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.