Language Contouring: The Most Efficient Word Order for Learning Any Language

This episode introduces "language contouring," a prioritization technique for choosing which words to learn first, built to solve three specific problems with traditional language learning order.

Problem 1: No Way to Jump Back In (00:00:40 – 00:01:40)

• Returning to a half-forgotten language (e.g. French after 15 years) means every course is either too easy or too hard, often both.

• Language contouring lets you start making progress from day one, regardless of your existing level.

Problem 2: Nuanced Words Don't Click Early (00:01:45 – 00:03:17)

• Prepositions and other context-dependent words (like "on," "at," "around") can't be mastered through study. They're learned through repeated exposure over years.

• Struggling with these on day one wastes time on something you won't fully get until much later anyway.

Problem 3: Basic Words You'll Pick Up Regardless (00:03:44 – 00:06:00)

• Words like "I," "he," "is" are concrete and simple, but you'll absorb them naturally within two to three months of any language exposure.

• Spending deliberate study time on words you're guaranteed to learn anyway is wasted effort.

How Language Contouring Actually Works (00:06:00 – 00:09:29)

• Combines nearly a dozen factors, primarily how common a word is in the language and how important it is within your specific sentences.

• Targets a "sweet spot" frequency: common enough that you need it to speak, but not so common you'd absorb it passively anyway (roughly weekly to monthly occurrence).

• Prioritizes words that carry the core meaning of a sentence (e.g. "campfire" in "they all sat around the campfire") over words you could infer from context.

Real-World Payoff (00:09:00 – 00:15:37)

• Learners end up knowing specific, high-value words like "handful" or "thread" early, because these are exactly the words needed to express real ideas.

• Words that repeat often across your personal library get naturally reprioritized and reinforced.

• Fully overridable: you can manually prioritize specific words if needed.

Real-World Results (00:15:56 – 00:17:02)

• Roughly 80–95% success rate in surfacing genuinely high-leverage words.

• Some false positives exist, but mismarked or mastered words are easy to skip going forward.

  
  

AI Transcript

00:00:02 All right, and welcome back to another episode of Phrasing FM, a podcast where I talk about languages and my experience building an app to learn them. My name is Benjamin, and I've been building phrasing for a little over three years now. One of the core principles of phrasing is a technique I developed called language contouring. So today I want to talk about what language contouring is, why it came about, and just jump into it.

00:00:31 Language contouring came about because I was continuously facing three main problems when I was learning a language. The first problem I was running into was I was trying to improve my French, and my French was already existing. It was probably at some point a high B1, maybe a low B2. I didn't use it for about fifteen years, and so I forgot most of my French. And every time I went to use any application, any tool, any course, it was either too easy for me or too hard for me, or somehow both. I always felt stuck in this loop of either reviewing things I already knew, or learning things I didn't understand, and there was never a way to just quickly jump into a new program and start making progress from day one.

00:01:24 So that was the first problem I wanted to solve. If you have some experience in a language, phrasing works for you from day one. You open it up and you start making progress. Doesn't matter where you were before, doesn't matter where you are, you're just going to start making progress from the day you open up the application.

00:01:40 The second problem I set out to solve with language contouring was when I was learning a new language, I was always starting with the really "simple" words. A lot of the time these would be things like prepositions, "to," "on," "at," "around," all of these words that are so contextually dependent. When you're learning another language, these are almost less things that you start to learn in the language. You can learn the basic translations of some of them, but how they're used is so nuanced, varying so slightly but so substantially, that you're not going to get these down from day one. It doesn't matter how you learn a language, it doesn't matter who you are, unless the language uses prepositions in exactly the same way you use your own language, you're going to sound weird, you're going to make a bunch of mistakes, and it's just a head-scratcher to wrap your head around. It messes with your brain in this way where you're trying to understand why you use "around" in this case, why you use "for," why you go "about." It just doesn't make sense. And to be honest, the best way to learn these is to just get exposed to them over years, hear them hundreds if not thousands of times, and eventually you start to use them because they just sound right. They don't logically make sense, eventually they just sound right. So I wanted to skip all that. I didn't want to focus on all these little details that just aren't going to make sense for a long time. Why am I struggling with these on day one when I know I'm not going to get them down until day one thousand?

00:03:44 The third reason language contouring came about was because when I was learning a language, I would start by learning the super basic words. You learn how to say hello, how are you, I, you, he, she, is, was, all of these. These aren't nuanced words, they're very concrete words. But you struggle so much with these in the beginning, and your vocabulary limits itself to this, and you struggle just trying to remember basic conjugations, what's the word for me, for you, for we. And then after two or three months, these are just second nature, no conscious thought about them at all. French is just "I," and that's not a word I have to translate. You've heard it thousands, tens of thousands, maybe millions of times throughout your language learning journey. So I didn't want to spend my time stressing and battling my way through learning things I know I'm going to see every single day, every day that I interact with this language. They're just so common. And when you start learning a language with these, you struggle with them just as much as any other words, but after two or three months, that time was basically wasted because you would have picked up these words anyway.

00:05:16 I was asking myself, why am I wasting my time struggling on this? I know this is going to make sense, I don't really need to worry about it because I'm going to see these tens of thousands of times, I will pick them up. I have one hundred percent faith that everybody learning a language, even if you don't study the word for "eye," you will eventually understand the word for "eye." It's just common, it's easy, it's concrete, it's not amorphous, there's no nuance to it. But this is where you start in most different language learning platforms, because they're the most basic building blocks. So the third thing I wanted to solve with language contouring was just skipping this stuff I know I'm going to pick up anyway. Just start me somewhere interesting.

00:06:03 And so what that ended up resulting in was this language contouring technique. It's a little bit complicated and a little bit technical, so I'm going to try to explain it simply. Basically what we do is we determine how common every single word is in an expression, how common it is in the language. And then we also figure out how important this word is in all of the sentences in your library. There are some additional things too, like how important the root is, how familiar the root is, and also the phrase it belongs to. Phrasing does a bunch of analysis on these expressions, so we're really taking nearly a dozen different numbers into account, but it basically boils down to how common is this in the language, and how important is this in your sentence. And once you have a bunch of sentences in your library, we can figure out how important this is overall to your library.

00:07:02 Once we have this information, we can start to focus on the words that are going to be common enough to justify spending your time on. You don't want to start with the word "remediation," because how often are you going to come across the word remediation? No, we're going to find words that have a frequency of between weekly and monthly occurrences, often enough that you definitely need to know them to speak the language, but not so often that you're going to get enough exposure to just instantly understand them no matter what.

00:07:47 We're also going to look for words that carry significant weight in your sentences. Any sentence has some filler words and some really important words. Take the sentence: "They all sat around the campfire." Now maybe you know "they," "all," "sat," and "around," but if you saw this sentence you'd have no idea what it's talking about. You really, really need to know the word "campfire" to understand the sentence. Even if you were missing any one of the other words, "they blank sat around the campfire," "they all blank around the campfire," you could probably assume the word from context, especially if you've seen it several times across your expressions. Maybe you don't know it like the back of your hand, but you'll have a rough idea of what it could mean, or when you hear it, it won't throw you for a loop. And even if it does, you have enough understanding of the rest of the sentence to fill it in.

00:08:48 This is powerful in two ways. One, it helps you in native conversations, out in the wild. You can really pull on these words because they're concrete, they're familiar, but specific. I've found that when I'm speaking languages I've been learning words for in phrasing, I'm able to use so many of the words that come up so often, and they're oftentimes the words I'd normally be reaching for. How do I explain a handful without knowing the word for handful? How do I explain a thread without knowing the word for thread? But I know the words handful and thread, because these came up pretty early on in the language contouring technique.

00:15:27 There is something magical that happens when you have just two or three examples of a word in your library in phrasing, and the words just crystallize, and you understand them so much better. So if a word is coming up often in your library, that will also prioritize it. Of course, you can go in and customize the prioritization yourself. If you see a word and it's not the one you wanted to learn in the sentence, you just tap it and say which words you want to learn, and we'll prioritize those. So it's all overridable, but for the most part, I don't do that much overriding.

00:16:00 I speak several languages to varying degrees. My Italian, French, and Portuguese are on this scale, we'll go Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, and French, on a pretty smooth scale from A1 to maybe high B1 in French at the moment. I'm hoping to refresh that up to B2 or even C level this year, but for all of them, I just open up the app and I'm learning words that are interesting, that are at my level, that don't feel like I'm going through a whole bunch of repetition. That's the idea of language contouring.

00:16:37 In full transparency, I'll say it has maybe an eighty to ninety percent success rate, maybe ninety-five percent. There are definitely still some false positives, but in phrasing it's really easy to mark a word as mastered, or excelled, and you're probably not going to see that word again. If you do, you'll see it in like a year, and it's really not a big problem.

00:17:02 So to sum up, language contouring is a prioritization technique to try and teach you a language as efficiently and effectively as possible. From spaced repetition, it's going to focus on the highest leverage words, the words you'll be most thankful you learned, while skipping a bunch of the basic words that trip up beginners and that you're not going to get down for a while anyway, or that are so obvious there was no point struggling with them in the beginning. It also allows you to jump into any language on phrasing from day one and start making progress.

00:17:42 So if any of that sounds interesting to you, if you've struggled with any of this in the past, if you're struggling with it now, consider giving phrasing a try. Phrasing dot app. It's a browser-based web application you can use to learn languages. You can add it to your home screen, install it just like a normal application, it's just not yet in the app stores. It works offline, it works in over ninety languages, and it supports learning multiple languages natively, letting you jump into all your languages, no matter the level, with no pre-required configuration or testing or worrying about skipping stuff you already know.

00:18:23 So that's a brief overview of the language contouring technique. If you liked this episode, if you liked this video, consider liking, consider subscribing. Share this video with any of your polyglot friends, maybe somebody's been complaining about how they can't improve a language because it's high level but not high enough. This video is for them, they'll definitely resonate. So thanks fo