myself, am I enjoying it?
When we start out in a language, we have a high tolerance for
relatively repetitive, uninteresting content like the mini stories.
There's a sense of achievement as we understand a little bit
more and a little bit more.
We often think we've learned something that we can maybe now use and we discover
we can't use it because it's somehow back there in the brain somewhere, you
can't bring it out when you need it.
But am I enjoying it?
And when I stop enjoying it, then I move on to more difficult content.
And there again, going through in sentence mode, but.
Learning about the Turks, about Central Asia, about the Balkans,
about Anatolia, about whatever it might be, or as in the case of this
Three Daughters of Eve, learning about some of the, social and almost
psychological issues of modern day Turks.
So that's interesting.
So my guide is, am I enjoying what I'm doing?
And if I'm enjoying what I'm doing, then I keep doing it.
When I now find it Too frustrating to continue in content that has
so many unknown words and that I would be happier or feel more
comfortable being in easier content, then I move back to easier content.
But by and large, I think I try to maintain at least 80 percent of my time
with big picture top down learning, but not neglect the 20%, 10, 15
percent of time that I need to spend on focusing in on the bits and pieces.
So I hope that was helpful.
I've left some links here on the subject to a Wikipedia article on the subject,
and I'm curious how all of you use the 80 20 principle in your language learning.
Bye for now.