The 50 Lithuanian words to learn first for A2

Word frequency has a long tail and a short head: a few dozen words turn up again and again in A2 reading and listening, and knowing them turns a passage from a wall into a sentence with a few gaps. The Lithuanian reading passages on wspell are no exception — they are original, written for wspell, not taken from any real or sample exam paper.

The everyday twenty

Greetings, numbers, days of the week, and the verbs of routine — to be, to have, to go, to live, to work, to want. These are not interesting and they are not optional. They are the frame every other word hangs on, and they show up in the first two lines of nearly every task.

If you only have one evening, spend it here.

The thirty that carry the reading section

The second group is less obvious, because it is not vocabulary about the world. It is vocabulary about the TEXT:

• connectors — bet, nes, todėl, tačiau. These tell you whether the next clause agrees or disagrees with the last one, which is very often the whole question.
• the verbs of opinion — manyti, galvoti, atrodyti. Comprehension questions are usually about who thinks what, not about what happened.
• quantity and comparison — daugiau, mažiau, dažnai, retai. A question asking which of two things is more common is answerable from one of these alone.

Why this beats "learn 1000 words"

Frequency is brutally uneven. The few hundred most common words do far more than their share of the work, and studying alphabetically or by topic spreads your effort flat across a distribution that is anything but.

Do this with them

Cover the Lithuanian column and write the words from the English. Then cover the English and write the meanings. The second direction is easy; the first is the one the exam asks for, and the gap between them is the part you have not learned yet.