Charles Ogden and the main 850 words to learn

One of the things that used to confuse me when trying to learn languages at school was the really small words with vague meanings. I remember, well actually I don't, something like "q'est que ce que ca", French obviously. Was that the phrase that meant "what is it that it is"? I mean, even if you translate that, do you really get to its meaning?

Now, I know this isn't a solution to that particular problem, but I got interested in why I didn't know obvious and common words like 'but' after maybe six months of learning the language. Yet I do remember learning, and can almost still remember the word in German, for a water desalination facility. And I got to thinking that there must be a list somewhere of words in order of their frequency of use. I've kept my eyes open ever since, and I left school almost thirty years ago, and I've never seen it.

So, I planned, and still do, to make one.

However, as I expected, someone did work on something similar, Charles Ogden. Back in 1930 he published a book in which he'd basically worked out that 90% of the concepts in an English dictionary could be communicated using just 850 words.

I haven't found a Spanish equivalent, but it seems to me that we could learn the Spanish word for each of the English words provided here, and that would give a basic vocabulary. If you learned five a day you'd be done in six months.

Clearly that doesn't come close to giving you everything you need to communicate in Spanish, but it is very interesting indeed. I wonder how many of the language courses use this. Certainly I feel the learn Spanish fast course I've been working through covers the basics really well .. that's its strength I think. But there are other courses that hint at this sort of approach more strongly, maybe this one.