How many words do you need to speak a language - BBC
#Language
So which words should we learn? Prof Webb says the most effective way to be able to speak a language quickly is to pick the 800 to 1,000 lemmas which appear most frequently in a language, and learn those.
If you learn only 800 of the most frequently-used lemmas in English, you'll be able to understand 75% of the language as it is spoken in normal life.
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Unknown titlenow all of the words in a language: for example it seems unlikely that anyone reading this has suffered from not knowing that "Zyzzyva" is a kind of tropical weevil and not a Spice Girls lyric. <span>So which words should we learn? Prof Webb says the most effective way to be able to speak a language quickly is to pick the 800 to 1,000 lemmas which appear most frequently in a language, and learn those. If you learn only 800 of the most frequently-used lemmas in English, you'll be able to understand 75% of the language as it is spoken in normal life. <img alt="An English-German dictionary" srcSet="https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/240/cpsprodpb/1BB7/production/_102159070_anenglish-germandictionarygett.jpg 240w, https://ichef.bbci.co. Summary
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