albysky Triglot Senior Member Italy lang-8.com/1108796Registered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4386 days ago 287 posts - 393 votes Speaks: Italian*, English, German
| Message 1 of 7 28 September 2013 at 2:54pm | IP Logged |
How many words roughfly do you have to know to be B1 in a language in your opinion ?
Edited by albysky on 28 September 2013 at 2:55pm
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beano Diglot Senior Member United KingdomRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4620 days ago 1049 posts - 2152 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Russian, Serbian, Hungarian
| Message 2 of 7 28 September 2013 at 4:15pm | IP Logged |
I guess it depends on your circumstances. If you find yourself in a situation where you are surrounded by the
language, you will rapidly acquire vocabulary but actually putting words into a meaningful context takes
longer. I think it's possible that someone could know relatively obscure words like chisel, fuse box,
gooseberry, barbed wire and weedkiller but not pass a B1 test. Conversely, someone might speak fluidly
without knowing terms like the aforementioned.
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Jeffers Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4907 days ago 2151 posts - 3960 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Hindi, Ancient Greek, French, Sanskrit, German
| Message 3 of 7 28 September 2013 at 5:09pm | IP Logged |
Apparently, the CEFR scales used to include a recommended number of words per level, but this was dropped for various reasons. One is probably that the definition of a word, as well as the number of words needed, vary from language to language. Another probable reason is that people would take a vocabulary test, and then claim a CEFR level based on the size of their vocabulary.
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leosmith Senior Member United States Joined 6548 days ago 2365 posts - 3804 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Tagalog
| Message 4 of 7 28 September 2013 at 5:49pm | IP Logged |
Rough threshold numbers for an average language imo:
C2 20,000 passive/10,000 active
C1 10,000 passive/5,000 active
B2 5,000 passive/2,500 active
B1 2,500 passive/1,250 active
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Cavesa Triglot Senior Member Czech Republic Joined 5007 days ago 3277 posts - 6779 votes Speaks: Czech*, FrenchC2, EnglishC1 Studies: Spanish, German, Italian
| Message 5 of 7 28 September 2013 at 9:44pm | IP Logged |
Several B1 vocabulary sources I consulted included about 4000 words total. Without distinction passive/active.
Since the CEFR level are based on their communicative skills definitions and not vocab count, I belive you can be functional B1 with less, perhaps as few as 2500 (which is the amount of words in most Assimils, I believe), if you know to use them efficiently. And should you have much wider vocabulary without some other skills, than you might be an awesome B1 but still not B2.
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Elexi Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 5563 days ago 938 posts - 1840 votes Speaks: English* Studies: French, German, Latin
| Message 6 of 7 29 September 2013 at 12:22pm | IP Logged |
Deutsche Welle state B1.2 is 2500 words. The range in Professor James Milton's survey
of the correspondence between required vocabulary levels and CEFR B1 puts the range at
2500-3250 words (and 3250-3750 for B2, 3750-4500 for C1).
However, the linked article below shows how wild the academic ranges are:
http://www.unomaha.edu/esc/2009Proceedings/EuropeandLanguage Learning.pdf
Professor Milton's range is here at the bottom of page 186:
http://www.scribd.com/doc/58382879/1847692087-Second-Languag e
Edited by Elexi on 29 September 2013 at 12:29pm
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tarvos Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member China likeapolyglot.wordpr Joined 4705 days ago 5310 posts - 9399 votes Speaks: Dutch*, English, Swedish, French, Russian, German, Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Afrikaans Studies: Greek, Modern Hebrew, Spanish, Portuguese, Czech, Korean, Esperanto, Finnish
| Message 7 of 7 29 September 2013 at 1:22pm | IP Logged |
It also matters what the language is. If you speak Hebrew then I'm damn sure you can use
less words because if you know how the roots work, you can form a lot of words on the
spot. And Hebrew doesn't have a whole lot of loanwords (and definitely not verbs).
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