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Comment by WalterBright | Hacker News Reader

Just reading the front page of the newspaper every day would do the trick. Look up every word you don't know.

Newspapers are targeted at a 6th grade level, so that's about right.

What helps is the common speaking vocabulary is about 2000 words. Not a tough goal to achieve. It'd be nice start to have a list of those words.

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> the common speaking vocabulary is about 2000 words

I feel that this must depend on the definition of "word". Are all conjugations of some root the same "word" in this sense, or does each conjugation count as a different word?

IIRC, the Duolingo word list was around 2000 words when I was still using it, and that just gave me unreasonable expectations.

Now I'm way beyond the top 2000 words, at least according to my Babbel and Clozemaster profiles — I can understand *most* of what's going on in the news or in real life these days, but I sure couldn't when I was only 2000 words in.

I read long ago that the average vocabulary of a high school graduate was 13,000 words. For a college graduate, 30,000 words. 1 million words in the English language.

For spoken conversation, it was about 2000 words.

I suppose that the utility of 2000 words was dependent on who you were speaking with :-/ I've also read that newspapers and TV are targeted at a 6th grade vocabulary.

Anecdotally, I've found an unsurprising correlation between the number (and quality) of books read and vocabulary.

Yeah, but which language and what exactly is a word? German has a case system where the same word can look quite differently based on where in the sentence they are. Do all of them count as one word or is each form different one?

The word is conjugated in the case system, in other words, it's still the same word. So all of the different forms would count as one word. Learning the different forms is part of the grammar.

This level of nitpicking is of no interest to me. Sorry.

When learning a new language, it's not a nit, it's the core question of how to measure progress with the vocabulary.

If I know only the present tense forms of words, can I even say that I know those words at all? Or do I know them at, say, 25% (to pick an arbitrary guess as to how often each tense comes up)?

> I feel that this must depend on the definition of "word". Are all conjugations of some root the same "word" in this sense, or does each conjugation count as a different word?

Even ignoring verb conjugations or other grammatical variants depending on the language, a lot of common words will have a whole bunch of different meanings (and knowing all of the meanings of common words can sometimes be more important than learning more words that are less common) so looking at the number of individual words is definitely misleading.

Aye. Time flies like an arrow, fruit flies like a banana, etc.

Heavily depends on the Newspaper though .

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