I have big news. The 13th of July, the first English with Dane webinar is happening. A lot of you have written to me asking me about classes and courses, etc. And I'm really happy to tell you that this is the first version of that. It is a one-hour interactive webinar focused primarily on the use of idioms, expressions, and overall agility. It's going to be really productive, and I would love for you to sign up.
Para apuntarte, you can go to Englishwithdain.com slash academy, or you can go to my bio, my perfil, and Instagram or TikTok. And I'll also put the link in the description of this episode so you can sign up easily. So, yes, the first English with Dane webinar, idioms, expressions, and agility on the 13th of July. Sign up now because there are limited spaces. Today's episode is the answer to a question that language learners have been asking me for years.
How many words do I need to know to be fluent? Or really just how many words do I need to know? Period. So I've wondered about this question for a while too. So I decided to do some research and give you an actual answer. So let's get right into it. You are listening to episode 144 of English with Dane. Hit it. So there's this show on BBC Radio 4 called More or Less, which periodically answers questions from listeners.
One of these listeners was very frustrated with the German language because he couldn't seem to retain, no lograba retener, he couldn't retain more than 500 words in German. So he asks the people behind this radio show if they could give him a shortcut, un attacho, a shortcut, and tell him how many words we actually use on a regular basis. What they did first was figure out how many words we know when it comes to our first language. That makes sense, right?
If we're trying to figure out how many words we need to be fluent in a second language, it would be good to know how many words we need in our mother tongue. So apparently there are around 171,000 words currently in use in USO in the English language, without counting the 47,000 that are no longer in use or obsolete. The article then goes on to talk about these linguists named Paul Nation, John Reed, and Robin Golden, who devised or came up with a quick test that just involves 50 words.
What they said was that you should take those 50 words, check how many of them you understand, and then multiply that number by 500 in order to get the number of your total vocabulary. Again, this is if English is your first language. The test isn't easy by the way. It starts off easy, but then contains harder and harder words such as oleaginus or cow sucker, which apparently has nothing to do, not has nothing to do with cows or sucking. So how many words do we know then?
According to Stuart Webb, who is a professor of applied linguistics at the University of Western Ontario, native speakers know 15,000 to 20,000 word families or lemmas. If you're wondering what a word family is, it's a root word and all of its inflections. So like build, builds, buildings, built, etc. That would be a word family or lemma. So native speakers know around 15 to 20,000 word families or individual words, let's say. Here's where it gets interesting though.
Professor Webb found that if you're learning a second language in what they are calling a traditional setting, like studying French in England or English in Japan, so outside of the actual country, you might struggle to learn more than two to three thousand words even after years of study. There was actually a study done in Taiwan that showed that after nine years of learning a foreign language, half of the students couldn't learn the 1,000 most frequently used words.
Here's the key to all of this though, la clave, the key. The key is the frequency with which the words you learn appear in day-to-day use. It doesn't really matter which language we're talking about. So according to Professor Webb, your aim should be to learn the 800 to 1000 most commonly used words in a language. And in the case of English, if you learn only the 800 most used families or lemmas, you should be able to understand around 75% of the language as it is spoken in normal everyday life.
So 800 doesn't seem that unattainable. In fact, I'm sure you could all do it. Here's the next level though. Professor Webb also says that in order to understand dialogue in film and television, you probably need to know the 3,000 most common lemmas. When it comes to articles, newspapers, and novels, you would need necesitaries, you would need around 8 to 9,000 lemmas. So it gets trickier and trickier.
I think right now some of you are thinking that it's easier to read than speak, but remember that we're just talking about understanding words. The written word is often much more rich in terms of vocabulary. I don't think it's common to find people who can speak more articulately than they can write. Anyway, I thought that was really interesting. It's something that I've been wondering for a while, and now we have an answer or a piece of an answer.
I'm sure this is actually a much more complicated question if you if you dig deeper. That's it for this episode of English with Dane. I hope you enjoyed the episode and I hope you learned something or at least gained some insight. Don't forget to follow me on Instagram and TikTok at Englishwith Dane for quizzes, videos, and random stuff. And again, the first English with Dane webinar will take place on the 13th of July. So go and sign up for that.
There are limited spots, so go to Englishwithdain.com slash academy and sign up, or go to the description of the episode or to link in my bio and TikTok. You get it. So go sign up. All right. See you next time. Talk soon. Bye bye.