How many words do you need to speak a language - BBC
#Language
Eight hundred lemmas will help you speak a language in a day-to-day setting, but to understand dialogue in film or TV you'll need to know the 3,000 most common lemmas.
And if you want to get your head around the written word - so novels, newspapers, excellently-written BBC articles - you need to learn 8,000 to 9,000 lemmas.
If you want to change selection, open document below and click on "Move attachment"
Unknown titleewer odd looks if you say "perhaps" rather than "peradventure". So is there light at the end of the tunnel for our frustrated German student? Well it depends why he wants to learn the language. <span>Eight hundred lemmas will help you speak a language in a day-to-day setting, but to understand dialogue in film or TV you'll need to know the 3,000 most common lemmas. And if you want to get your head around the written word - so novels, newspapers, excellently-written BBC articles - you need to learn 8,000 to 9,000 lemmas. If you want to find out what it would be like to restrict your native tongue to the most common 1,000 words, Theo Sanderson has created a site where you can test your linguistic skills Summary
| status | not read | | reprioritisations | |
|---|
| last reprioritisation on | | | suggested re-reading day | |
|---|
| started reading on | | | finished reading on | |
|---|
Details