There’s an interesting conversation to be had here on vocabulary vs. semantics, one that I’m not qualified to weigh in on! The analysis seems to suggest that knowing 100 French words will let you understand around half of the average French book, but does being able to parse the most common, repetitive words such as pronouns and articles (un, une, le, la, il, elle, etc.) really get you that far if you don’t know any of the (less repeated) verbs and nouns they’re referring to? Interesting analysis but I’d love to see the next level up: if you trained an AI on only 100 common French words, what would its translations of a passage back to English look like?