The ‘minimum effective dose’ is a term borrowed from the medical world. It seeks to answer the question: what is the minimum amount of input I need to achieve a desired result?
Or in other words, how can I get maximum benefit from minimum effort?
The ‘minimum effective dose’ or MED in the medical world usually refers to the amount of medicine a patient needs to resolve their immediate needs.
The MED has recently been taken outside the medical world and applied to areas of improvement such as strength, conditioning and fat loss. For example, what is the minimum amount of exercise you need to do to lose 10 pounds?
The idea of MED has also been used in the area of accelerated learning.
In today’s podcast we take a look at the idea of the MED and ask a fundamental question:
How does the minimum effective does apply to language learning?
Before we can answer this question, we have to look that the definition of the problem. We need to first determine the end game.
You need to be able to figure out the desired result first, before you can figure out the MED.
The focus of Real Fast Spanish is answering the question: “How can you get to a conversational level of Spanish as fast as possible?”
So in the context of this problem the MED would be focusing on the minimum amount of words you need to learn, understand and recall in order to be conversational.
For Spanish, there are 1000 words that make up 87% of all spoken communication. I have included these 1000 high frequency Spanish words in the conversation hacking guide. Once you memorised these words and you can use them in context, you have achieved your MED for the goal of conversational Spanish.
Once you have a solid grasp of these words then you need to change the end game. If you are already conversational, the next obvious question would be:
How can you take your Spanish to the next level using the minimum effective dose?
Well regardless of your level, all Spanish students should be looking at doing one of two things: growing their Spanish knowledge or maintaining their Spanish knowledge.
Check out today’s podcast to see how we tackle this problem.
Quote from the episode:
“I’ve found that small wins, small projects, small differences often make huge differences.” – Rosabeth Moss Kanter
How can you use the minimum effective does to improve your Spanish?
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