Language through Literature

The words worth learning first

Frequency lists are the usual way to order vocabulary, and they are the wrong way. 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 — how many go from nearly readable to readable when you learn it.

These lists are ordered that way, measured on real sentences from fifteen Russian classics. Every entry carries its English meaning and how much of the shelf it opens.

Take an author with you — free Anki decks

One deck per writer, built from that writer's own texts and ordered by what is characteristic of him rather than by what is merely common. Ranking a book's vocabulary by raw frequency puts «to be» and «to say» at the front — true, useless, and words you have had for years. Weighting each word by how much of its life in this corpus is spent inside one author puts «шинель», «чиновник», «коллежский» there instead.

Function words and the first rungs of the language are left out: these are for someone past the coursework. Every card carries the stressed form, and many carry a real sentence from a free story with its translation. The Russian is set upright throughout — italic Cyrillic is very nearly a different alphabet, and no learner should be taught letters that are not on the page in front of them.

213–600 cards each, free, no account. Import into Anki on any platform.

Why these numbers matter, and what counts as "enough", is set out in how much Russian you need to read Chekhov. The corpus these lists are cut from is counted whole, book by book, at the ledger. The books themselves are here.