What is the 80/20 rule for studying French?

The Pareto Principle, also known as the 80/20 rule, is the idea that 80% of outcomes come from 20% of causes. In other words, a tiny proportion of our efforts is responsible for the vast majority of our successes.

Named after the Italian sociologist Vilfredo Pareto, the Pareto Principle is a phenomenon that applies to all sorts of fields, from computing to business, where it lies behind the adage that ‘80% of sales come from 20% of clients’.

The Pareto Principle applies to language learning in a number of different ways. In essence, however, it suggests that 80% of what you put into practise in your conversations and in your reading and writing will come from just 20% of what you revise. In other words, if you spend five hours studying French, it’s likely that only one hour of that time will bear results that you can put to use.

This might sound disheartening. But once you’re familiar with the 80/20 rule, it can help you to identify the dead weight in your revision practices, and ultimately save yourself a lot of time.

There are over 135,000 words in the French dictionary. Luckily, many of these are technical or obscure words that most people will never have heard of, let alone use. In fact, the average native French speaker has a vocabulary of between 15,000-20,000 words, and studies suggest that you only need to know around 3,000 to be considered fluent in French.

Looking at this quandary through the eyes of Mr Pareto, we can see that if you set about to learn every word in the French dictionary, only 20% or so of what you memorise would be in any way useful (and in all likelihood, the percentage is much lower even than that).

So which words should you prioritise? It’s a sensible idea to learn the most common words first, although learning words by rote without any context can make it difficult to remember them. That’s why we suggest learning vocabulary clustered by category, and to focus on common categories first. The vocabulary section of our Complete French Course is ordered in precisely this way, with categories such as fruits, animals and modes of transport among the first you’ll learn.

Similarly, studying the conjugation patterns for 100 different verbs will not do you much good if they all belong to the same verb group, and you don't expose yourself to the different types of verb. If you focus on studying the conjugations for the most common verbs in French, you will find yourself able to tackle verbs from all three verb groups.

As with vocabulary, there are certain aspects of French grammar which we use more often than others.

Nowhere is this more the case than with tenses. Subscribers to the Complete French Course will notice how we introduce the present tense near the start of the course, with the passé composé, futur simple and imparfait following shortly. That’s because the present tense is by far the most commonly used tense in French, while the perfect is used more often than the future and imperfect - and so on. Simply by learning these few tenses, you’ll be able to conduct yourself in almost any situation and refer to the past, present and future with ease.

Of course, these are just three of the twenty tenses in the French language. But the more advanced tenses actually use aspects of the commoner tenses as building blocks. By learning 20% - or four - of the tenses in French, you'll be well equipped to conjugate, for instance, the plus-que-parfait or the futur antérieur.

The essence of the Pareto Principle is that we tend to spend five times as long studying as we need to. If you're struggling to identify which 20% of the language you really need to hone in on to advance your skills and develop proficiency, Alexa's structured, easy-to-follow Complete French Course has everything you need.