How many root words are there in English? How many words are there in English that you need to know?

Threatening attempts to "debunk the myths about the great and mighty"

It is well known that lexicon different languages ​​are not the same. The vocabulary of a civilized person can be tens of times greater than the vocabulary of a representative of some wild African tribe. It is also clear that within the same language, the vocabulary of different speakers varies greatly: a child and an adult, a janitor and a professor... In any case, no one doubts that a more extensive vocabulary is always associated with stock of knowledge and intellectual superiority. And now attention: what would you think if you were officially told that our Russian language is savage, contains five times less words than English? Of course, they would indignantly dispute this nonsense! However, such a “scientific opinion” is repeatedly broadcast in the media. This cannot but be alarming.

The last time this statement was heard on television was in 2011. But it is easier to discuss and analyze not television programs, but printed materials, which are easier to read (for example, on the Internet). So, you can look into the archives of the journal “Science and Life”. In the 6th issue of 2009, a doctor of philological sciences (!), a certain Miloslavsky, was published under the mocking title “The Great, Mighty Russian Language.” In it, the author “debunks myths” about the Russian language. In particular, it is stated that “according to very rough estimates, English dictionaries literary language contain about 400 thousand words, German - about 250 thousand, Russian - about 150 thousand." From which it is proposed to draw the conclusion that "the wealth of the Russian language is a myth" (almost verbatim quotation). In general, the article is written in the spirit of self-spitting, characteristic of the early 90s, I was even somewhat struck by its anachronism, not to mention its complete unscientificness.

The author did not even mention the difficulties and problems of word counting and, in general, the problem of the possibility and appropriateness of any scientific definition and comparisons of the vocabularies of entire languages. I consider it necessary to raise the following objections.

1) B different cultures The criteria for the “admission” of words into the literary language are different. In the continental tradition, centralized planning dominates, while the Anglo-Saxons have a market element in everything (informal approach). For example, among the French, vocabulary is strictly censored by a body such as the Academie Francais (Academy of the French Language). She decides which words belong to literary French and which do not. Due to such censorship, a situation has arisen where it is believed that French, with all its rich literature, no more than 150,000-200,000 words. In English, anyone can come up with a word and immediately enter it into the language. So, Shakespeare wrote that he came up with about 1.7 thousand words from his writer's vocabulary of 21 thousand words. This, by the way, is a huge achievement for a writer; it is exceeded only by our Pushkin: 24 thousand words, an absolute and unsurpassed individual record for an active dictionary of all times - see "Dictionary of the Pushkin Language" in 4 volumes (M., 1956-1961) . Most educated Europeans actively use no more than 8-10 thousand words, and passively - 50 thousand or more.

Obviously, the 150,000 Russian words named by the author of that article is a slightly rounded volume of the well-known Large Academic Dictionary of the Russian Language (BAS), which in the 1970 edition in 17 volumes totaled 131,257 words. And the English 400,000 are, apparently, the latest editions of Oxford and Webster. Moreover, in the penultimate editions of these same English dictionaries there were several times fewer words (specifics can be found on the Internet). Where does this increase come from and why do their dictionaries contain more words than ours? The first reason is a shameless count of archaisms that modern Englishmen and Americans, of course, do not know. In the English philological tradition, the vocabulary of modern English is considered to be all words since the time of Shakespeare (a contemporary of Ivan the Terrible and Boris Godunov). In the Russian tradition, all pre-Petrine, and at the suggestion of the famous lexicographer Ushakov, even pre-Pushkin vocabulary is considered ancient or old Russian.

The second reason is that the criteria for the “acceptance” of new words into the language have become even less strict. Approaches to the English language are becoming more and more daring, and the assessments appearing on the Internet are simply fantastic. Thus, the GLM agency (Global Language Monitor, website www.languagemonitor.com) reports the appearance of... the millionth word in the English language! By which word is considered the millionth, it is immediately clear what kind of garbage dump they are trying to pass off the English language as: this is the “word” of Web 2.0! And this is along with the fact that (the) web is considered a separate word. Apparently, Web 1.0 was also considered a separate word somewhere! Moreover, they are not shy about counting phrases as words: “financial tsunami” - “Financial tsunami” was counted as the 1,000,001st word. In this case, in the Russian language, along with the words “financial” and “tsunami”, there is the word “financial tsunami”, which can be counted. However, the purists who compiled the BAS are unlikely to have included the word “tsunami” in it, since it is a foreign borrowing (for this, see the next paragraph below).

For reference: Company analysis Global Language Monitor consists of several stages. At the first stage, the words that are included in the most famous dictionaries in English: Merriam-Webster's, Oxford English Dictionary, Macquarie's. It is worth noting that the latest edition of the Merriam-Webster's dictionary includes only 450 thousand English words. At the second stage, the company's employees, based on a special research algorithm, take into account all neologisms of the English language. At the same time, texts on the Internet are analyzed, including blogs and other informal network resources. Periodicals, both electronic and paper, and new literature in various fields are taken into account. It is this technique in the work of the Global Language Monitor company that causes a flurry of criticism from independent experts. The main reproach is that when calculating are included in the English vocabulary as outdated words both phrases and slang formations. In addition, in its accounting method, the company also takes into account words used only in varieties of the English language, for example, in China and Japan. And this is about 20% of total number words that are recognized by company specialists. In addition to everything, linguistic blunders made by the US President Bush were also taken into account as lexical innovations in the English language. I propose: add all Chernomyrdin’s mistakes to the dictionary and thereby “overtake America”! Classic methods of counting words are much more conservative. For example, the Oxford Dictionary takes into account only 300 thousand words.

2) English not only creates its own, but also very actively borrows foreign words from languages ​​all over the world. We complain about dominance English loanwords, but that layer of scientific, technical and business vocabulary, which entered our language with the fall of the Iron Curtain, is only a pitiful handful compared to the active borrowings produced by the English language without any false restraint. It has been half French since the time of William the Conqueror. It turns out that we are borrowing what we borrowed! Or, figuratively speaking, we repurchase what we bought. And now, when millions of people in multinational companies communicate in English, which is not their native language, whole layers of vocabulary are emerging: “Chinese English”, “Latin American English”, “Japanese English”. These layers of vocabulary belong to the so-called occasionalisms.

For reference:

Occasionalisms– these are words created spontaneously, for one-time use. The question arises: at what point should this word be considered part of the vocabulary? How many repetitions of this word are needed in speech or in print to come to the conclusion that it has ceased to be a random artifact and has become a full-fledged part of the lexicon?

There are also words limited to a very narrow part of society. Let's say one family. Real example: all members of one family I know call boiled potatoes fried with sausage the word “secondary roast”. This is their own invention, and I have never seen such a word anywhere else. Can this occasionalism be considered a full-fledged part of Russian vocabulary?

Of course not! But the Americans would count.

Every language has dialects, in English these are British, Australian, American, Canadian, etc. But when a community of hundreds of thousands of non-native speakers arises, actively communicating in English, which serves as a means of communication for them or acts as a business language business communication), they enrich the language with the words of their native language and in other ways develop a certain regional jargon, which can hardly be called a dialect in the traditional sense. Moreover, it does not have a clear geographical localization; it is the language of the blogosphere, forums and email. Of course, it also contains such “original English” words as babushka, bomzh, pelmeni, etc. According to GLM, such words, mainly of Chinese and Japanese origin, occupy up to 20-25% of modern English (as they understand it). In this case, a paradoxical situation arises: the carriers themselves English vocabulary This kind of “international English” is often misunderstood! In the Russian language, of course, borrowings regularly appear, the influx of which has increased sharply in last years: “router”, “merchandiser”, “cleaning” and other ugly words. But they will never be included in BAS and other Russian language dictionaries. The maximum they can count on is the inclusion of foreign words in dictionaries. English philologists, apparently, do not distinguish between foreign and their native words.

3) The vocabulary of English, due to the informal approach characteristic of the Anglo-Saxons, has been overestimated in the last few decades also due to the counting in the general dictionary of the supposedly literary language of words from other layers of speech: scientific, technical and other vocabulary. We do not consider such words as “flange” or “carburetor” to be literary, these are technical terms - but they do, because don't see much difference. At the same time, the assessment of the Russian language contained in the BAS is clearly underestimated due to the opposite picture: dominance in the Soviet language school formal approach. How can there be only 150 thousand words in the Russian language, when just one Dahl dictionary contains about 200 thousand words, today mostly archaisms! It’s just that we don’t count archaisms, but they do (however, I already wrote about this above, in paragraph 1). And if we take technical terms, in our two-volume Polytechnic Dictionary alone (or how many volumes there are, I don’t remember) there are about a million terms.

4) the richness of the language is mutually complemented by two sources: word formation and inflection. The latter is an order of magnitude richer in Russian than in English. It is precisely the scarcity of its inflection that the English language tries to compensate for by word formation (or rather, by borrowing words - see point 2 above). Such a moment as word formation according to regular rules is also considered differently in the English and Russian traditions.

For example, in modern English it is possible to collapse an entire phrase of two, three, four or more words into one word, getting something like the word “self-made-man”. And such words, becoming common, fall into explanatory dictionaries.

The Russian language has very wide possibilities for word formation using prefixes and suffixes. Expressions like “a little hare who didn’t jump over the pit” are not at all uncommon in the Russian language. However, the first word does not appear in Russian explanatory dictionaries, as occasionalism, and the second - as a diminutive, formed according to regular rules.

Summarize. The main core of a language, whether English or Russian, contains at least 250 and hardly more than 300 thousand words. To this in both languages ​​you can add, or you can not add (BAS does not add): archaisms and dialectisms (ohlobystnut, endova, veretyo, poyarkovy) - about another 100-200 thousand words; technical terms, mostly borrowed (driver, caliper, molding) - at least 300-500 thousand; jargon, also known as slang, which can be everyday, youth, journalistic, professional (cut, winda, cherkizon, PR man, setup) - another 100 thousand. It turns out about 700 thousand. And we inflate them to a million: in Russian - by including derivative words like “under-jumped”, in English - thanks to borrowings from Chinese, Arabic and Japanese. So, if you wish, you can simulate the opposite situation, when in Russian there will be nearly a million words, and in English there will be only 300 thousand.

The question arises: do pundits not know all this? Of course they understand everything! They just can't help but know. Then why do they write this? Obviously, the question goes beyond the purely scientific sphere. Firstly, they need something to justify their own negligence in compiling dictionaries. The same BAS has not been reissued, it seems, since 1970. When the need for republication became ripe, work in 1993 ended on the 4th volume. But this is not the only reason. I can’t help but think that some of these statements are of a custom nature and pursue suggestive purposes. Someone needs the territory of this country to turn into a source of cheap raw materials with a submissive and small population, devoid of national identity and pride. In this context, the blow to the Russian language as the basis of culture and self-identification is understandable. The main thing is not to “get carried away” (here’s another neologism, by the way).

L.N. Powder flask, 2009-2011

The vocabulary of the English language is rapidly filling up with new lexical units. Scientists have calculated that an average of 15 new words appear per day, but not all of them take root in the language, but only those that are most widespread.

If not "selfie" in 2013, we would never have known that a self-shot had a specific title. Following him came the well-known today “bookfie”,"shelfie", "legsie" and others, which can often be found in in social networks in the form of hashtags. If you are a person who does not complain about fantasy, you can come up with your own word ending in “sie”/“fie”, post it on a social network and see what the effect is.

Printed dictionaries and word counts

About 15 years ago you could buy an English dictionary containing 500 000 words At that time, such a number seemed quite decent even for a linguist, because, according to scientists, the average person uses about 5,000 words in his speech. This is what is called an active dictionary. All other lexical units remain passive: we can recognize and understand them in texts, but not use them in everyday speech.

How many words do you need to know?

Now let's move on to the question of how many words you need to know in English. It all depends on how to talk, who to talk to and what topics to discuss. In order to communicate with a pen pal, 500-1000 words, including verbs, nouns and adjectives, will be enough. For comparison, the active vocabulary of a native speaker is from 15,000 to 40,000 words. However, it’s worth making a little reservation here so that every student of English doesn’t think that you can master a thousand words and chat freely. This thousand is different for everyone. And if you look into the frequency dictionary, it becomes clear that most of The vocabulary consists of prepositions, pronouns, numerals, question words, which may not be used at all in conversation.

According to the authors of the Oxford Learner's Dictionary, in order to understand 80-90% of the text, you need 3,000 words, which approximately corresponds to the Intermediate level.

In order for words not to become passive, they must be used regularly - repeated at certain intervals. Even better is to work with flash cards, which allow you to repeat everything that has been covered at any time.

In order not to guess the meaning of phrases, but to know them for sure, you will need a little more units - approximately 5,000 - 6,000. With such a reserve, you can freely read books, watch films, and communicate on the most common topics.

GLM and new words in English

If we look at the GLM (Global Language Monitor), we can see how many words in the English language appear regularly and become popular. And this is neither more nor less than 1,041,258 (at the time of writing). And this number is constantly growing. Despite such a vocabulary boom, this does not mean that everyone will be able to actively use new words, so you should focus on the most frequently used units.

You may ask, how do words become popular, who popularizes them? Of course, the media and social networks. For a word to be included in the GLM list, it must be repeated at least 25,000 times, covering a certain breadth and depth of use. Depth is the form of words in the media, and breadth is its distribution throughout the world.

What words are popular today?

Bigly - extremely, very, strongly. It became popular after Donald Trump used a different meaning in his speech “I”m going to cut taxes bigly, and you”re going to raise taxes bigly. Social networks literally exploded from what they heard, discussing whether he really used this word in the right context.It later turned out that Trump used the expression “big league”, but this no longer had any meaning.

Below you can see the most popular words today:

• Brexit - exit of Great Britain from the European Union;
• non-binary - polysexuality, attraction to several genders;
• memory care - fight against Alzheimer's disease;
• texticate - write messages on social networks;
• trumpism - the style of thinking and behavior of a Republican;
• futebol is a variation on the theme of football. The world first saw this word in Brazil in 2011;
• emoticons. smileys, emoji’s - emoticons (smiles) used by everyone in correspondence. Since 2013, these words have become especially popular;
• Chinglish - Chinese-English. However, such words today are enough to understand that that same variable English is spreading around the world at lightning speed.

In December 2016, the expression Web 2.0 emerged, a technical term for a new generation of web products and services. Interestingly, the word 1,00,001 was “financial tsunami” - a global financial restructuring that came out of nowhere and cost trillions of dollars.

This term was preceded by the following words:

• jai ho - long live victory (translation from Hindi);
• N00b is a derogatory term for a newbie who makes unforgivable mistakes;
• slumdog - a person living in the slums;
• cloud computing - cloud computing;
• carbon neutral - with a neutral carbon release rate;
• slow food - movement against the system fast food;
• octomom - mother of eight children Nadya Suleman;
• greenwashing - green camouflage, a form of eco-marketing that uses methods that indicate the environmental friendliness of products;
• defriend - remove from the list of friends, “unfriend”.

So how many basic words are there?

It is quite difficult to answer the question of how many basic words there are in the English language, since these very basic words can vary from person to person. You can select an average of 150-200 verbs and 500 nouns, connect them all with prepositions and pronouns and see what happens.

People who start learning English are often interested in the question of how many English words to learn per day. You shouldn’t overload yourself with 50 or 100 words a day, as you won’t last long; 10-15 words will be enough to simultaneously replenish your vocabulary and not lose your desire to learn English.

If you want to find out the most up-to-date information, take a look at . Thanks to the tutorial, you will master English without leaving home, and the articles will help answer all your questions.

What counts as a word? If “run” is a verb, is the noun “run” considered a separate word? What about various forms- “ran”, “runs”, “running”? Or words derived from the same root, for example, “runner”, “runnable”, “runaway”? How to count how many words there are in the English language and whether to count compound words, for example, “man-o’-war”, “man-hour”, “man of God”, as one word or several?

Another problem: what is English? The word "veal", borrowed from French in the 14th century, looks quite English. To a lesser extent - “spaghetti”, which came from Italian in the 19th century. What about Vietnamese pho soup, which is just now becoming popular? Or Chinese dim sum? Or words that are used in Singaporean English?

Moreover, the very question of how many words there are in the English language is not entirely correct, since it is based on the assumption that words are objects that someone creates and which are stored in dictionaries. Both of these premises are false. Words that exist only in oral speech, but not in print, do not end up in dictionaries.

This does not mean that they are not words, because language is, first of all, speech and only then writing. Of the 6,800 languages ​​in the world, only less than a thousand have a written language. If only those in dictionaries were considered words, most of the languages ​​on the planet would be left without words!

In fact, every language has the ability to produce as many words as necessary for communication - either internal means, by word formation (clever > cleverly) and compounding (water + fall > waterfall), or from the outside, by accepting .

Therefore, the number of words in English and any other language at any given time is infinite, as there is no limit in any human language. However, we can distinguish between hypothetical and factual words. So how many words are there actually in the English language?

Dictionaries are only part of the vocabulary

A dictionary is a convenient collection of vocabulary used in a certain place at a certain period of time. Moreover, each dictionary contains a different number of words. Of course, you can easily find out this number - it is usually indicated on the very first pages.

However, each time compilers decide whether to include or exclude a particular word, they are guided by controversial criteria - limited space in the book, an opinion about whether the word is considered commonly used and its presence in printed sources.

Words have their time

Dictionaries strive for relevance, so they contain words that their compilers consider modern. However, the concept of modernity is difficult to evaluate, because words that were used yesterday may be out of use today. On the other hand, a small group of people may use an archaic word that no one remembers. Some people still use “whither”, “whence”, “thither”, “thence” in their speech.

Think of all those words that existed in the past but are not used now: "spats" (gaiters), "isinglass" (fish glue), "fro" (back). This is not to say that they no longer exist, only that they are not heard in everyday speech. They can be found in historical texts, and we have every right to start using them again.

Words have their place

Dictionaries contain words from a specific area. Expressions used in Australia or England may not be familiar to people in the United States. For example, the word “prepone” (the antonym of “postpone”) is considered new in Canada, but has been used in India for more than 40 years.

There are many “local” words - “gazump”, “daft”, “smarmy” (England); "dag", "billabong", "dinkum" (Australia and New Zealand). Even if words exist in English, they may be actively used in one geographical region and absolutely not to be used in anything else. How then to count how many words there are in English?

Richness of word formation

Let's say we needed a new verb and we borrowed or coined the word "blunk" for this purpose. The English language just got a new concept, right? What about “blunker”, “blunked”, “blunking”, “blunkable”, “blunkability” and even “unblunkability” and so on, which immediately become available to a person as soon as he hears this word?

Have you ever heard the word "unclickability"? It’s not in the dictionaries, but look: if a link can be “clicked on,” then it’s “clickable.” Isn't it possible to say that a broken link is "unclickable"? This means that it has the property of being “unclickable”. Is this a word or not? Of course, it’s a word, but it’s unlikely that it will ever make it into the dictionary.

How about words like "kohlrabian" (a person who eats only kohlrabi), "concarnivore" (who only eats meat dishes) or "pondist" (who only swims in a pond). These concepts are not necessary, so they are never used. Does this mean that these are not words?

Some words exist simply because of . There are those that are used once in a specific case and are no longer heard. In fact, they "are" whether they are used or not. How to count in this case how many words are in English?

Do words even exist?

After everything we wrote about above, such a question may seem unexpected. But when we speak, we often don't take full words from our mental store of words (called the "lexicon"), but rather lexemes. Before we pronounce them, we can add morphemes (suffixes and prefixes) to them.

When we recall the word “word,” we can say “word,” or “wordy,” or “wordiness,” depending on what we want to express. We pronounce the word “speaker” by recalling “speak” and adding .

What is the difference between remembering “speaker” and remembering “speak” + “er”? There are many differences between lexemes and morphemes, but the most important of them is that lexemes are always pronounced, morphemes are not. To say that a person is running, we use the verb "run". To name this person himself, we use the noun "runner". That is, "er" means "one who performs an action."

The one who writes (“write”) is called a writer (“writer”). But if this logic is correct, which part represents the doer of the action in the word “a guide”? Or "a cook"? Or “a cheat”? IN different languages There are millions of such words where the change in meaning is not expressed by any sound. It turns out that a morpheme can also be silent.

Another difference is that lexemes, that is, nouns, verbs, adjectives, refer to objects and concepts of the real world (“word”, “speak”, “red”), while morphemes express only grammatical categories - tense , number, performer of the action. There are no silent lexemes in any language. Morphemes, on the other hand, can also be silent.

What this all means is that when we say what we think of as “words,” the brain does two things: various actions: remembers the sound and meaning of a lexeme and adds (or not) something completely different to it - morphemes. Some modern research indicate that different areas of the brain are responsible for these two processes.

Finally

So speech is not what it seems. We don't just keep the words we need in our "mind palace" and store the rest in printed dictionaries. First of all, we can create words on the fly, as needed, using the two-step process mentioned above.

Do you know a large number of words in English? Tell us how you improve your vocabulary!

Knowledge of English is required in many professions today. If it is not directly required by the employer, then, in most cases, you need it for personal purposes.

I constantly face the problem that I seem to already know a lot of words, but nevertheless, I have to constantly look into the dictionary. How many words are there in total? :)

How many words are there in English

In fact, the exact amount is very difficult to calculate. After all, each new word is born approximately every hour and a half. And besides, it is not entirely clear whether it is worth counting all the word forms of each word, which makes the task very difficult. Philologists wonder whether slang words are worth taking into account.

And, of course, it is very difficult to keep track of the appearance of new words. However, I found information about a company called GLM that does just that. According to her data, there are 1,004,010 words in the English language. A lot, right?

For comparison, it is believed that the Russian language has 500,000 words. This is 2 times less than in English. And I think the rate at which new words are introduced in the "high and mighty" is much slower than in English.

In addition, I wondered what a word needs to be officially introduced as new. After all, someone can simply utter a non-existent word in an interview. So what, it will appear in online dictionaries? No. It is not that simple. For a word to become officially registered, it must be mentioned on social networks about 25 thousand times.

Which languages ​​have the most words?

The same English language comes first. But who is coming next? One American newspaper publication compiled a small list. Here is a list of the first four places after English:

1. Chinese- about five hundred thousand words. This number includes all kinds of dialects.
2. Japanese language - two hundred thirty thousand words.
3. Spanish- two hundred twenty-five thousand words.
4. And only in fourth place is the Russian language - one hundred and ninety-five thousand words. At the top I wrote that there are about 500 thousand words in the Russian language. Yes, one source states exactly that. But USA Today thinks differently.

English language learners often ask the question: “When will I be able to speak fluently?” How many English words do you need to know for this? Different sources give different answers on this matter, but no consensus has been reached on this issue. We decided to express an opinion based on the experience of our English teachers.

How many English words do you need to know to speak fluently: myths

How many English words do you need to know to speak fluently: 1000 or 10000? The concept of “minimum required vocabulary” is a subtle and ambiguous thing. The Oxford English Dictionary lists 500,000 words: a frightening number and not at all encouraging for those learning English. According to statistics, a native English speaker actively uses from 15,000 to 40,000 words. This is the vocabulary that a person uses in written or spoken speech - active vocabulary. Passive vocabulary (words that the native speaker recognizes when speaking or reading, but does not use in speech) reaches 100,000 words. In the article “” you can read in detail about these concepts.

The idea of ​​the “magic thousand English words” is now being actively discussed on the Internet. According to this hypothesis, a person only needs to know 1000 words of English to communicate freely on any everyday topic. Agree, it’s great: if you consider that we learn 10 new words a day, then in just over 3 months we will be able to communicate freely!

At the same time, the vocabulary of a 4-5 year old child averages from 1200 to 1500 words, and that of an 8 year old child - about 3000 words. Does 1000 words really give you freedom in speaking? We believe that 1000 words are not enough for normal communication at the adult level. Where did this figure come from then? Perhaps the whole point is in a study by British scientists: they found that any author of an average text (excluding literary masterpieces) uses a vocabulary of only 1000 words. However, no one clarifies that the composition of this 1000 is different for each author. Each person has his own vocabulary, which he uses when writing texts.

Some people advocate 1000 words for another reason: they believe that for free communication In English you need to learn the thousand most commonly used words. You can even find special ones on the Internet frequency dictionaries. However, if you look at such a publication, it becomes clear that you won’t get far with these thousand words: about a third of them are prepositions (in, at, on), different kinds pronouns (he, she, his, her), question words (where, why, what), numerals (first, second), etc. With such a set it will be difficult to compose a meaningful sentence. In addition, the authors of dictionaries, when writing irregular verbs, do not indicate all three forms at once, but arrange them in three places according to their frequency. For example, the word keep is included in the first 200 words (according to various sources, 167-169 places), kept - is in 763-765 places. This approach to irregular verbs inconvenient: it’s better to learn all three forms of the verb at once, so it’s easier to remember them.

However, not all frequency publications are bad. You can use them, but choose the RIGHT words to communicate, especially verbs and nouns. In a sentence the verb plays main role, because in any sentence there is an action (go, break, speak) or a state (be, exist) of the subject, expressed by a verb. It makes sense to study lists of the most frequently used verbs in the English language. For example, beginners can be advised to master a list of 100 verbs - all of them are voiced, given in three forms at once. And those who continue can familiarize themselves with the list of the 1000 most frequent verbs, where you can also see examples of their use in various contexts.

If we “lower the bar” completely, then we can also rely on the dictionary of Ellochka the cannibal: she easily managed with 30 words. However, if you don't want to be a "cannibal" and want to speak at the level of an adult, you will need to learn more English words.

As vocabulary is reduced, so are the number of feelings you can express, the number of events you can describe, the number of the things you can identify!

If your vocabulary decreases, so does the number of feelings you can express, the number of events you can describe, the number of things you can name.

How many English words do you need to know to speak fluently: reality

Now let's put mythology aside and solve the question of how many words are needed to communicate freely in English. And let us turn again to statistics; like facts, they are stubborn things. To understand 80-90% of the text on a general topic, it is enough to know about 3000 words; this is the figure stated by various studies by foreign scientists. You can read more details on the website lextutor.ca. Oxford learner's Dictionaries also offers 3,000 words for English language learners. However, this is not yet enough for FREE communication in English. As you read, you will guess the meaning of many words from the context. In addition, of these 3000 words, some will be in your passive dictionary, that is, you will recognize many words when speaking or reading, but not use them in speech.

To speak truly fluently, you need to “activate” your passive vocabulary: 3000 in the active vocabulary is a confident or beginning stage. At this level of knowledge, a person can speak on general topics quite fluently and confidently.

Thus, we came to the idea that 3000 words - minimum required to talk about general topics. It is possible to reach this level “from scratch” in about 1.5-2.5 years (depending on the intensity of classes, the efforts of the student, etc.). To express yourself truly FREELY, you need to know about 5000-6000 words. This vocabulary corresponds to the level, and this is already 3-4 years of learning English from scratch.

Don't speak English yet? Start mastering the first 1000 words! You can calculate the time frame in another way: if you tirelessly learn 10 words a day, then a stock of 3000 words can be acquired in just a year of study. However, do not forget that memorizing words is not enough. To learn how to speak, you need to learn grammar so you understand how to construct a sentence. And most importantly, you need to speak English as often as possible. You need to be able to operate with any vocabulary, then even with 1000 words in your pocket you can, if necessary, communicate in English on a simple topic.

As you can see, to communicate freely in English you need about 3000-5000 words, your desire to speak and hard work. Do you want to make it easier for yourself to memorize so many English words? Try it with one of our teachers. You will significantly expand your vocabulary and learn how to correctly use the learned vocabulary in speech.