>Does anyone know of similar general purpose word sets for other languages?
This would be great. All my attempts at learning a new language are thwarted by the seeming daunting nature of the task. 850 (or so) words? I could see myself doing that (and then continuing on to another few thousand words.
I believe Tim Ferriss did something like this for learning Japanese. He made the list himself, but published it for others. It's in "The 4 Hour Chef" and probably on his website.
I looked into this more (had an urge to learn Spanish today). Frequency dictionaries might be a good place to start. Here's the Spanish one I found [1]. It's a dictionary sorted by frequency of use (in a 20 million word text survey) instead of alphabetically. I imagine you can find a similar dictionary for other languages.
This would be great. All my attempts at learning a new language are thwarted by the seeming daunting nature of the task. 850 (or so) words? I could see myself doing that (and then continuing on to another few thousand words.
I believe Tim Ferriss did something like this for learning Japanese. He made the list himself, but published it for others. It's in "The 4 Hour Chef" and probably on his website.