Zipf’s Law: 135 words to 50% fluency

I read an interesting statistic in a study of frameworks recently. Due to a phenomenon called Zipf’s law, learning the top 135 words of a language allows a person to speak half of the words used by a native speaker.

Specifically, Zipf’s law states the most frequent word used in a language will occur twice as often as the second-most-frequent world, three times as often as the third-most-frequent word and so on. This almost universal trend of language allows for the above framework to happen.

I am going to try this out with a language this year.