Verbavia
@verbavia.bsky.social
Eight free language courses that follow a real syllabus and teach the words you'll actually meet first. Grammar, reading, listening, speaking. Including Shanghainese, which almost nobody else teaches.
verbavia.com
verbavia.com
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Verbavia — Learn a language, actually get fluent
The words people actually use, in the order they use them. A complete course from your first word to C2: grammar taught properly, stories and listening built from words you already know.
verbavia.com
Most language apps pick vocabulary by theme. You learn twenty animals before you learn "although".
Verbavia orders vocabulary by how often words actually occur, inside a real A1 to C2 syllabus with grammar, reading and listening.
verbavia.com #langsky
Verbavia orders vocabulary by how often words actually occur, inside a real A1 to C2 syllabus with grammar, reading and listening.
verbavia.com #langsky
Shanghainese doesn't give each syllable its own tone the way Mandarin does. One contour runs across a whole word or phrase — the first syllable sets it, the rest follow.
So drilling a tone per character, the right instinct for Mandarin, actively gets in the way here. #Shanghainese #langsky
So drilling a tone per character, the right instinct for Mandarin, actively gets in the way here. #Shanghainese #langsky
September 16, 2026 at 11:27 PM
Shanghainese doesn't give each syllable its own tone the way Mandarin does. One contour runs across a whole word or phrase — the first syllable sets it, the rest follow.
So drilling a tone per character, the right instinct for Mandarin, actively gets in the way here. #Shanghainese #langsky
So drilling a tone per character, the right instinct for Mandarin, actively gets in the way here. #Shanghainese #langsky
FSI hour estimates, for planning realistically:
~600–750 — Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese, Dutch, Norwegian
~900 — German
~1,100 — Russian, Greek, Hindi, Polish
~2,200 — Mandarin, Japanese, Arabic, Korean
That's full-time study with a teacher. A floor, not a forecast. #langsky
~600–750 — Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese, Dutch, Norwegian
~900 — German
~1,100 — Russian, Greek, Hindi, Polish
~2,200 — Mandarin, Japanese, Arabic, Korean
That's full-time study with a teacher. A floor, not a forecast. #langsky
September 16, 2026 at 11:26 PM
FSI hour estimates, for planning realistically:
~600–750 — Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese, Dutch, Norwegian
~900 — German
~1,100 — Russian, Greek, Hindi, Polish
~2,200 — Mandarin, Japanese, Arabic, Korean
That's full-time study with a teacher. A floor, not a forecast. #langsky
~600–750 — Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese, Dutch, Norwegian
~900 — German
~1,100 — Russian, Greek, Hindi, Polish
~2,200 — Mandarin, Japanese, Arabic, Korean
That's full-time study with a teacher. A floor, not a forecast. #langsky
The cruellest part of the vocabulary curve is the top.
1,000 word families ≈ 80% of ordinary text
3,000 ≈ 90%
5,000 ≈ 95%
8,000–9,000 ≈ 98%, where you read unaided
The last three points cost more words than the first eighty. Hence years at "I get the gist". #langsky
1,000 word families ≈ 80% of ordinary text
3,000 ≈ 90%
5,000 ≈ 95%
8,000–9,000 ≈ 98%, where you read unaided
The last three points cost more words than the first eighty. Hence years at "I get the gist". #langsky
September 16, 2026 at 11:26 PM
The cruellest part of the vocabulary curve is the top.
1,000 word families ≈ 80% of ordinary text
3,000 ≈ 90%
5,000 ≈ 95%
8,000–9,000 ≈ 98%, where you read unaided
The last three points cost more words than the first eighty. Hence years at "I get the gist". #langsky
1,000 word families ≈ 80% of ordinary text
3,000 ≈ 90%
5,000 ≈ 95%
8,000–9,000 ≈ 98%, where you read unaided
The last three points cost more words than the first eighty. Hence years at "I get the gist". #langsky
Why vocabulary-size claims never agree: people count different things.
"Run, runs, ran, running, runner" is one word family. Count it as five and every figure inflates three- or fourfold.
When you see a number, ask whether it's families, lemmas or forms. Most articles don't say. #langsky
"Run, runs, ran, running, runner" is one word family. Count it as five and every figure inflates three- or fourfold.
When you see a number, ask whether it's families, lemmas or forms. Most articles don't say. #langsky
September 16, 2026 at 11:24 PM
Why vocabulary-size claims never agree: people count different things.
"Run, runs, ran, running, runner" is one word family. Count it as five and every figure inflates three- or fourfold.
When you see a number, ask whether it's families, lemmas or forms. Most articles don't say. #langsky
"Run, runs, ran, running, runner" is one word family. Count it as five and every figure inflates three- or fourfold.
When you see a number, ask whether it's families, lemmas or forms. Most articles don't say. #langsky
Italian makes you choose which auxiliary a verb takes, and then agree the participle:
Ho mangiato — I ate
Sono andato / sono andata — I went (m/f)
Spanish uses haber for everything and never moves the participle. It's the single biggest reason Italian feels harder in month one. #Italian #langsky
Ho mangiato — I ate
Sono andato / sono andata — I went (m/f)
Spanish uses haber for everything and never moves the participle. It's the single biggest reason Italian feels harder in month one. #Italian #langsky
September 14, 2026 at 11:26 PM
Esperanto gets dismissed as a hobby, but it has a literature taken seriously. William Auld was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature more than once, for work written in it. Esperanto PEN joined International PEN in 1993 — the body that recognises national literatures. #Esperanto #langsky
September 14, 2026 at 11:25 PM
Esperanto gets dismissed as a hobby, but it has a literature taken seriously. William Auld was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature more than once, for work written in it. Esperanto PEN joined International PEN in 1993 — the body that recognises national literatures. #Esperanto #langsky
The vocabulary coverage curve, which more courses should be built around:
1,000 word families ≈ 80% of running text
3,000 ≈ 90%
5,000 ≈ 95%
8,000–9,000 ≈ 98%, the point you read unaided
The first thousand does roughly as much work as the next seven combined. Order matters more than total. #langsky
1,000 word families ≈ 80% of running text
3,000 ≈ 90%
5,000 ≈ 95%
8,000–9,000 ≈ 98%, the point you read unaided
The first thousand does roughly as much work as the next seven combined. Order matters more than total. #langsky
September 14, 2026 at 11:23 PM
The vocabulary coverage curve, which more courses should be built around:
1,000 word families ≈ 80% of running text
3,000 ≈ 90%
5,000 ≈ 95%
8,000–9,000 ≈ 98%, the point you read unaided
The first thousand does roughly as much work as the next seven combined. Order matters more than total. #langsky
1,000 word families ≈ 80% of running text
3,000 ≈ 90%
5,000 ≈ 95%
8,000–9,000 ≈ 98%, the point you read unaided
The first thousand does roughly as much work as the next seven combined. Order matters more than total. #langsky
A thing that surprises people learning Shanghainese: the pronouns aren't Mandarin pronouns with a different accent. They're different words.
侬 nong — you
阿拉 ala — we
伊 yi — he/she
You can't guess any of them from 你 我们 他. And they're in your first sentence. #Shanghainese #langsky
侬 nong — you
阿拉 ala — we
伊 yi — he/she
You can't guess any of them from 你 我们 他. And they're in your first sentence. #Shanghainese #langsky
September 14, 2026 at 11:22 PM
A thing that surprises people learning Shanghainese: the pronouns aren't Mandarin pronouns with a different accent. They're different words.
侬 nong — you
阿拉 ala — we
伊 yi — he/she
You can't guess any of them from 你 我们 他. And they're in your first sentence. #Shanghainese #langsky
侬 nong — you
阿拉 ala — we
伊 yi — he/she
You can't guess any of them from 你 我们 他. And they're in your first sentence. #Shanghainese #langsky
Tullio De Mauro's vocabolario di base maps Italian by how much work each word does: about 2,000 fundamental, 2,750 high-use, 2,300 high-availability. Around 7,000 total, covering the overwhelming majority of ordinary Italian.
Built in the 1980s. Still the best map of the language. #Italian #langsky
Built in the 1980s. Still the best map of the language. #Italian #langsky
September 13, 2026 at 10:16 PM
Cantonese and Shanghainese both have tens of millions of speakers. The resource gap is striking.
Cantonese: Jyutping, its own written characters (嘅 咗 佢 喺 冇), dictionaries, subtitled film.
Shanghainese: two competing romanisations, no settled written form, almost no graded reading. #langsky
Cantonese: Jyutping, its own written characters (嘅 咗 佢 喺 冇), dictionaries, subtitled film.
Shanghainese: two competing romanisations, no settled written form, almost no graded reading. #langsky
September 13, 2026 at 10:15 PM
Cantonese and Shanghainese both have tens of millions of speakers. The resource gap is striking.
Cantonese: Jyutping, its own written characters (嘅 咗 佢 喺 冇), dictionaries, subtitled film.
Shanghainese: two competing romanisations, no settled written form, almost no graded reading. #langsky
Cantonese: Jyutping, its own written characters (嘅 咗 佢 喺 冇), dictionaries, subtitled film.
Shanghainese: two competing romanisations, no settled written form, almost no graded reading. #langsky
Spanish learners are taught ser = permanent, estar = temporary. Then they meet "está muerto." Death is not temporary.
The real split is closer to essence vs. state. Estar marks a condition you arrived at. Being dead is a state you ended up in — so, estar. #Spanish #langsky
The real split is closer to essence vs. state. Estar marks a condition you arrived at. Being dead is a state you ended up in — so, estar. #Spanish #langsky
September 13, 2026 at 10:14 PM
The single letter beginners drop in Esperanto is the one doing the most work. The accusative -n marks the object, so word order stops carrying that job. La knabo vidas la hundon and La hundon vidas la knabo mean the same thing. Drop the -n and the sentence collapses. #langsky
September 12, 2026 at 11:04 PM
The single letter beginners drop in Esperanto is the one doing the most work. The accusative -n marks the object, so word order stops carrying that job. La knabo vidas la hundon and La hundon vidas la knabo mean the same thing. Drop the -n and the sentence collapses. #langsky
Shanghainese keeps a three-way contrast in its initials: voiceless, aspirated, and genuinely voiced. Mandarin only has the first two. It's why Shanghainese sounds softer to Mandarin ears, and why Wu is useful for reconstructing older stages of Chinese. #langsky
September 12, 2026 at 11:04 PM
Shanghainese keeps a three-way contrast in its initials: voiceless, aspirated, and genuinely voiced. Mandarin only has the first two. It's why Shanghainese sounds softer to Mandarin ears, and why Wu is useful for reconstructing older stages of Chinese. #langsky
The Italian passato remoto is described as literary, and in Milan that's true. In Sicily and much of the south it is ordinary spoken past tense, used for things that happened this morning. Same language, and the tense is alive in one half and archaic in the other. #langsky
September 12, 2026 at 11:03 PM
The Italian passato remoto is described as literary, and in Milan that's true. In Sicily and much of the south it is ordinary spoken past tense, used for things that happened this morning. Same language, and the tense is alive in one half and archaic in the other. #langsky
Mandarin makes you sort every countable noun into a category before you can count it. 一条鱼 for the fish, 一张纸 for the paper, 一只猫 for the cat. Long and thin, flat, animal. The logic is visible afterwards and almost never predictable beforehand. #langsky
September 12, 2026 at 11:03 PM
Mandarin makes you sort every countable noun into a category before you can count it. 一条鱼 for the fish, 一张纸 for the paper, 一只猫 for the cat. Long and thin, flat, animal. The logic is visible afterwards and almost never predictable beforehand. #langsky
German makes you hold the sentence in memory. The finite verb goes second, then everything piles up in the middle, and the part that tells you what actually happened arrives at the very end. Ich habe das Buch, das mir mein Bruder geschenkt hat, gelesen. #langsky
September 12, 2026 at 11:02 PM
German makes you hold the sentence in memory. The finite verb goes second, then everything piles up in the middle, and the part that tells you what actually happened arrives at the very end. Ich habe das Buch, das mir mein Bruder geschenkt hat, gelesen. #langsky
France says soixante-dix, quatre-vingts, quatre-vingt-dix. Belgium and Switzerland say septante, nonante, and Switzerland adds huitante. The base-twenty counting isn't older French being preserved in Paris. It's an oddity Paris kept and the others dropped. #langsky
September 12, 2026 at 11:02 PM
France says soixante-dix, quatre-vingts, quatre-vingt-dix. Belgium and Switzerland say septante, nonante, and Switzerland adds huitante. The base-twenty counting isn't older French being preserved in Paris. It's an oddity Paris kept and the others dropped. #langsky
Spanish ser and estar are not permanent versus temporary. That rule breaks immediately: está muerto is about as permanent as it gets. Closer: ser classifies what something is, estar reports the state or place it's currently in. #langsky
September 12, 2026 at 11:01 PM
Spanish ser and estar are not permanent versus temporary. That rule breaks immediately: está muerto is about as permanent as it gets. Closer: ser classifies what something is, estar reports the state or place it's currently in. #langsky
Portuguese has something no other Romance language kept: an infinitive that conjugates. para eu fazer, para tu fazeres, para nós fazermos. An infinitive with a subject built into it. Spanish, French and Italian all lost it. #langsky
September 12, 2026 at 11:01 PM
Portuguese has something no other Romance language kept: an infinitive that conjugates. para eu fazer, para tu fazeres, para nós fazermos. An infinitive with a subject built into it. Spanish, French and Italian all lost it. #langsky
的 is the most common character in written Chinese by a wide margin — somewhere around one in every twenty-five you'll meet on a page. Getting comfortable with everything it does buys you more reading ability than the next twenty characters combined. #langsky
September 12, 2026 at 12:32 AM
的 is the most common character in written Chinese by a wide margin — somewhere around one in every twenty-five you'll meet on a page. Getting comfortable with everything it does buys you more reading ability than the next twenty characters combined. #langsky
What makes French hard to listen to isn't the grammar, it's liaison. les amis runs together. les héros doesn't. Nothing in the spelling tells you which, so h aspiré is a list of a few hundred words you simply have to know. #langsky
September 12, 2026 at 12:32 AM
What makes French hard to listen to isn't the grammar, it's liaison. les amis runs together. les héros doesn't. Nothing in the spelling tells you which, so h aspiré is a list of a few hundred words you simply have to know. #langsky
The clitics are what break learners of Italian, not the subjunctive. ci and ne attach to everything and shift meaning as they go: ci sono, ce n'è, andarci, farcela, non ne posso più. Native speakers never think about them. Nobody teaches them properly either. #langsky
September 12, 2026 at 12:23 AM
The clitics are what break learners of Italian, not the subjunctive. ci and ne attach to everything and shift meaning as they go: ci sono, ce n'è, andarci, farcela, non ne posso più. Native speakers never think about them. Nobody teaches them properly either. #langsky
Spanish and Portuguese intelligibility runs mostly one way. Portuguese speakers follow Spanish fairly well; Spanish speakers struggle with Portuguese. The grammar is close enough. The gap is phonology: nasal vowels and heavy vowel reduction on the Portuguese side. #langsky
September 12, 2026 at 12:22 AM
Spanish and Portuguese intelligibility runs mostly one way. Portuguese speakers follow Spanish fairly well; Spanish speakers struggle with Portuguese. The grammar is close enough. The gap is phonology: nasal vowels and heavy vowel reduction on the Portuguese side. #langsky