The Vocabcord 500

The Vocabcord 500 is six lists of 500 spoken phrases, one per language, for the first weeks in a country where that language is spoken: grouped by the situations of a day, from the first hello to the first opinion at work, and split across three lanes called survive, travel and work. We wrote and reviewed every line ourselves, which is what separates these lists from the graded word corpus behind the app, whose English frequency backbone comes from the New General Service List.

What is in each list

Each collection holds exactly 500 phrases in 17 or 18 sections, and a section is a situation as it happens in a day: first contact, the repair kit for when you have not understood, getting around, eating out, shopping and paying, health and the pharmacy, emergencies, the phone and the landlord, then the work sections, then small talk and opinions. Sections run from 18 to 40 phrases, sized by what the situation needs. Grammar never gets a section of its own. At a till you need the line for the total, and the grammar rides inside it whether or not anybody labels it.

Three lanes cut across the sections. Survive is the floor of a day: greeting, asking, paying, health, admin. Travel moves you through places, from transport and hotels to restaurants and the small talk of a stranger. Work covers a first week in an office, a shop, a site or a kitchen. Survive came out largest in all six languages at 38 to 43 percent, travel took 30 to 34, and work took 26 to 29. Nothing was trimmed to make the six line up, which is why they do not.

Beside some phrases sits a note, and a note has one job: to say what the translation cannot. Register, a regional variant, a trap, or when in the exchange you say it. Es ist halb drei. is 2:30 in German and reads like half past three to an English ear. Reklamówkę? is the whole question a Polish cashier asks you. Between 23 and 30 percent of each list carries one, and the rest carry none, because a note column that is always full stops being read.

The six collections

Each has its own page with all 500 phrases in tables, and each page prints.

How it was made

1. The brief. One situation at a time, in the order a first week unfolds, every line something a polite adult says out loud to a stranger. A situation that needs 18 phrases gets 18.
2. A writing pass per language, against one declared variety: Spain for Spanish, Brazil for Portuguese, France for French, Germany for German, with the form used on the other side of the border or the Atlantic put in a note where daily use differs.
3. An editing pass for register and for calques, the lines that translate word for word and land wrong. That check is editorial. No independent native-speaker sign-off is documented for this batch, and readers who live in these languages will find things we missed.
4. A validator over each JSON file: the count of 500, the floor under every lane, duplicate phrases, notes over 160 characters, and any dash that slipped in. A file that fails does not get rendered.
5. What was cut. Proverbs, textbook sentences, slang that dates, and anything built to teach a grammar point. Email openers and sign-offs broke the spoken-only rule and stayed, because a newcomer types them on day one.

The long version of that decision trail is why 500 phrases, and how we chose them. For how the graded corpus behind the app is built and levelled, read the methodology page. Teachers can run a list as a ten week scheme of work: the teachers page lays one out and links the files.

Cite as

The Vocabcord 500 (2026), Vocabcord, https://vocabcord.com/the-vocabcord-500

Quoting phrases with a link back here is welcome. A licence covering full copies is coming; until it is written, ask us first on the support page.

What comes next

Text-to-speech audio for all 3,000 phrases, then app packs, so a line plays on the charger the way a graded phrase already does. There is no date on either.

Changelog

• v1, 9 September 2026: six languages, 3,000 phrases.