How many words do you really need?

Every learner asks it, usually in the first week. How many words do I need? In 2006 Paul Nation gave the honest answer, which is that it depends what you want to do with them, and then he counted.

He grouped words into families, so that happy, happier and happiness count as one, and measured how much of a page the most common families cover. The first 1,000 cover roughly 78 to 81 percent of the words in a novel or a newspaper. The first 2,000 cover about 86 percent.

That sounds like most of the job. It is not. Reading comfortably without a dictionary, in the studies Nation was drawing on, needs about 98 percent of the words on the page, and getting from 86 to 98 takes another 6,000 to 7,000 families. Written English needs about 8,000 to 9,000 in all; spoken English, films and conversation, about 6,000 to 7,000.

Here is the shape of it. A small core of words does most of the work, because they come up on every page. After that the words get rarer one by one, and each new family adds less and less coverage. The core is a list you can learn. The rest is not a list anybody can learn, and Nation says so: past the common words, vocabulary grows mainly through reading and listening, because the remaining words are too many and each too rare to teach.

Which is where the other number comes in. Stuart Webb found that learners who met a word in about ten different sentences knew it best. The rare words come back, but only in text, and only if you read enough of it for them to come back ten times.

Two caveats. The counts are for English, and other languages will differ, though the shape holds. And 98 percent is the mark for reading unassisted, not for reading at all. With help within reach you can read long before that.

So learn the common words however you like. Then start reading, early, with something that explains the rest as you meet it. That is what I built Aloglot for. It reads you a book in the language, lights each word as it is spoken, and explains any word you tap, so the six thousand words past the core arrive the only way they can, one story at a time.

Sources

• Nation (2006). How large a vocabulary is needed for reading and listening? Canadian Modern Language Review, 63(1), 59–82.
• Webb (2007). The effects of repetition on vocabulary knowledge. Applied Linguistics, 28(1), 46–65.