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Speakers of x language use only x words | ||
Tags: Word Frequency | Word List | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages |  | |
| clumsy Octoglot Senior Member Poland lang-8.com/6715Registered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5178 days ago 1116 posts - 1367 votes  Speaks: Polish*, English, Japanese, Korean, French, Mandarin, Italian, Vietnamese Studies: Spanish, Arabic (Written), Swedish Studies: Danish, Dari, Kirundi | Message 1 of 7 13 April 2011 at 9:45pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I have read on one forum-like web site that in order to know 90 per cent of a languge you need to learn 3000 English words.
French people use 2000 Germans use 5000 Japanese use 10000 Do you know from where to take such a data? The person cited Wikipedia, but I could not find the info on the page s/he suggested. I think Korean, could be the same as Japanese. Vocabulary making is much easier when you use characters. Hindi can have vast vocabulary to remember: they use words borrowed from different sources. On the other hand native vocabulary(every single word they know, even when they don't use all of those) seems to be something like 50 000, as for University graduate. I think it's very interesting topic, for vocabulary learning. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Arekkusu Hexaglot Senior Member Canada bit.ly/qc_10_lec Joined 5381 days ago 3971 posts - 7747 votes Speaks: English, French*, GermanC1, Spanish, Japanese, Esperanto Studies: Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Estonian | Message 2 of 7 13 April 2011 at 10:13pm | IP Logged | |||||
This doesn't make much sense to me. Actually, the basis of what constitutes the most common words in most languages is very similar. If language A has two words where B uses only one, then B will have another concept divided into many words when A will only have one. It cannot be that language A consistently has 3, 4 or 5 words for every one word of B. German often puts 2 words together to create a new one. Presumably this sometimes counts as a 3rd word. For this, French will sometimes have a new word, or sometimes put many separate words together. Can this really account for such a difference?
What? Edited by Arekkusu on 13 April 2011 at 10:30pm 4 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| FrostBlast Diglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5099 days ago 168 posts - 254 votes Speaks: French*, English Studies: Spanish, Russian, Swedish, Icelandic | Message 3 of 7 14 April 2011 at 1:33am | IP Logged | |||||
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I don't see how the number of words used in a language can be a representation of anything at all concerning said language.
"Where does the information comes from" is a fair question to ask, but I'd rather ask what such information can be used for in the end. Edited by FrostBlast on 14 April 2011 at 1:35am 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Bao Diglot Senior Member Germany tinyurl.com/pe4kqe5 Joined 5766 days ago 2256 posts - 4046 votes Speaks: German*, English Studies: French, Spanish, Japanese, Mandarin | Message 4 of 7 14 April 2011 at 3:02am | IP Logged | |||||
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Speakers of zombie speak use only one: Hnk. =D
The only claim about words known in English I found believable so far was about word families college students know. The article it was mentioned in was about a project for foreign college students studying in English, who were supposed to learn 6 words (?) a week and publish them for other participants of the project to see them. Don't remember the actual numbers, or more of the details. Maybe somebody else read that? 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6703 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map | Message 5 of 7 14 April 2011 at 2:01pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Even the expression "90 per cent of a language" is meaningless.
You can find trustworthy statistics over the number of words (or 'word families') that constitute 90% of the words in a specific corpus, and it is a fairly small number of words (which you afterwards can find in frequency tables). But this claim only concerns the raw number of words, not how much of the meaning those words constitute. Learners might say in a loose and unscientific way that they understand 90 % of ordinary texts, and then they do refer to the meaning. But such a claim is really just the same as saying that there are roughly 10% 'blurred' (incomprehensible) patches left in ordinary texts when they read them attentively, and that can have other causes than specific words - for instance complicated constructions or idiomatic issues. And there is absolutely no way that such a vague impression can be taken at face value - it's like saying than one landscape is 90% as pretty as another. Apart from that I agree with Arekkusu's analysis of the differences between languages. Edited by Iversen on 14 April 2011 at 2:06pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| clumsy Octoglot Senior Member Poland lang-8.com/6715Registered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5178 days ago 1116 posts - 1367 votes Speaks: Polish*, English, Japanese, Korean, French, Mandarin, Italian, Vietnamese Studies: Spanish, Arabic (Written), Swedish Studies: Danish, Dari, Kirundi | Message 6 of 7 18 April 2011 at 2:37pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Thank you all for replies.
Well, It's been here and there I have seen such info. Often put as "English speakers only use 2 000 words in normal life" (here 2 there 3 000). I don't wanted to say that some languages are better than the others. I don't think myself Polish people use a lot of vocab too. Adult people know around 50 000 of vocab, or with lemms the number is round 25 000 or something. Of course language learner is unable to learn all those vocabulary in her foreign language. Moreover we have idioms etc. However it can be somewhat useful to know how many vocabulary do you need to learn. Japanese and Korean use characters in their speech very often, they allow you to create new words. For example "foreign language" is a compound word made up with: outside country language" parts. but! you cannot use those building blocks separately. kuni means country, tami means people, but country people (citizens) is written as :kokumin" using the same characters, but with Chinese reading, making a whole new word. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| rolf Senior Member United Kingdom improvingmydutch.blo Joined 6007 days ago 107 posts - 134 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Dutch | Message 7 of 7 19 April 2011 at 12:01am | IP Logged | |||||
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This stat you have seen refers to everyday conversational language.
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