Comments on: How Many Words is Fluent?

By: Antonio Graceffo

Antonio Graceffo — Wed, 13 Oct 2010 11:26:41 +0000

Hidaya, thanks for making me smile. I agree, English can make your head hurt. Remember, I come from a home where we spoke Italian and Spanish. So, I understand how hard it is to learn English.

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By: Antonio Graceffo

Antonio Graceffo — Wed, 13 Oct 2010 11:24:30 +0000

Martin, good point. english is about 65% German and 30% Latinate (through French). and the rest is mixed. Or, those were the old numbers, in the 1980s. Today, we would definitely need to separate American English from British English and look at words borrowed from Spanish and other immigrant languages in US. But you are absolutely correct, American English has the largest lexicon, the most words, of any language that has ever existed. It is estimated that English has over 1 million words, where Italian has 200 or 300,000 and Khmer has only tens of thousands. When you work in science, medicine and other fields which need very specific definitions, such as "The patient has a fever." As opposed to "elevated body temperature." English is one of the few languages that could express these nuances of meaning.

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By: Antonio Graceffo

Antonio Graceffo — Wed, 13 Oct 2010 11:19:49 +0000

I agree with you that the number is closer to 6,000 or 7,000. You made an interesting point that, although we need 6,000 to 7,000 words, this may only represent 2,500 individual characters. That is a good point. perhaps that is where the lower end estimates came from when i encountered texts which claimed you only needed 1,500 or 2,500 characters to read a newspaper.

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By: Antonio Graceffo

Antonio Graceffo — Wed, 13 Oct 2010 11:16:39 +0000

I agree that each character is a syllable. But there is not even one Chinese character which is not a word by itself. If there are any, they are the exception and not the rule. It is not strictly true that Chinese words are composed of more than character. what is true is that many Chinese words are compound words. so, they are composed of more than one word. for example, "police" and "man" can stand alone as words or be combined into a compound word.

Native speakers absolutely cannot infer the pronunciation of an unknown character. If they haven't specifically studied and learned that character before, even native speakers can not guess at the pronunciation, although they may be able to guess at meaning.

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By: John Fotheringham

John Fotheringham — Tue, 12 Oct 2010 23:44:07 +0000

Hi Hidayah. I will pass on your kind words to Antonio; I am sure he will appreciate it. Incidentally, all of his books are available on Amazon. Just click one of the book cover images above.

With regard to learning English (or any language for that matter), the good news is that you don't need to spend very much time consciously studying vern tenses and grammar, and in fact, doing so is often the reason people can never learn a language well. They spend almost all their time learning information ABOUT the language (i.e. building their declarative memory) and not enough time actually listening to and speaking the language (i.e. building their procedural memory).

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By: Hidayah

Hidayah — Thu, 07 Oct 2010 11:30:32 +0000

I'd love to get one of MR. Antonio books..here he wrote in such a 'cute' way!.Study foreign language (any language) always fascinating me while most of my high school buddies said it was such a boring!.English is hard to learned,bunch of tenses,grammar that make your head spinning..

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By: Martin

Martin — Sun, 03 Oct 2010 04:06:53 +0000

Isn't English one of the biggest languages, in terms of raw number of words, though? I would expect the NYT to contain more words than, say, a Japanese newspaper.

Also, while English is largely derived from Latin and Greek, many other languages are built from themselves. A giant German word is made up of 4 tiny German words. A giant Japanese word is made up of 4 joyo kanji.

I would expect, based on what little of these languages I know, for English to be at or near the difficulty limit. If you're learning anything else, it will probably be easier than these numbers indicate!

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By: Tom

Tom — Thu, 30 Sep 2010 19:49:06 +0000

I know this is an old post but felt after reading I should comment. As Peter said in chinese a character is not a word most words are multi character and to understand a character i think you need to know several words that it is in to understand the nuances of it. Also in Chinese the language is very informal words change/break up and used in different ways to more formal languages like European languages. For my thought in Chinese you need to know about 6000-7000 words to be able to read newspaper, these words would contain about 2500 characters though maybe a few would be not understood exactly but you can understand the meaning from the context.

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By: Peter

Peter — Fri, 10 Sep 2010 09:48:21 +0000

'In Chinese each word is a character'
This is definitely not true. Each syllable is a character and most Chinese words consist of two (or more) characters.

Anyway. I think that for a native speaker of Chinese 3000 learned characters is enough to read the newspaper, because they can infer the meaning and pronunciation of unknown characters.
For us non-native speakers 3000 might not be enough, even though it is possible to guess the probable pronunciation after learning 3000 characters.

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By: Kevin

Kevin — Wed, 01 Sep 2010 17:17:20 +0000

You should count only the root form of a word as a unique entry rather than record every verb conjugation and word plural as a separate entry. This is how printed dictionaries list word definitions.

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