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How many words do you need to speak a language - BBC
#Language

Typically native speakers know 15,000 to 20,000 word families - or lemmas - in their first language.

Word family/lemma is a root word and all its inflections, for example: run, running, ran; blue, bluer, bluest, blueish, etc.

So does someone who can hold a decent conversation in a second language know 15,000 to 20,000 words? Is this a realistic goal for our listener to aim for? Unlikely.

Prof Webb found that people who have been studying languages in a traditional setting - say French in Britain or English in Japan - often struggle to learn more than 2,000 to 3,000 words, even after years of study.

In fact, a study in Taiwan showed that after nine years of learning a foreign language half of the students failed to learn the most frequently-used 1,000 words.

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for learning a language BBC Future: The amazing benefits of being bilingual He discovered that it is incredibly difficult for a language learner to ever know as many words as a native speaker. <span>Typically native speakers know 15,000 to 20,000 word families - or lemmas - in their first language. Word family/lemma is a root word and all its inflections, for example: run, running, ran; blue, bluer, bluest, blueish, etc. So does someone who can hold a decent conversation in a second language know 15,000 to 20,000 words? Is this a realistic goal for our listener to aim for? Unlikely. Prof Webb found that people who have been studying languages in a traditional setting - say French in Britain or English in Japan - often struggle to learn more than 2,000 to 3,000 words, even after years of study. In fact, a study in Taiwan showed that after nine years of learning a foreign language half of the students failed to learn the most frequently-used 1,000 words. <div class="ssrcss-1nxdn42-ErrorMessage eitf6462"><div class="ssrcss-1b7cqa9-StyledInnerContainer eitf6461"><p class="ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph eq5iqo00">This video can


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