Language Learning - The Pareto Principle 8020 Rule

People say, you know, if you just learn the 100 most common words, then you'll be able to deal with most language contexts. Unfortunately, when it comes to language learning, that's not the case. The other 30% even 20% of words that you need in order to understand any meaningful context is a very large number. In English, or at least in language learning, you end up spending more than 90% of your time chasing 10% of the words. So it's kind of an inverse Pareto principle. And I think it applies to all of us. We need a lot of words.