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WalterBright

I read years ago that:

1. TV vocabulary is 2,000 words

2. High school vocabulary is 10,000 words

3. College vocabulary is 30,000 words

4. English language has 1,000,000 words

This is good news - you can be proficient in a foreign language by learning only 2,000 words!

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Those numbers aren't right.

I don't know what "TV vocabulary" is even supposed to mean... but even if you're talking about just sitcoms it's way more than 2,000 words. You cannot be proficient in a foreign language with just 2,000 words. That's generally considered around the "basic" level of language learning classes, before intermediate and advanced.

A fluent adult generally knows 15,000-30,000 words.

The English language really only has 50,000-60,000 words, depending on how you count them. I have no idea where you got the "million" figure but it's nonsensical. Like it's not even a matter of how many archaic or technical terms you include, it's off by a full order of magnitude no matter what.

> This is good news - you can be proficient in a foreign language by learning only 2,000 words!

Depends what you mean by "proficient". I currently know ~6k Spanish words and would hesitate to self-apply that word. Others might, but damn languages are hard.

> Depends what you mean by "proficient".

I thought I was pretty clear - you could understand at the level of television. Television scripts are dumbed down.

Depends on a number of factors, but the majority of people with a 2k word vocabulary would not understand much of a Spanish television show or news cast at native speed. If you were reading the script, it might be different.

Being proficient in a language is really less about memorizing words than it is pronunciation and grammar. Memorization itself is pretty easy.

No, memorize many noun most important. Grammar less Important. Can do food, can do travel, can do tax. Because, noun most important.

Working with ESL people makes it clear that grammar isn't so important. One of my friends would say, instead of "go shopping", would say "make some shoppings". Instead of "it's time to go", he'd say "time for go". All words that started with 's' were pronounced 'ehs', as in "gas ehstation".

The other people at work soon picked those lines up, and we used them regularly amongst ourselves. I still use them decades later!

But your friend was applying consistent rules of grammar from his mother tongue. Having learned some vocabulary, he would mentally form the phrases in his head, and then literally translate out the words and tenses.

Grammar was so important to him that he was adhering to the grammatical rules he knew. It would be interesting to know how he would perform with writing or typing instead of contemporaneous conversation.

"go" in particular is an irregular verb, and also one of the most versatile words in the English language. Having studied how to conjugate "go" in other languages, I do not envy anyone trying to conjugate or just use it in an English sentence!

The point was I understood him perfectly despite the execrable grammar.

That's cause you knew what he wanted to do, and there was no other possible meaning from "make some shopping."

If he just said "make shopping some" it would have been less clear.

This is grammar from their native language. They dont know the English grammar, so they just assume it's the same as the one they understand. You just understand them via the context.

Older Europeans used to say 'AND NOW WE MAKE PARTY!"

English is a fault tolerant language that is usually comprehensible with errors. That isn't generally applicable to all languages.

> That isn't generally applicable to all languages.

I'm skeptical of that claim.

Put volume!

— Trevor Noah, <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wtz0WZSNcPA#t=43s>

Me go market, find juice, say sugar free

nice! sugar free!

me take juice, me take sugar, police take me, why? hell!

I think we have different definitions of “proficient”. :)

Tbh, that's how I learned English. Rudimentary grammar, knew a few words, and then just read with dictionary until I didn't need a dictionary. Also watched a lot of shows until I didn't need subtitles.

Languages are weird like that – if you use them enough, your brain just figures some things out. After all, natural languages are easy enough for toddlers to learn.

I recall a WW2 documentary where a veteran recounted that he approached a bunker filled with Wehrmacht soldiers. He pointed his gun, and said "raus oder ich scheissen!" The response was laughter. He repeated, and they finally came out, still laughing.

He later realized he should have said "shiessen".

P.S. He confused "shoot" with "shit".

Please someone tell me where to get those 1 million words in decreasing order of difficulty or ascending order of usage along with their meanings and insinuations

Sounds like a job for LLMs.

Only if you mean llms finding already compiled lists on the internet. Since they would be too inefficient for actually compiling a list themselves.

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Wiktionary:Frequency_lists

Also worth going through the references of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zipf%27s_law

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