How many words do you need to learn to speak a foreign language?
Learning a foreign language can be a serious challenge. How many words do we need to know to start speaking it?
To understand the answer to this question, let's first learn how many words are used, for example, in the English language. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, there are currently 171,146 words in use in the English language, not counting another 47,156 obsolete words (learn English with British teachers).
But how do we calculate how many words from this enormous collection we will actually need?
The Formula
Linguists Paul Nation, John Read, and Robin Goulden developed a test that includes only 50 words. Their theory states that if you count how many of these 50 words you know and then multiply them by 500, you will be able to calculate your total English vocabulary.
The 500 words start with fairly simple examples like: dog, editor, immense… But soon the words become more complex and confusing, for example: do you know how to use 'oleaginous' or 'cowsucker' in a sentence? (Hint: the second word has nothing to do with 'cows'… or 'sucking').
You can find the test by the three linguists on Google by searching for 'Paul's free English vocabulary size test'. There is now also a version with 100 words.
How many words do we need to know?
Stuart Webb, a professor of applied linguistics at the University of Western Ohio, specializes in the process of learning a foreign language. He discovered that it is incredibly difficult for learners to learn as many words as native speakers know, regardless of how long they study the language.
Native speakers typically know between 15,000 and 20,000 word families, or so-called 'lemmas', in their native language. A lemma is a word form derived from many texts and uses, serving as representative of the variants of a language unit in them.
For example, the word 'use' is a lemma for the words 'usage', 'used'. Or the word 'run' is a lemma for 'running', 'ran'.
Is it possible to have a decent conversation in a foreign language if you know 15,000 – 20,000 words? And is this a realistic goal to strive for? Hardly.
Ways to Learn a Foreign Language
Professor Webb found that people who study languages in the traditional way – for example, English in Bulgaria or German in England – often struggle to learn more than 2,000 to 3,000 words, even after years of study (Kabinata.com offers innovative online training – access to all lessons, levels, and teachers – with just one subscription!).
In fact, a study in Taiwan showed that after 9 years of studying a foreign language, half of the learners failed to learn even 1,000 of the most commonly used words in the language.
The key is the frequency with which the words we learn appear in our daily lives.
There is no need to know all the words in a new language.
Which words should we learn?
Prof. Webb argues that the most effective way to speak a foreign language quickly is to discover 800 – 1,000 lemmas that are used most often in that language – and learn them. If we learn only 800 of the most commonly used lemmas in English, we will be able to understand 75% of the language spoken in normal life.
These 800 lemmas are far more valuable than other words, simply because they are used much more frequently. For example, in English it is much more useful to know the word 'house' than the word 'abode'. And fewer people in England will look at us strangely if we say 'perhaps' instead of 'peradventure'.
The reason why we are learning a particular language also has serious significance for learning it faster.
800 lemmas will help us speak the language used in everyday life, but to understand a dialogue in a movie or on television, we need to know 3,000 of the most commonly used lemmas.
If we want to understand written language, such as novels, newspapers, and various materials on the internet – we need to learn 8,000-9,000 lemmas.
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