8/2/2026 at 4:39:05 PM
I tried to organize vocab by difficulty level for an English language-learning app once.It shocked me how there is absolutely no "right" answer.
If you are teaching English for travel, then you're prioritizing a lot of stuff around bathrooms, transportation, menu items, etc.
If it's for understanding TV, it's a lot of words like "murder", etc. Depending on which TV shows you want to understand.
If it's for reading the newspaper, you don't ever need to know "bathroom", but you sure do need to know words like "congressman".
While if you are living somewhere, it's really important to know a lot of basic supermarket items that you wouldn't prioritize for other usages.
Also, while it's easy to calculate word frequencies for stuff like newspaper articles, there aren't any good statistics (last I checked) around just normal everyday conversation. Because that stuff isn't getting recorded and transcribed. And the substitutes -- transcribed speech from TV, radio, podcasts, etc. -- is not the same context as the random stuff you say at home and during an average day.
by crazygringo
8/2/2026 at 6:27:40 PM
> Also, while it's easy to calculate word frequencies for stuff like newspaper articles, there aren't any good statistics (last I checked) around just normal everyday conversation. Because that stuff isn't getting recorded and transcribed.Linguists have resorted to spying on people in parks and shops and restaurants, to get "natural" language unperturbed by observer effects, audience tailoring, the filter of writing, etc. (In most cases that would not be considered ethical today!)
The gold standard is something like: get acculturated to the language community you wish to study, make some acquaintances and friends, somehow finagle an invite to their homes or workplaces or social venues, and then with their permission, record their conversations as unobtrusively as you can.
There is so little data on how language is really used it is quite bedevilling. As soon as people know you are listening they change how they speak.
by retrac
8/2/2026 at 7:37:31 PM
> Linguists have resorted to spying on people in parks and shops and restaurants, to get "natural" language unperturbed by observer effects, audience tailoring, the filter of writing, etc.Hence the common phrase, found in most language phrasebooks: “is that a linguist hiding behind that bush?”
by rsynnott
8/3/2026 at 6:34:35 AM
Im working this into some conversation this week. I feel its something Douglas Adams would have wrote.by w-ll
8/2/2026 at 8:35:48 PM
That’s what makes ethnolinguistics fascinating. As a native French speaker, I started getting interested by linguistics when I learned Italian, and now I keep noting things I never thought about when I talk with other native French speakers. As someone said, “You don’t know your language until you know another one”.by hk__2
8/2/2026 at 7:02:38 PM
That's what I discovered religion is for, understand the language as it was created.Ever wonder who decides what's self-explanatory and what resonates?
by itsamario
8/2/2026 at 11:06:48 PM
What?by monk_grilla
8/2/2026 at 6:44:19 PM
This is one upside of the digital panopticon, I guess.by HPsquared
8/3/2026 at 8:15:26 AM
Why is it unethical to record what people say in public settings, like a cafe, transcribe it, and then throw away any identifying information? You could go even farther and only store the individual set of words spoken without any ordering, so it would be impossible to reconstruct the actual content of anyone's conversations.by DiogenesKynikos
8/3/2026 at 12:52:36 PM
In a perfect world, it wouldn't be. Personally, if I knew an infallible person was recording my private conversation and anonymising it to an acceptable degree, I wouldn't care. For example, by removing personal identifiers and aggregating the data across a topic such as "conversations at cafes in central Paris in 2026".But the second there is doubt about security across any link in the chain from raw recording to anonymisation and storage, I would no longer consent.
by NorthSouthNorth
8/3/2026 at 8:36:09 AM
Universities in certain countries have strict ethical standards that require consent and crediting informants. These standards were often inspired by working with indigenous informants, who were viewed as having been historically exploited in the collection of data, but they apply now to anyone eliciting data from anyone.by TFNA
8/3/2026 at 10:29:14 AM
What is the practical harm that is actually being avoided here?When people speak in public, they assume that other people around them can overhear what they're saying. This is just gathering anonymous statistics about word use. It's hard to imagine how there's any real downside for anyone here.
by DiogenesKynikos
8/3/2026 at 12:03:23 PM
The word set is enough to identify some people based on speech patterns or interests. The inclusion of other words in the set — cocaine, divorce, abortion, merger, lymphoma — would make many people uncomfortable.by smelendez
8/3/2026 at 4:27:32 AM
Its um like you know whateverby nelox
8/2/2026 at 9:21:12 PM
> If it's for reading the newspaper, you don't ever need to know "bathroom", but you sure do need to know words like "congressman".Unless you're reading a newspaper from the last 5 years or so - in which case, the word "bathroom" becomes surprisingly more relevant.
by tavavex
8/2/2026 at 11:18:16 PM
>Retired radio shock jock Alan Jones′ influence and reputation survived one arrest, in a London public toilet in 1988.Always has been.
by protocolture
8/2/2026 at 5:25:57 PM
There is also a whole different language used to talk to toddlers and small children that native speakers know but very few adult learners ever pick up. And slang used among teenagers and young adults that often times not even their parents understand fully.by adrianN
8/2/2026 at 5:35:42 PM
The problem with adding slang to any organised education program is two-fold: some of it changes much more quickly than you course materials can, and much of it is quite localised.by dspillett
8/3/2026 at 8:20:31 AM
I recently discovered that even high-level non-native speakers do not know the term "fraidy cat."by DiogenesKynikos
8/3/2026 at 9:26:20 AM
Well, I didn't know the term until I looked it up just now (though the meaning was obvious enough). It appears to be a US term.by Gander5739
8/2/2026 at 6:05:49 PM
Beware though that only learning words may leave you confused as in my experience Americans tend to overload the same word with a different meaning depending on the context. They also often resort to idioms and cultural references.For reasons unknown to me, instead of using the word with the meaning they probably are trying to convey, they rather use vague analogies or metaphors.
It always made me question if Americans in contrast to the British are a bit afraid to be precise.
by dadie
8/2/2026 at 7:15:30 PM
> Americans tend to overload the same word with a different meaning depending on the context. They also often resort to idioms and cultural references.This is not specific to "Americans". Learn any language and you will have the same impression, and experience the same gulf between textbook usage and everyday usage.
by jonahx
8/3/2026 at 2:19:26 AM
As a non-native speaker, English does have (what I think is) a rather unique phenomenon where the same verb can be used to express different shades of meaning (or sometimes wildly different meanings) depending on whether or which proposition is attached to it. "To step" means to take a step, but "to step up" means to confront something. When you "talk to" someone you converse with them, and when you "talk at" someone you monologue at them.by fluoridation
8/3/2026 at 5:45:53 AM
English uses a lot of prepositional phrase idioms. Now that I'm learning Japanese, I find there are relatively few like that (although not zero, compare "と相談" to discuss with and に相談" to consult). But it instead uses many, many compound verb expressions that are often not intiutive to a learner and just have to be memorized, so the effect is similar.It also has words with opposite meanings like 断る (kotowaru, to reject, to ask permission), and 適当 (tekitou, suitable, appropriate, half-assed, careless).
by tdeck
8/3/2026 at 7:32:58 AM
Thanks. I'm learning Japanese too. The other day I learned that 在る can be used with either で or に and didn't make this connection, though I guess whether it counts as different meanings depends on how you look at it, since in both cases you're specifying the position in spacetime of something.by fluoridation
8/3/2026 at 9:14:16 AM
> [Japanese] also has words with opposite meaningsThese are known as contronyms (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contronym).
by Gander5739
8/3/2026 at 10:59:25 AM
Thank you! It's funny how I have never thought of most of these. The only similar word I could think of was "biweekly".by tdeck
8/3/2026 at 8:48:00 AM
These are called phrasal verbs. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_phrasal_verbsby gmac
8/3/2026 at 8:23:50 AM
This is a feature among the Germanic languages (of which English is one).In German, these are called splittable verbs, and they can appear in two forms: "upstep" and "step up," depending on the sentence structure. That makes "upstep" / "step up" seem more like a separate verb from "step," rather than just being the same verb with an adverb added on.
by DiogenesKynikos
8/2/2026 at 6:28:17 PM
Interesting perspective, I'm used to seeing the exact opposite observation, that British people are famous for saying things meant as insults that sound positive at a surface level and that people are often unsure if they're being mocked/ridiculed or not.Of course, American corporate-speak is unique from normal conversations, and people intentionally use vagueness to make sure there's general agreement before saying something concretely that might be contentious or cause problems.
by alyeska2
8/2/2026 at 7:03:16 PM
Different context. One social register is extreme understatement, which may be laden with passive aggression, but could also be approving. "That's not a bad idea" is likely to mean "Good idea, let's do it, or at least consider it seriously." But "Interesting idea" is likely to mean "You're an idiot."This is more corporate/middle class.
There's also a working class register which is very direct and sweary, and extreme insults are actually meant affectionately.
Even more confusingly, the two can overlap, and the same people will switch between them - sometimes in the same setting - with relative equals.
Americans don't seem to do understatement. "My business died" becomes "My incredible journey." Relationships are cross-bred with hustle, so you can be friends with someone and they'll ask you to invest in their MLM scheme.
Instead of using understatement US corporate speaks uses noise to act out hierarchy, to gaslight and to misdirect.
I was talking to someone today who was asked to produce a report. They sent it on time, and then the team lead called a meeting to ask why it hadn't arrived.
The report was literally sitting in their inbox unread. Everyone could see it, but they all went through the motions of pretending it wasn't there and developing an action plan for future delivery.
It's all very David Graeber. So far as I can tell the US seems to specialise in situations where corporate insanity is happening but the sharp edges have been filed off, so it looks like productive activity higher up the pyramid.
by TheOtherHobbes
8/2/2026 at 9:43:10 PM
> Americans don't seem to do understatement.Brits say this all the time because they assume we talk like people in movies and interviews do (or they interpret corporate-speak as how Americans actually talk). We use understatement plenty. In fact, the "interesting idea" understatement? I wouldn't even clock it as British because we use that in the US, too. I would say it is a classic example we use here of how you politely call an idea stupid. "Hm, interesting." We don't usually say "that's a stupid idea." That would be extremely rude.
I encounter this same attitude vis a vis Brits and sarcasm. "Oh, Americans don't get sarcasm." We absolutely do get sarcasm (insert claim Brits are being sarcastic when they say we don't get it). Britain is not special in this regard. It boggles the mind why Brits think we don't understand it. The languages are not so far gone.
I tell ya what, "understatement of the year" was not a phrase coined to describe something a Brit said.
You also find observers outside the Anglosphere describing understatement not as a British thing, but an anglophonic thing, including in American speech. https://www.identitytheory.com/anna-wierzbickas-english-mean...
I would go so far as to say that the hedges famous to American English opinion sharing is an example of understatement. "I feel like XYZ" is an Americanism, and it's understatement to the point of re-catorizing a fact as an opinion in order to soften your speech.
I can't tell you the number of times I've heard a Texan describe extremely hot weather as "a bit warm."
Examples abound.
(We also bust balls with our friends, and it lines up with class the same way you describe, including code switching between two registers.)
by KPGv2
8/2/2026 at 11:16:23 PM
Code switching between registers is a fact of life in America. Nobody speaks corporate natively, and it's more extreme if you grow up or live in an ethnic minority enclave.What Americans tend to not "get" is how dry British humor can be. It's less about not getting sarcasm and more just not finding it as funny. Personally, I blame the number of ads that interrupt our TV shows back when people watched broadcast and cable TV. There really wasn't enough time to build up and the ads are too loud and shouty in comparison.
by zdragnar
8/3/2026 at 12:45:29 AM
I think that it's often true that Americans don't get British sarcasm. And it's similarly often true that British people don't get American sarcasm.by TRiG_Ireland
8/2/2026 at 10:07:01 PM
Seems like an extremely reductive and negative take on what is "American". Perhaps you've only experienced America via LinkedIn and a specific shitty company?by viciousvoxel
8/2/2026 at 8:57:50 PM
> They sent it on time, and then the team lead called a meeting to ask why it hadn't arrived. The report was literally sitting in their inbox unread. Everyone could see it, but they all went through the motions of pretending it wasn't there and developing an action plan for future delivery.That is surreal.
by watwut
8/3/2026 at 5:52:07 AM
Here is British comedian David Mitchell complaining about the same kind of vagueness in British corporate culture.by tdeck
8/2/2026 at 7:53:11 PM
>Interesting perspectiveI see what you did there!
by climech
8/2/2026 at 9:08:32 PM
When I started dating someone whose second language was English, I found that the idioms were a giant hurdle. We really do speak in idioms and metaphors and this makes it very difficult for people who understand the words but not the cultural context. While my (now spouse) adapted, I also adapted by learning how to speak far more literally, especially around people of mixed levels of English.I don't think there is a fear of being imprecise. If anything, it is a fear of speaking plainly as boring.
by ebiester
8/3/2026 at 7:19:59 AM
In your experience, would you say that your communication has become more precise?Reflecting on it now, I believe that metaphors and idioms can help a lot for communicating intuitively and they can convey a lot of information. But at the same time in the situations where a idiom isn't understood by the other, I often have to take a moment to extract the essence of its meaning.
by AgentMatt
8/3/2026 at 7:54:23 AM
[dead]by psp99
8/2/2026 at 6:15:36 PM
Darmok and Jalad at Tanagraby overtone1000
8/2/2026 at 10:29:11 PM
Sokath! His eyes uncovered!by bigstrat2003
8/2/2026 at 6:52:48 PM
I always hear a phase that goes like “we have a word for it in Language, …”. You almost never hear it said where English is that language. We just don’t have many words or don’t like adding new ones very frequently, it seems.by conductr
8/2/2026 at 8:45:00 PM
English has more words than any language on earth. People don't learn or use use most of them because they will be labeled pretentious.by eudamoniac
8/2/2026 at 9:40:57 PM
I wonder if despite our large vocabulary, English speakers tend to use a small subsection of it because there are so many non-native speakers. It seems to me from reading and watching people from decades ago that the language was more complex. (I don't mean this as any knock on people who speak English as a second language.)by poncho_romero
8/2/2026 at 9:50:47 PM
We don't use most of them because no one could learn them all. There's more than 100,000 hanzi recorded in Chinese. Some quick googling suggests educated Chinese people know 8,000, and the average Chinese person knows around 3,500.So 3–8%.
Nothing to do with pretention and everything to do with impossibility :D
by KPGv2
8/3/2026 at 9:10:55 AM
Sounds... load bearing. Worse than being called pretentious, someone's gonna come along accuse you of being an LLM if you use words that aren't part of the normal lexicon.by fragmede
8/3/2026 at 3:25:15 PM
Utilizing a breadth of vocabulary won't evince your being an LLM. None have such a habitude. You'll merely attract invidious barbed tonguelets.by eudamoniac
8/2/2026 at 9:50:12 PM
> you almost never hear it said where English is that languageI'm willing to bet it's a combination of two factors:
1. you are consuming these things in English, and English natives are less likely to say "English has this word that those other people don't" because they fully understand English so it doesn't seem inscrutable, but some other language is kind of "magical an mysterious" to them. See, e.g., the urban legend that the Chinese word for crisis is "danger" and "opportunity." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_word_for_crisis There's a whole cottage industry around "that foreign language is so cool compared to English"
2. "this language can say X but another language cannot" is invariably wrong
by KPGv2
8/2/2026 at 7:37:18 PM
English tends to just borrow/steal words from other languages if they're useful enough. It could also be something to do with the lack of consistency of english rules so it's not so easy to create new words.by ndsipa_pomu
8/2/2026 at 11:00:31 PM
You can wordificate cromulent lexemes with abandon. The English language don't care.by kevin_thibedeau
8/3/2026 at 4:18:32 AM
any noun can become a verb if you don’t care enough— <https://blog.linguisten.de/post/183704949120/any-noun-can-be...>
by teddyh
8/3/2026 at 5:46:44 PM
Its cause its funby DontchaKnowit
8/3/2026 at 3:57:47 AM
Have a butchers at my China who thinks the seppos are less precise.by dhathorn
8/3/2026 at 4:47:45 PM
I read some articles the other day about rhyming slang. It all made sense of course, that it's a thing in some cultures. But most rhyming slangs are part of Cants or other special purpose vocabs which often have the intent of obscuring meaning.But none of that answered why in the absolute world a group would choose to initiate a rhyming slang for things such as the damn stairs. Rhyming slang is purposely obscuring.
It's insane to me, that cockney is half made up of purposely making communication more difficult or insular. Like, I get that there's complicated in group signalling incentives at play, but like, why?
by mrguyorama
8/3/2026 at 4:49:36 AM
> For reasons unknown to me, instead of using the word with the meaning they probably are trying to convey, they rather use vague analogies or metaphors.First, most native English speakers have an execrable vocabulary. I seem to remember that most people use less than 2000 (generally much less) unique words when they talk to each other. There is a high probability that they simply don't know the right word.
Second, using the same word over and over again gets monotonous. Using colorful idioms and metaphors is often necessary to keep people's attention. This is triply true in this day and age of mayfly-like attention spans.
Finally, if I'm teaching something, I'm probably trying to give you 3 or 4 different ways to think about the subject in the hope that one of them resonates and clicks so you understand. I don't know a priori which one that will be, so my vocabulary needs to shift in the hope of getting the point across.
by bsder
8/2/2026 at 5:12:06 PM
I think a lot about this. It's funny how there are certain domains of language, familiar to all native speakers, but that you are simply not likely to learn as an adult language learner, at least not without diligent and focused study.I live and work in a foreign country, and have a modest but functional grasp of the language here. Which is to say, I know how to say 'sustainability', 'union-negotiated collective agreement', and 'offensive conduct in the workplace'.... but if you asked me the words for 'cedar', 'robin', 'pond', or 'linen' I would be struck dumb. And yet presumably every ten year old I walk past in the street would know those words as comfortably as I knew them in English as a ten year old in England.
by DC-3
8/2/2026 at 5:30:39 PM
It's kinda funny. My life switched to English when I was around 18 and, while my family still speaks my native language exclusively, everything I've learned since then I don't know how to say it in my native language.Just earlier I was talking to them, trying to say "when life gives you lemons" and being unable to find an equivalent phrase. I hope they understood my lemons reference regardless.
by flyingshelf
8/2/2026 at 7:15:13 PM
Words like cedar/robin/linen come from either the physical or cultral environment that I (as a Chinese) wasn't exposed to when I was a child. Cedar and robin are all species native to Europe, and I guess they also appear in many Western fairy tales or historical stories.Also, both because of the familiarity and how English form words, English assign very specific non-compound words to them (rather than "xxx tree/bird"), making it more difficult for people from a completely different language family to learn them.
But of course this is not only English. In Chinese a child is taught to act 孝 (filial piety, respect and obedience to parents) and know how your uncles 舅 (mother's brother) 伯 (father's elder brother) 叔 (father's younger brother) relate to your parents. I'm sure it's OK for a foreign learner not to master them.
by cvhc
8/3/2026 at 4:49:03 PM
"...how your uncles 舅 (mother's brother) 伯 (father's elder brother) 叔 (father's younger brother) relate to your parents."These words are likely also on their way out, when you consider how few people in China have uncles in the present generation.
by MarkusQ
8/2/2026 at 7:43:07 PM
Cedars, fwiw, are not found in most of Europe either. Small parts of the Mediterranean (also parts of the Himalayas, bizarrely; closer than you think!)They likely show up in Western works a lot because they’re mentioned in the bible a good bit.
by rsynnott
8/2/2026 at 5:27:39 PM
When you're a foreigner learning a language your experience is mostly from reading. There are words, however, that are much more common at home and in spoken language. So you'll probably never learn the words that a 10 year old kid knows.by coliveira
8/2/2026 at 8:03:02 PM
One subtle issue in learning words from reading is that with languages like English where there's ambiguity in how to pronounce a given spelling, sometimes you might not guess the correct pronunciation for words you learned. This isn't specific to learning non-native languages either; growing up I read a lot and learned most of my advanced vocabulary that way, so as a teenager I would often find out that I didn't pronounce a word correctly because I had only ever seen it written down before.by saghm
8/2/2026 at 10:00:07 PM
There's a quote I've come across before, never make fun of someone mispronouncing a word in English, because it's a sign they are a reader.I was in my 30s when I learned "ennui" was pronounced "on wee" rather than N-U-I. I did not know it was from French. No shame. I never spoke the word aloud, but used it in writing. A teenager I knew was studying for a vocab test and had to learn the word, and I overheard him flash carding. Pronounced it "on-wee" and my brain exploded.
by KPGv2
8/3/2026 at 3:41:59 PM
Interesting example in this context because "ennui" looks French, which may help someone with the pronunciation or spelling depending on needs. It's not a word I've come across much before though, if ever?It means: tedium, boredom, "A feeling of weariness and disgust; dullness"
Thanks for the teachable moment!
by dieselgate
8/3/2026 at 8:27:26 PM
I've always assumed it was a loan word from French, but I honestly also have never been properly able to figure out how to pronounce arbitrary words in French because I'm not familiar enough with the language. My perception is that the pronunciation for it is fairly regular, but I'd still need to take the time to learn it, and unless I actually spent the time to fully learn and practice French, I doubt I'd end up remembering the pronunciation rules anyways.by saghm
8/2/2026 at 6:48:11 PM
I started learning english around 1984, when I began to learn programming. Back then most books were, by very far, in english. I also spent some time in the US (about one year altogether).Copying lyrics from my favorite songs of the 80s was helpful. And then later on TV series and movies in english.
I've watched Friends, HIMYM and Californication* more than once (it's probably the reason I swear so much) and those really helped.
Now I raised my kid in english: from the beginning she was only ever allowed to watch TV shows in english. And she's always been to international schools, in english too.
The other day she taught me a simply word which, surprisingly enough, I didn't know: a "coaster" (a drink coaster).
My absolute favorite is when she uses english grammar and applies it to french: the rules about where adjectives do go vary between french and english and she regularly messes it up in french (supposedly her "native" language but at this point I wonder whether english ain't a first language, and french second).
And one thing she has that I'll never have is a beautiful, proper, english accent. Mine shall forever be a strong french one.
by TacticalCoder
8/2/2026 at 8:44:47 PM
My wife kept up her english via friends. And I am always surprised how much US cultural exports help people learn the language.A French accent in English is easy to mock but it actually sounds pretty good. My American accent in Spanish sounds atrocious and sadly our bilingual kids have pretty American accents too. But honestly who cares?
Speaking another language is the best effort I have ever made (I am lucky not to do it out of necessity). Totally changed my world view and how I think, speak, read and dream. Though please do not make me listen to a recording of my own voice…
by cogogo
8/2/2026 at 5:38:18 PM
It is changing. A bulk of learners now get their vocabularies from youtube, netflix and podcasts. Watching kids shows is common recommendation (I disagree with it somewhat, but that does not make it not common), so I think people will learn also those 10 years old world words.by watwut
8/2/2026 at 9:55:27 PM
> if you asked me the words for 'cedar', 'robin', 'pond', or 'linen' I would be struck dumb. And yet presumably every ten year old I walk past in the street would know those words as comfortably as I knew them in English as a ten year old in England.Indeed. I'm American but my family has spoken German in the USA uninterrupted for 200 years. I speak German with my kids. But there's a children's song called Alle Vögel sind schon da and another called die Vogelhochzeit that I listen to with my kids, and it's just a litany of bird species I do not know but, being in a kid's song, I assume means they are common words for German kids.
When I look them up, the English words are ones I've heard and know from context are birds, but I couldn't tell you what they are like, and I would never use the word in English when asked about birds. My go-tos would be mockingbird, cardinal, hummingbird...ones I see in my backyard and have seen my entire life.
by KPGv2
8/2/2026 at 6:08:30 PM
After years of reading technical and scientific materials, listening to lectures and youtube tutorials and learning English exclusively through them I hit a wall when I watched a cooking youtube video for the first time.I was pretty confident in my English but I couldn't understand half of the sentences since I didn't know any of the vocabulary related to cooking. From tools (spatula) to ingredients (parsley) or even actions (frying). My delusions of proficiency shattered as I found out my everyday vocabulary is smaller than an elementary schooler.
by mahdi7d1
8/2/2026 at 10:41:28 PM
Oh, this is such a fun rabbit hole.There are plenty of programmers who can write a commit message in almost perfect English, yet don't know the difference between lettuce and radish, and can't tell what a little sheep is called.
My favorite area to catch people on is religion. Many C1 English speakers who grew up religious, some of whom are still devout and go to Church every Sunday, would be unable to hold even a basic conversation about their religion in English.
The unfortunate side of this is how non-native speakers of English swear much more often. I got better at it, but I suspect I'd still struggle in American corporate culture.
by miki123211
8/2/2026 at 6:15:03 PM
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!
by WalterBright
8/3/2026 at 2:21:29 AM
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.
by crazygringo
8/2/2026 at 7:21:17 PM
> 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.
by jonahx
8/3/2026 at 12:22:03 AM
> 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.
by WalterBright
8/3/2026 at 5:55:32 AM
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.by jonahx
8/2/2026 at 6:33:41 PM
Being proficient in a language is really less about memorizing words than it is pronunciation and grammar. Memorization itself is pretty easy.by theli0nheart
8/2/2026 at 8:43:03 PM
No, memorize many noun most important. Grammar less Important. Can do food, can do travel, can do tax. Because, noun most important.by refactor_master
8/2/2026 at 9:39:11 PM
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!
by WalterBright
8/2/2026 at 11:32:17 PM
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!"
by Thraway198
8/3/2026 at 4:26:23 AM
Put volume!— Trevor Noah, <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wtz0WZSNcPA#t=43s>
by teddyh
8/2/2026 at 11:42:22 PM
English is a fault tolerant language that is usually comprehensible with errors. That isn't generally applicable to all languages.by kevin_thibedeau
8/3/2026 at 6:55:39 PM
> That isn't generally applicable to all languages.I'm skeptical of that claim.
by WalterBright
8/2/2026 at 11:00:28 PM
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!
by ButlerianJihad
8/3/2026 at 12:06:10 AM
The point was I understood him perfectly despite the execrable grammar.by WalterBright
8/3/2026 at 9:10:29 PM
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.
by Thraway198
8/2/2026 at 10:45:17 PM
Me go market, find juice, say sugar freenice! sugar free!
me take juice, me take sugar, police take me, why? hell!
by yongjik
8/3/2026 at 4:52:44 AM
I think we have different definitions of “proficient”. :)by theli0nheart
8/3/2026 at 12:11:46 AM
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".
by WalterBright
8/2/2026 at 6:21:42 PM
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 insinuationsby Guestmodinfo
8/2/2026 at 6:26:20 PM
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Wiktionary:Frequency_listsby stevesimmons
8/2/2026 at 6:44:35 PM
Also worth going through the references of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zipf%27s_lawby bilegeek
8/2/2026 at 6:26:16 PM
Sounds like a job for LLMs.by WalterBright
8/2/2026 at 9:02:36 PM
Only if you mean llms finding already compiled lists on the internet. Since they would be too inefficient for actually compiling a list themselves.by mahdi7d1
8/3/2026 at 12:37:24 AM
I see another problem being that the same words can have different meaning or intent in different contexts and particularly with different intonations and facial expressions.by Smoosh
8/2/2026 at 4:51:51 PM
I tried to teach 'magicE vocab', sorting them by difficulty level for an English language plan, and got them easily arranged. For example, sham/shame and slide/slid are for hard to learn level, while ate, pale, kite, are for the easy level.by Sam6late
8/2/2026 at 5:06:07 PM
Kinda like how there's no average-sized airplane pilotby ReactiveJelly
8/2/2026 at 4:49:20 PM
> While if you are living somewhere, it's really important to know a lot of basic supermarket items that you wouldn't prioritize for other usages.Why? Having spent a good amount of time living in Shanghai, I found it important to be able to understand menus. But there's no pressure to know the words for supermarket items; you can just go to the supermarket and look for the item.
Otherwise your point is correct; all semantic words are equally difficult and which ones you know depends on the things you like to talk about. Grammatical words are more difficult, and more important, but this is so widely understood that language-learning material already treats them as an entirely separate class of things to learn.
> Also, while it's easy to calculate word frequencies for stuff like newspaper articles, there aren't any good statistics (last I checked) around just normal everyday conversation. Because that stuff isn't getting recorded and transcribed.
(1) You seem to want COCA, which includes a bunch of transcribed telephone calls.
(2) Word frequencies are still the wrong concept. If you want to understand a particular document, you need to understand almost all of the words that appear in that document. (You'll be able to learn some of them from their use in the document.) If you decide to learn a list of "frequent" words, you're unlikely to be able to understand more than a couple of isolated sentences in any given document.
by thaumasiotes
8/3/2026 at 3:03:04 AM
>(2) Word frequencies are still the wrong concept. If you want to understand a particular document, you need to understand almost all of the words that appear in that document. (You'll be able to learn some of them from their use in the document.) If you decide to learn a list of "frequent" words, you're unlikely to be able to understand more than a couple of isolated sentences in any given document.The point of learning by generic word frequency is to optimize study, not to attempt to brute-force understanding. If you have a document in front of you, would you rather have to look up every word in a dictionary, or only every other word?
by fluoridation
8/3/2026 at 4:16:45 AM
> If you have a document in front of you, would you rather have to look up every word in a dictionary, or only every other word?I've been in this situation. There's no real difference between the two circumstances you describe.
by thaumasiotes
8/3/2026 at 5:06:50 AM
OK, what about every fourth word? Every eighth word? If you're going to say that needing a dictionary at all is the same as needing a dictionary for every word, I'm gonna have to call you a liar.by fluoridation
8/2/2026 at 6:20:17 PM
> you need to understand almost all of the words that appear in that documentI didn't learn English by reading vocabulary lists or dictionaries. Pretty much all was learned by context.
by WalterBright
8/2/2026 at 11:52:42 PM
Yes, but that was a process of over a year that involved being repeatedly presented with real-life scenarios accompanied by verbal descriptions.If you were to just listen to all the same input, you would never have learned anything. The learning comes from deciphering the connection between the reality you see and the words you hear.
And if you want to understand a document, which is just a sequence of unsupported words, it is equally true that you must already understand almost all of those words.
by thaumasiotes