On the other hand I have a terrible memory (just ask my friends), and this time I want to learn more French in 1 month than all the Spanish I learned in 4 semesters at university.
Luckily you don’t need to know that many words to become fluent in a language. The below example is for Russian, but the numbers are similar for most languages.
the 75 most common words make up 40% of occurrences the 200 most common words make up 50% of occurrences the 524 most common words make up 60% of occurrences the 1257 most common words make up 70% of occurrences the 2925 most common words make up 80% of occurrences the 7444 most common words make up 90% of occurrences the 13374 most common words make up 95% of occurrences the 25508 most common words make up 99% of occurrences
As for the grammar, it’s not necessary to learn all of it. To make things easier I will start with learning just the present tense “I” and informal “you” conjugations. I will do this for the 3 types of regular verbs and the 24 or so most common irregular verbs. Once I’ve learned this, I should be able to use almost any verb in the present tense as long as I know the infinitive.
For the past and future tenses I will use the help of . These verbs – such as to be, to want, to have (done something), to go, to be able, etc – allow me to use other verbs without conjugating. The exception is “to have”, which will require me to learn one more conjugation for each of the regular verbs and a handful of irregulars. But, learning this will allow me to use almost any verb in the past tense.