List of basic Finnish vocabulary words!?!?

[Rosamunda]

Word lists are pretty useless when it comes to learning a language, unless your goal is to emulate an on-line translation tool. Even modern EFL/ESL textbooks don't go in for word lists much these days. The buzz word is collocation: chunks of language. Memorise some useful, functional phrases that you can use and then learn how to modulate them. Learn which words go together and how they go together. Read Michael Lewis "The Lexical Approach".

[yamoussoukro]

I see your(or Lewis's) point. I do want to read that book. But still, don't kids first just pick bunch of words and then learn how to connect them? Don't brains figure out the collocation, by hearing the words they regonize in the speech? We all know it's important to practise where and with what words you can use the word, but it doesn't mean that learning that word itself would be useless, without any associations. With verbs, on the other hand it would be hard to practise all the conjugations, without learning phrases where you hear them conjugated. It's seems to be that we remember words better, the more we have other words, situation etc. to connect them with, or to remind us about them. Those 'reminders', we get by using the words and hearing them used by native speakers, so they come by experience. I just learned an English word collocation. And for me it was important to look it up in the dictionary, because it helps me a lot to get the idea in my native language. I can also try to memorize the phrase: "The buzz word in modern linguistics is collocation." Both ways can be useful, but if I did not know the word itself, I could hear it hundred times in speech, and still be wondering what on earth is co-location.. But that just me.