Excellent article on: "How Many Words Do You Need to Know in ????? language)?
6 Comments
I have a big problem with studies like this. Just because you can "understand" the words does not mean you can extract meaning from the language. While being able to parse the words and grammar are a huge first step, if you don't know the idiom it won't matter if you understood 100% of the individual words.
Curly is right.
I read a couple of Argentine newspapers every day. Usually I read the English translation, but I use the original to find gross errors of translation and there are many, but I still don't really have a handle on the meanings.
The Argentinians, as I suspect most cultures, have local words, expressions and idioms not accessible to furriners.
I do love the idioms I understand, very poetic, very accurate for the authors use. It is. to me, worth learning...It ain't just Spanish it's the language of portenos.
Fascinating article. It's really interesting because he discusses that there's more to learning language than just the 1000 word vocabulary. I've been trying to collect more conversational phrases, and this article has really encouraged me.
Different articles show different figures. It seems so easy when you hear that with 2000 or 3000 words you are able to understand many things and speak quite freely. However, I believe that even with 10 000 words one may have problems to express himself/herself. Your native language you learn for years in all of the areas (biology, geography, history, math etc.). While learning foreign languages it is hard to acquire those words and expressions that you do not use daily.
