Wednesday, April 25, 2012

The Word Brain

1
Words
Words are the fuel of language. The number of words you are familiar
with determines your language abilities. The more words you know, the
better you are. Put in numbers, this statement reads as follows:
15,000 > 10,000 > 5,000 > 2,000 > 1,000 > 500
Between 2 and 18 years, you learned 10 new words every day. Later, at
work or at university, you enriched your brain vocabulary with
thousands of technical words. Now, after decades, you know more than
50,000 words of your native language. Words are the hard stuff of
language; in comparison, learning grammar is a finger exercise for preschool
children.
To be comfortable in another language you need roughly half of the
words you possess in your native language – 25,000. As about 40
percent are variants of other words and can be easily inferred, a good
estimate of truly unique words you need to start with is 15,000 words.
This is a huge number and double what you are expected to learn in
8 years at school. Fortunately, you do not always have to learn them all.
Take the word evolution. In Spanish, Italian, and French, the word
translates into evolución, evoluzione and évolution. As you can see,
many words are almost identical between some languages and come
with just slight differences in packaging. Once you understand the rules
that govern these differences, you have immediate access to thousands
of words.

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