How Many Words Do You Know? January 27, 2012
Posted by cantueso in language.trackback
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Native speakers are expected to deal with vocabularies of about 3000 words.
Many foreigners know that many and yet can’t speak.
Why is that?
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A native speaker knows his 3000 words each with more than one meaning.
If there is an estimated average of 5 meanings per word, your 3000 word vocabulary represents a 15 000 item knowledge.
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HOWEVER, here comes the catch: a native speaker also combines his 3000 words all with each other to create thousands of new meanings :
Bring up ….educate
bring down ….topple
bring in …. earn
bring out…publish
bring off ….succeed
Break up ….. interrupt
break up ….disintegrate
break down …. collapse
break down …. analyze
break off … interrupt
break away ….escape
break out…erupt, escape
Estimating about 10 new combinations per word, that would give your native speaker a command of over 150 000 lexical items.
Now add ……
…… literary quotes
…… fixed phrases
…… abbreviations
…… technical terms
and you end up with 200 000 lexical items known to the native speaker .
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Definitions
………………….. Active vocabulary = words that you use
………………….. Passive vocabulary = words that you recognize in context. The passive vocabulary is always much larger than the active one.
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C r e d i t s
The stats and the idea are based on “Cambridge Companion to the English Language”.
The little kid with his cell phone is from a drawing by Gary Olsen at http://www.dubuque.k12.ia.us/cartoons. He allows taking his drawing if you link it to his collection.
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Added March 24 2011
More recent examples:
Uptick …….. I asked three Spanish engineers. They knew “tick” and of course “up”, but were unable to guess the meaning of “uptick in the radiation readings” .
Axe ……. These three were also unable to understand “Calls to Axe MP” though they knew “axe” and understood “call”.
Their English level is high, but they only read technical literature. One of them very recenly passed the GMAT with a 6 and maximum punctuation in his essays ……
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I think the word run is an example of how difficult English is to learn. I run for office, there is a run in my stocking, I will run around the block, the car is running, the water is running, I will run for my life, have run out of time, my nose is running and there must be dozens more. I would imagine other languages have a different word in each example to convey the meaning in context.
“Run” and most other very common words like e.g. go, come, be, have, get. Of these, “get” is the most fearful, because of its standard grammar use in the passive formation: to get killed, get seen, get understood.
Besides, your examples are of idiomatic uses. The difficulty is in the combination of verb and particle: run up (a hill, a bill), run down (a hill, a reputation), bring up (educate, mention, discover), get in, get out, get over.
Many of these combinations are not stable, are not in the dictionary, are novel or old.