All beginnings are difficult. And this is also true for learning languages. Especially when getting started with a language, where there aren't many resources, it is challenging to find one's way.

Sure, there are many resources when you want to learn German or French. But what about languages with fewer speakers, such as Slovak or Finnish? Or if your base language is not English?

When we started to work on Wokabulary, an app that lets you practice and collect your individual foreign language words, we did not expect our users to learn such a variety of languages! Many of our users are learning small or even endangered languages. This motivated us to start creating cross-language basic word lists.

The word lists cover the most basic and useful words and essential phrases. Words that help you find your way, understand the menu in the restaurant, to run errands and to describe your surroundings. Altogether, over 200 words for each language!

The topics are:

• Basic words
• Essential sentences
• Directions
• Weather, city and nature
• Food
• Transport
• Technology
• Time
• Health
• Personal information
• Essential words
• Essential adjectives
• Colors
• Numbers

The folder wordlists contains folders for each language combination currently supported, for example German <> Korean named as de-ko according to the language code standard. Just pick the combination you need and select the topics you are interested in, or download all word lists for a language.

You are free to use the word lists to learn them with Wokabulary or any other vocabulary learning or quiz app.

If you just want to have an overview of words in a language to get a feeling for it or before going on vacation, you might want to use the word lists on our website in a more reader-friendly way.

If you would like to help us expand the word lists and make your language accessible from multiple languages and vice versa, please reach out to [email protected]!

This work is licensed under a Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.