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I read years ago that the vocabulary used on TV was about 2,000 words. A high school graduate has a vocabulary of 10,000 words, a college graduate 30,000, and there are a million words in the English language.

What was interesting to me was that I could learn a foreign language by only learning 2,000 words!

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That is interesting. What about languages other than English? Any idea about the avg. word count needed to learn them? (Used on TV does seem like a good benchmark for "learned). Or is it roughly the same for every language, do you think?

"being able to read a newspaper" is a typical goal for pre-fluency language acquisition. In most languages I'm aware of the number of words required to do that is something around 1500-3000.

Yes. But I read somewhere that a newspaper vocabulary is targeted at somewhere around a 5th grade reading level.

I have no data, but I suspect it is similar.

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