The fastest way to learn 10,000 words in a foreign language

[Kal_student_of_German]

I'm doing most common 100 verbs, then with example sentences after doing every tense/mood for each.

Concurrently, with that, I am doing A1-C2 grammar featuring those verbs.

[andreahoehmann]

I lived in Kazakhstan for three years and taught German. Since I was often listening to Russian, I was speaking it fluently after 12 months - without any learning! I was also often listening to Kazakh, but I had to study hard. This language is a tougher nut to crack because it is not related to European languages. None of the claims about learning European languages ​​are valid in the rest of the language world.

[Deutsch-mit-David]

I'm Russian (and German) native. Allow me one little tip please. I see lots of foreigners going for more vocabs etc., while still making 10 mistakes in each and every sentence. In Russian it's WAY more important to correctly use the simple and commonly used words with PROPER conjugations and declinations than just going for "more vocabs" 💪. To my (and other native's) ears it just sounds very silly and childish when non-natives speak _fluently_, but with horrible declinations and conjugations and with wrong prepositions etc. There's just no justifiable need to learn 10000 vocabs, 90% of which you'll never use - if you don't learn proper declinations and conjugations FIRST.

Russian has 6 cases.
German has 4 cases.
English has 3 cases.

So in reality - learning English as a Russian speaker means you need to "step down", and learn a more simplistic way to express things. Russian is very intricate, we change endings of each word left and right - if you just misuse one of them, the whole sentence sounds OFF. So, before trying to learn tons of vocabs, learners should put more focus on declinations etc.

Let me give you an example.

[Case] - [english] - [russian]

*Accusative* - I feed the dog. - Я кормлю собакУ.
*Instrumental* - I play with the dog. - Я играю с собакОЙ.
*Dative* - I go to the dog. - Я иду к собакЕ.
*Nominative* - The dog loves me. - СобакА любит меня.
*Genitive* - The dog's neck is white. - Шея собакИ белая.

In English it's dog-dog-dog-dog-dog. In Russian it's собакУ, собакОЙ, -Е, -А, -И etc.
So what literally ALL foreigners do is they don't alter the endings or mis-decline them, e.g.:

- Я кормлю собакА.
- Я играю с собакА.
- Я иду к собакА.
- СобакА любит меня.
- Шея собакА белая.

This sound so horrible to a Russian native's ear :)

And that's only SINGULAR.

So the point I'm making is this - going for more vocabs BEFORE learning all these will not do you any favour.
Don't waste your time learning new vocabs if you still can't use the declinations / conjugations correctly, it will just sound silly to natives, even if you know lots of vocabs.

[brebrown]

I’m learning 5, 000 but how do I even find a 10, 000 list for Spanish?

[-nfvt]

I recommend Immersive translate. It helps in learning and revision of foreign languages

[timothymurray]

where would i find a such a list for Spanish for example?

[ganpik]

With 5, 000 words (word families, actually) you can understand conversation. With 8, 000 - written text.
Even if I start memorizing 5, 000 Russian words in a relatively short time - which I highly doubt because I only have background with Western European languages, and because it's difficult to memorize words that don't have cognates or similarly sounding words in languages you already know, and because the sounds in Russian have a structure I'm not used to, with softened/palatalized consonants etc. - there's no way I would actually survive a conversation with a native speaker. They will speak fast, use numbers and cases that take so much time to learn in such a language (there's no meaning for the sentence "I went over the grammar and I know it now), and they will use non-frequent words. Every list of most common words relies on a specific corpus. Often, news, where the words claim, reported, president and Middle East are extremely important. To eat and a teacher are rarely needed in news. Another corpus could be subtitles of movies and series, but then kill, crime, sex, and swear words would be more common than in everyday life.
Yes, memorizing vocab is key, but in the first stages at least, and for languages that are farther away from English, it takes time.