Class 101 — the core two hundred, the words that do most of the work. Here is a fact about vocabulary that should change how you study. In any language, a very small number of words does an enormous proportion of the work. The pattern is named after George Zipf, who observed that word frequency falls off in a steep and remarkably regular curve: the most common word in a language appears roughly twice as often as the second, three times as often as the third, and so on. The practical consequence is startling. In most languages the hundred most frequent words account for roughly HALF of everything said or written. A thousand words gets you to around three quarters. Two thousand gets you into the high eighties. And then it slows down brutally. Going from ninety per cent coverage to ninety-five takes many thousands more words. So the first thousand words are worth more, per word, than every word that follows. And the first two hundred are worth more still. This class is that two hundred for Malayalam — the pronouns, the question words, the handful of verbs that carry most sentences, the connectors, the quantifiers, the time words, the politeness particles. Not a themed list of nouns you could point at anyway, but the structural words that hold a sentence together and that you cannot mime your way around. Learn these before you learn anything else. Learn them cold. Every later class is easier once these are automatic, because they are the words the other words are attached to. A reference class. Come back to it. Key Malayalam words for this topic: ഞാൻ (njaan) – I നിങ്ങൾ (ningal) – you (polite) എന്ത് (enthu) – what എവിടെ (evide) – where എപ്പോൾ (eppol) – when ഉണ്ട് (undu) – there is, have ഇല്ല (illa) – there is not, no വേണം (venam) – want, need പക്ഷേ (pakshe) – but ഇപ്പോൾ (ippol) – now Dr. Reshmi R Nair — SpeakMalayalam.