Hi there, I was wondering, how many words would you have to know to be well able to understand a different language? I mean turn on the radio and get a good idea of what’s being said, pick up a newspaper and understand it?
I have started here on lingq a few weeks ago, I read a lesson, write sentences from the lessons, and repeat listening a lot and in the end I move the words to known, I am currently at 1000 words known.
I know you could keep learning forever really, but I would like a number to use as a goal and to work towards, and keep myself motivated.
Oh… And another thing, I love the site, and enjoy the lessons but regarding interesting content, how do ye find content ye are interested in? I brought in text from wikipedia and was reading some stuff about the city of florence yesterday because I visited there recently, however I felt I was missing out because I had no audio??
I know these questions probably comes up a lot but seeing that lingq counts the words for you I am curious! Thanks. Any feedback greatly appreciated.
I don’t know about Spanish. The word count on LingQ can’t really be compared between languages. For example, one word in Chinese might correspond to ten in Russian. My experience with German is this.
When I was at around 10,000 known words on LingQ, I read a basic novel aimed at children of the 8-12 year old range outside of LingQ. At about 20,000, I was able to read novels outside of LingQ that were aimed at adults and get a good idea of what is going on. I am now just past 30,000 and I can enjoy reading novels quite comfortably, though I still miss a lot of detail and come across a lot of words I do not know.
I suspect all these numbers scale down a bit when going from German to Spanish, such that 30,000 in German might correspond to 20,000 in Spanish, but I don’t really know.
There are a lot of Wikipedia articles that already have audio. I would check out this page
I agree with Colin: for reading and watching TV, films you need quite a lot of words.
For speaking you need less words, but the knowledge of these words must be very active: 4000 words on the tip of your tongue is for speaking much better than 20,000 passive words.