The French words worth learning first
A word that appears constantly but always beside three words you do not know buys you nothing you can read. What matters is how many complete sentences a word finishes. These lists are ordered that way, measured on the 679 sentences of eight tales by Perrault and Daudet that are more than a name or a cry, and every entry carries its English meaning and the forms it is printed in.
Two numbers, and the gap between them
100 words are 58% of every word printed on this shelf — and they leave 12% of its sentences readable. You can know most of the words on a page and still not read a line of it, because the ones you are missing are spread one to a sentence. The second number is the one that says whether you can read.
What French does to a word count
French glues its smallest words to the next one: «l’enfant», «d’or», «qu’il». These lists count the glued word separately and file it under its full form, so «l’» is counted under «le» with «la» and «les», and the forms column prints it with its apostrophe. And a verb with a pronoun hung on it — «dit-il», «est-ce» — is the verb, not a new word: it is counted under dire and être.
Where the lists stop, and why
The shelf's ladder runs to 1,539 rungs across 1,610 dictionary words. These lists publish the first 500, where the argument is already made: 500 words carry 85% of every running word on the shelf. What lies past them is the long tail — words met once or twice that no learner plans around and that arrive on their own while you read. In the room every one of them is glossed where it stands. Proper names such as «Barbe-Bleue» and «Cucugnan» are left out of the lists, because nobody learns a name from a column.
Words in sentences stay; words in a column do not
A word met in a list is a word you will meet once. A word met in «Il était une fois une petite fille de village, la plus éveillée qu’on eût su voir : sa mère en était folle, et sa mère-grand plus folle encore.» arrives with the sentence attached, and the sentence is what you keep. «Le petit Chaperon rouge» is free and entire, with no account, if you would rather start there.
Where to start reading in French · the shelf, counted · the same lists for Spanish · and for Russian