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