title_body: What's a good starting place to work on vocab? Obviously, generating a lexicon is very time-consuming, and there's so much that needs to be done, I often find myself suffering with analysis paralysis, because I just can't decide where to begin.
  
  Word frequency lists don't help all that much, because there's an inverse relationship between how useful a word is and how common it is. The most commonly used word in English is 'the', for instance. If you just made words for the 100 most commonly used words, you wouldn't really be able to make that many sentences, which would make it difficult to work on the grammar.
  
  I've seen some people use the Swadesh list, but I fail to see how that is useful in any way since the list was arbitarily chosen rather than thought through. And besides, it would require you make words for things that are highly unlikely to ever be mentioned, such as a word for 'louse'.
  
  The Conlanger's Lexicon suggests you work by categories, so that that way you can at least form complete sentences, even if this does limit you to writing about one topic. Of course, there's still the problem of which list to begin with. He just lists the categories in the book alphabetically.
  
  Are there other methods to use? And yes, I know about word-generating programs, but those spit out stuff that's much lower quality than stuff generated by hand. And besides, my conlang will have a highly productive word-derivation system, so I don't need that many roots (when I'm writing down lists of words, often times I just write what I want the compound word to literally translate as, though I rarely go back to fill it in because I never get to the words that would comprise the compound).
  
  I've mostly been looking at frequency lists and the Conlanger's Lexipedia, but I would like to know if there was a better way.
upvoted_answer: If you're new to conlanging and want to start an entire language from scratch:  I would recommend reading The Language Construction Kit by Mark Rosenfelder.  It's a fun read and is very helpful to a new conlanger, and helps you know what to create for your purposes, how to do this, and gives you a good understanding of basic linguistics.
  
  For creating vocabularies from scratch:  A common practice is to begin with a list of roots and expand outwards, usually using some kind of derivational morphology.  The words you're going to want to begin with, besides words that come up in your grammar, which I think should be close to done by the time you start building a lexicon, are the basic concepts.  Things like man, tree, water, eat, do, green.  One famous example of such a list is the Swadesh list.  The way I made my vocab for my first language, Simean, was by coming up with roots for the concepts on this list and using morphological rules to expand that list.
  
  Another alternative, though one I don't personally use, is to simply translate things and make up the necessary words as you go along.  Even so, I'd start with the Swadesh list to get a good grounding in terms of what your language feels, looks, and sounds like.