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Comment by adrianN | Hacker News Reader

No, vocabulary is the most important part of learning a language if you want to use to it to actually communicate, or consume media in that language. And learning vocabulary takes a lot of time. You can join exactly zero conversations about everyday topics without knowing at least a few hundred, better a few thousand words. You can't even read stories for toddlers without knowing a few hundred words. Grammar won't help you understand sentences if all the meaning you extract is Noun (singular, female) Verb (present tense) Object (plural, neutral).

Learning grammar on the other hand is relatively easy, because there are far fewer rules to remember and you naturally develop a "feeling" for correct sentence structure after you've used the language enough, even passively.

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I did not read the article and agree that vocabulary is crucial.

However just trying to memorize vocabulary is not the best approach. The reason is that it's hard to memorize vocabulary without associating certain emotions and experiences with them.

Actually using the language daily, even if you only know 100 words is the most important part. You will learn and memorize new words much quicker that way.

Another good practical approach is to change your computer's OS language to the target language as soon as possible - you'll have to remember new words fast and those words will stick forever!

I don't think thats a big revelation or secret though.

If you have someone with the iron patience needed to converse with you using a heavily restricted vocabulary: awesome. For the casual home learner I recommend learning words in context. For example using something like https://digitalwords.net/anki/tatoeba-audio/index.eng.html, or a hand-mined deck with sentences from things you read or heard. I've made good progress by reading the news and children's books and adding words I didn't understand. Many languages have easy news for children or foreigners (e.g. News in Slow German: https://www.dw.com/en/langsam-gesprochene-nachrichten-learni...)

Great resources.

I can also recommend language exchange platforms as a great tool to make new friends and have regular conversations and practice speaking in foreign languages.

Hard disagree. Give me a person with great pronunciation, ability to differentiate minimal pairs and decent grammar with only 400 words in their repertoire and they will be better language users in no time than any person with a +5000 vocabulary but crappy grammar and pronunciation. Vocabulary is the easiest part to get by daily usage, for the others you have to do a conscious and constant effort.

I think it depends on how you learn vocabulary. If somebody learns a bunch of vocabulary on context, then he will naturally acquire grammar and pronunciation compared to somebody who learns off context.

I agree, vocabulary is the most important part. I emigrated to US when I was 13 and I understand English very little at that time. I remember how difficult it was to read the textbook in high school. It took 3 years to catch up. It is just impossible to understand without know what the words mean.

If you wish to undertand and to be understood, I agree that vocabulary is very important.

I assume from the class of errors you made (understand instead of understood; know instead of knowing) that your native language doesn’t have verb tense like Chinese. But it doesn’t matter if these small grammatical errors are made, because native speakers can still understand sentences with flawed grammar. However, if you are missing vocabulary you will have a hard time understanding what other people are saying, and when you speak you end up spending a lot of time trying to describe words you don’t know in terms of words you do know.

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