I know that the essence of a language is it's structure and grammar, but to use it, one must also have a firm grasp of vocabulary. When I go learn a language, I like to start by reading through historical and cultural factors, then grammar, then vocabulary; using culturally significant literature as a guide and motivation.¶Recently I've been thinking that there ought to be some list of concepts that occur in most cultures, and for each culture, the relations of persons having that culture to those concepts, including how they communicate about those concepts (e.g. the words or phrases they use to refer to them), in order of how basic those concepts are to that culture, and a similar list of concepts significant or unique to that culture. Swadesh lists are not what I have in mind, as they are lists of words, many of the meanings of those words are of little edificational value, and are primarily used for morpho-semantic comparisons of languages, originally for memeology of languages.