List of 1000 most common words across all languages - Linguistics Stack Exchange
Learning 1000 Most Common Words first
1000 Most Common/Used German Word List
What’s the best 1000 words list?
There is no best list. Grab one and start learning, don't get stuck trying to optimize everything. If you want to learn Japanese you have to learn far more than 1000 words anyway. It doesn't really matter much with which one you start.
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There is no such list, but you could build one. You can find (multiple) frequency lists for many languages, and you could come up with a way to decide which frequency list to use (there are very many for English). I suppose you are thinking you might construct a list with entries like {day, Tag, jour, день, gün, siku, päivi, 日} where all of the words seem to mean the same thing and the words all end up on the top-1000 list in their respective languages (I don't know if they do, this is just a hypothetical example).
The problem is that the most frequent words in English (and many other languages) are things like "a, the, all, but, she", and these are not going to have correspondents in all languages. Plus, the various forms of the verb "be" or "do" and "don't" are each treated as separate words in some frequency lists. It would be more productive to define a subset of concrete nouns and "verbs" like "cat, dog, big, small, eat, walk" and get the N most frequent equivalents across languages. You must abandon the search for data in every language, but you could go for "as many as you can get". As a precursor to this exercise, you might try to come up with the N most frequent concrete nouns and verbs of English, filtering out proper names (unless you really want proper names to be included). Then do the same thing for Khmer. Then you have to decide whether "good" and ល្អ are "the same" in meaning (the Khmer word also translates "attractive").
I think you are looking for the "Swadesh list", a list of the 100 most common concepts across languages.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swadesh_list
I have this one theory that the best way to start learning a language is to memorize the 1000 most common words first, since it makes up close to 85-90% of the language. Has anyone tried something similar to this, and how effective is it compared to other strategies?