How many words to know to communicate? - SuperMemo

How many words do you need? Let’s start with the basicsWe’ll begin with a question – what counts? What is a single word? For example, do the words “bicycle” and “bicycles”, i.e. singular and plural, count as one word or two? To dig a little deeper and decide how many words are needed to communicate in a foreign language, it will be helpful to introduce the term “word family”.What is a word family?Theword familyis a word and all of its forms inflected by genders, numbers and cases. Each family is represented by a so-called lemma, i.e. the dictionary form of a given word. “Bike” is the lemma of the word family – the family here are “bikes” in every available, linguistically correct form. And when we write about how many words you need, we will mean word families.Learning vocabulary vs knowing the wordSo, we’ve figured out what the term ‘word’ means. Now, it’s time to answer the question: what does it mean toknow a word? Can you say that you already know the word when you learn its dictio...