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Comment by mrfusion | Hacker News Reader

So I'm wondering, if you just learned the 200 most popular words, you might get pretty far in learning a new language, no?

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200? no. Try 2,000. That should be representable of a barely usable level of the language. If you are what might be described as fluent, you're probably at >20,000. Take this headline:

JACUZZIS FOUND EFFECTIVE IN TREATING PHLEBITIS

"EFFECTIVE" and "IN" are the only two words found in the first 2,000 words sorted by frequency, although "FOUND" is close. So with only 200 words you'd understand:

WNPHMMVF SBHAQ RSSRPGVIR IN GERNGVAT CUYROVGVF

2,000 words would give you:

WNPHMMVF FOUND EFFECTIVE IN GERNGVAT CUYROVGVF

And some grammar knowledge would tell you

WNPHMMVF(N) FOUND EFFECTIVE IN GERNGVAT(V) CUYROVGVF(N)

Which is enough to know that you only really need to look up "TREATING" in the dictionary to understand the gist of the sentence But it'd hardly pass as a fluent understanding...

"Some grammar knowledge" probably also tells you the structure of the verb, namely TREAT+ING(V,present progressive). "TREAT" is the 1,118th most common word, so that gives you:

WNPHMMVF FOUND EFFECTIVE IN TREATING CUYROVGVF

And then some contextual knowledge of what sort of things get treated tells you that CUYROVGVF is a disease or injury, and WNPHMMVF is a medicine or therapy. So knowing 2,000 words and some grammar isn't quite fluent, but it's around the level of a middle-school child who has to ask what lots of nouns are.

This is actually a very nice example of the importance of grammar. A typical novice English learner, even if they can look up all the words from the dictionary, would go on like this:

"Hmm, Jacuzzis is clearly a noun, so it must be the subject. So Jacuzzis found "effective"... wait, that doesn't make sense. "Effective" is not a company, how does one found "effective"? Oh, it must be the past tense of "find". OK, so these Jacuzzis found... effective? How does one find "effective"? And why was effective hiding in "treating phlebitis"? OK, whatever, maybe I could decipher this if I understand "treating phlebitis"... So it is a kind of disease that is... treating someone (or something)? How could a disease treat anyone? This sentence makes no sense!!"

If you think "Duh, that's ridiculous, nobody thinks like that", then you obviously never met a struggling English learner.

I took exactly this approach to learning passable German when I lived there a couple months. Unfortunately, most Germans would much rather practice their English on you than let you practice German on them. So I gave up and let them.

It's funny, I had exactly the same experience when I lived in Germany for six months and was studying German. I would just keep speaking German until they gave up :)

Probably depends on the language. A three-year old supposedly knows about 1,000 English words.

You could probably at least get around.

While the frequency of words drops off precipitously, there's also the fact that the set of all thoughts one might want to convey is incredibly vast, so within any given conversation there will probably be at least a few words which otherwise rarely appear.

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