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How many different words are the minimum to get by on a day to day level in English?
You need questions Who, What, When ...?
Numbers ... for as large an amount you are going to spend 10s to 1,000,000s ... depending on what you are buying/doing.
You need verbs ... shop, be, go, wash ...
Pronouns ... you, me, he, she, us, them, we ...
Lots of nouns ... car, spinach, wind ...
Some adverbs and adjectives. Red, large, fast, slow...
And maybe some conjunctions, prepositions, and articles... and, at, a ...
So what is the MINIMUM number of words to be functional in English? What about in German, Hebrew, or Japanese?
I know that Japanese high school students need to know about 1940 kanji characters, but they have kana to supplement that.
I was thinking about a thousand might be enough words to get by in English.
It depends on your definition of "functional." Short visit or immigrating? Asking for directions or talking your way out of a traffic ticket? Filling out a McDonald's employment form or a tax form?
I googled "Words by Frequency" and found a few cool resources that might help answer your question:
Wiktionary's lists of words by frequency of use.
The first 10,000 words in the Project Gutenberg list. This list is definitely a productivity killer for me.
You can check out these lists and decide when words are obscure enough that they exceed your limit for "minimal functionality."
Here's a fun interactive representation of words by frequency:
wordcount.org
Eighty years ago, someone decided that anything that could be said in English could be said using a vocabulary of 850 words, and he called his invention "Basic English". A problem that wasn't noticed until later was that the way English uses prepositions often doesn't make sense to someone who grew up with a language constructed on different principles: "I ran out of paper" can't be understood if you know the separate meanings of "run" and "out".
Until it was essentially abandoned, though, they tried. One of the more heroic inventions was the Basic English term for beefsteak: "A piece cut off the back end of a male cow kept on the fire long enough."
Martha Barnette
Grant Barrett
Grant Barrett
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