If you’re already familiar with the 80/20 Rule (also called the Pareto Principle), you can probably skip this. Just know that it applies BIG TIME with Spanish.
The 80/20 Rule basically states that 80% of the results come from 20% of the inputs.
80% of the pea pods are produced by 20% of the plants.
80% of the revenue is created by 20% of the customers.
80% of the headache in support is created by 20% of the customers.
And 80% of spoken Spanish uses 20% of the language.
Well, actually, that last one isn’t true.
You need to know much less than 20% of the language to understand 80% of social conversations.
The most commonly used grammar and vocab (which is a rather small percentage of the total words, conjugations, and complex grammar in Spanish) allows you to understand often over 80% of what you’ll hear in Spanish.
What you learn (being effective) is more important then how you learn (being efficient). So, you can cut months off your learning curve by cutting a lot of material out of your curriculum.
What This Looks Like In Practice
When you dig into the “Stages of Learning” lesson, you’ll see exactly how this plays out.
But, for example, it means that:
- until the advanced stages, you don’t learn the majority of the different conjugations (of which there are a LOT, but most of which are almost never used). You just learn the most commonly used ones.
- you learn the most commonly used vocab first (based on frequency lists), and the “niche” vocab that you personally will use a lot (things you are interested in and thus talk about).
- you stack the most important/most commonly used stuff first, as it will give you the most bang for your buck.
The curriculum and stages of learning I present in the course have 80/20’d everything to the Nth degree, so you don’t have to do the work of figuring out what stuff is the most important.