does anyone know the most common 500 words? Is it language neutral or does it vary from language to language? I definitely agree that learning the 500 or so most common words is a great start - even if some of the words are conjugated verbs and you don't have the background to understand the conjugation.
I am not a believer in rote word memorization, but rather putting each word in a sentence and using the sentence as the memorization route. Rote memorization stores the word in a different part of the brain than the language center, and using the sentence as the unit of flash card seems to override this.
I still see use for flash cards to re-trigger words in memory, but not for actually learning new words. I can't tell you how much I struggled to de-link certain words because I "memorized" them at the same time and so mixed up the meanings of the two words.
