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How many words does it take to be fluent in (the Polish) language? [21]
I've been learning Polish for over a month now and I am making great progress. Recently I've been wondering how many words does it take to be fluent in a language. I searched online and found what I think is a great article that gave me my answer and everything else you may want to know about languages and language learning. (I've posted the links below) Using English as an example, the author says that if you know the 3,000 most commonly used words, you'll be able to understand 95% of common texts and be able to effectively guess the other 5% based on the context. Essentially if a person "memorizes" these 3,000 words they will be able to be conversational in English. Granted that doesn't consider grammar, idioms, etc.
The last part that I found eye opening was that for a person to be fluent in English (knows 3,000 most common words) they only need to know 1.75% of all English words (170,000 total) listed in the Oxford-English dictionary. While the average native speaker has about 40,000 active words in his vocabulary.
The author shows that rigid learning (learning by looking up definitions in a dictionary) is a poor way of learning a language. Instead learn the most commonly used words and then learn by guessing/assimilation. Whether it's by talking, speaking and/or listening you start to pick up the nuances of a language by simply learning from the context.
Part 1: lingholic.com/how-many-words-do-i-need-to-know/
Part 2: lingholic.com/how-many-words-do-i-need-to-know-the-955-rule-in-language-learning-part-2/
