Dutch vocabulary

Why these words in particular

Every vocabulary site claims to have the most important words. Hardly any says how it measures that. Here it is, because without a yardstick “important” is just another way of saying “what occurred to us”.

The yardstick of this list is not frequency in texts but reach in everyday life: how many situations can you get through if you know this word and not the other? That is why toch is at A2 and echter only at B1 — you hear toch in every other conversation, and echter can almost always be replaced by maar.

In practice that means four rules, applied to every single word:

• At the first levels it occurs in a situation everyone has. Shopping, being ill, asking the way, arranging to meet, filling in a form. Specialist vocabulary is not here, however common it is in its field.
• What looks and means the same costs little. de hand, het water and de appel still stand at their level — but the time goes to the words that are different or lead you astray.
• It has an example sentence that explains something. A word without a sentence is a line in a dictionary. Every word here stands in a sentence where it really occurs — with its article, its form and its place in the sentence.
• It appears exactly once. A word turning up in two lists sounds harmless and is not: go through both and you think you are further on than you are. The build checks this.

The selection is therefore a decision of this project, not a measurement. It is reasoned, open to inspection and open to challenge — which is more than a number without a source could offer.

The levels

Every word carries the level from which you need it. A first-level word is not easier to pronounce than one further up — it just comes up sooner. So the question is not how hard a word is, but from when you cannot get by without it: het ziekenhuis is long and at the first level, because everyone needs a hospital one day; de boete is short and only at B1, because you can manage without it for a long time.

The right-hand column is the yardstick. It is there so that the grading can be checked rather than believed — and because a level without its question would only be a label.