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22 Jul
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How Many Words Do We Need to Speak English?



How Many Words Do We Need to Speak English?


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Just like Tootsie Pops, languages are tasty treats that we rarely notice ourselves getting closer to the center of until we’re chewing on the chocolaty goodness of free-flowing conversation and wondering how many steps it took us to get there.


However, while the number of licks in a Tootsie Pop remains a mystery to this day, there are a few different useful ways of sussing out how many words you need to reach arbitrary labels like being conversational or fluent in a foreign language or to truly speak the language.



How Many Words Do We Need to Know in My Target Language?



It’s true that you can’t learn a language without learning the words that make it up, but amassing a huge vocabulary shouldn’t be your main goal the difference between 1,000 words and 5,000 is a small one if those extra 4,000 are just different versions of the first thousand, if they’re words you’ll rarely get to use, or if you don’t really know how to use them.

Before you can wrap your head around the difference between 1,000 words and 5,000, you’ll need to think about what a word is. The answer depends on who you ask.


What is a word




Some word counts count every form of a word. For example, from the verb to run, we get to run, runs, ran, running and many more. By some counts, these would all count as individual words, all with slightly different meanings related to the person, number and tense.

Other counts only look at headwords or word families, the forms by which most words are listed in the dictionary and the root word from which all other forms are derived. When counting this way, house and houses would be two forms of the same headword, house. The same would be true of am, is, was and be, all forms of the headword to be.

Taking the latter approach to counting up our vocabulary, you can think of a verb like to run as a word that you’ve learned, and your ability to conjugate it to the dog runs would count as grammatical knowledge, rather than an entirely new word.


Perhaps you can already see the gulf of the grey area between these two approaches.

For instance, if run and ran count as one word, what about the verb to run in the sense of to manage or the noun form, as in a quick run to the store? Where do we draw the line between one cluster of meanings and the next?




How do you know what you know?

Another complication is defining words we know.

Do you know a word if you sort of mostly understand it when you hear it, but are unable to recall it and use it during a conversation?

This is the distinction between active and passive vocabulary.

Active vocabulary is vocabulary that you can quickly remember and actively use when writing, speaking, and thinking.













Advanced: 4,000-10,000 words. As you grow past the 3,000-word mark or so in most languages, you’re moving beyond the words that make up the everyday conversation and into a specialized vocabulary for talking about your professional field, news and current events, opinions and more complex, abstract verbal feats. At this point, you should be able to reach C2 level in the Common European Framework for Reference (CEFR) in most languages.





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