2000 words is enough for daily communication

用2000的词汇量进行日常交流

           How much vocabulary should need to us englisgh effectively. The question is not quite easy. First , let’s answer the question, “how big is the stock of english vocabulary?”. Again there is no simple answer. The very first dictionary of the english compiled by Samuel Johnson contrained 43,000 words. The unabridged Random House of 1987 has 315,000, Webster’s Third New International of 1961 contains 450,000 words. The largest English dictionary has more than half a million entries.

          In fact, it is an extremely hard task to count all the words appearing in english. For one thing, the meangs that english words carry are much more various than those that a bald count of entry words can indicate. For example, the mouse you can find in your kitchen floor and the mouse you use to activate your personal computer are obviously two different entities. Shouldn’t they be counted as tow words? Moreover, there are numerous compound words that are not listed in dictionaries of any sort. For example, the meaning of take-it–or-leave-it as an adjective is clear in the sentence: he is take-it-leave-it person, but no dictionary has ever listed this adjective.

           In addition, there are all the names of flora and fauna, medical conditions, chemical substances and all the other scientific and technical terms that do not make it into ordinary dictionaries. According to some scholars, there are not less than 3 million words of this kind. Of insects alone, there are 1.4 million named species. Taken words of all kinds together, lexicographers have estimated that would be as many as 6,000,000 in the english language.

           So how many words does an ordinary native english speaker know? Again, it is a disputed question. Max Muller, a famous German philologist thought that an average famer had an everyday vocabulary of no more than 300 words. Mario Pei studied a fruit picker and put this number at no more 500 words, though he believed that the number of words this fruit piker possessed in reality is much higher. Stuard Flexner, the noted Ameracan lexicographer, suggests that the average well-read person has a vocabulary of about 20,000 words and probably uses about 1,500 to 2,000 in a normal week’s conversation. Some scholars have taken the trouble of counting the number of words used by various authors with the hope that this word can tell us something about human vocabulary. According to Pei and Mc-Crum, Shakespeare had a vocabulay of 30,000 words. However, it is argued that the number of words used by an author can tell us the true size of his vocabulary. A author may possess thousands of words that he never used because he does not like or require it. In Shakespeare’s plays the words Bible, Trinity, or Holy Ghost never appear, but this does not sugges that he was not familiar with them.

          In fact there are endless difficulties in judging how many words a person knows. However, it is certain that the number of the words we use (active vocabulary) is very much smaller than the number of the words we know (passive vocabulary or recognition vocabulary). It is often the caswe that you read a newspaper and recognize the meaning of a word, such as now-governmental, but you have never been able  to use thi word in your english conversation or writing before. According to one source, native speakers of a language have a passive vocabulary of up to 100,000 words, but an active vocabulary of between 10,000 and 20,000 words.

           Then how many english words should be needed for a non-native speaker? There are different answers. According to Professor Ogden of Cambridge University. To be able to communicate in an english a learner just needs 850 essential words (as active vocabulary, including a mere 18 verbs: be, come do , get, give, go, have, keep, let, make, may, put, say, see, seen, send, take and will). Other linguists, however, did not agree with. Ogden, claiming those who learnt only 850 basic words might be able to write simple messages but would scarcely be able to exchange ideas or to read anything in english (even comic books and greeting cards would contrain words and expression quite unknown to them). Mackey and his colleagues suggested that in a foreign learning, an active vocabulary of about 3000 to 5000 words, and a passive vocabulary of about 5000 to 10,000 words are required to achieve the intermediate to upper intermediate level of proficiency. It is roughly estimated that foreign students need more than 20,000 words a pasive vocbulary and at least 10,000 as active vocabulary to attend college in an American university.

          It is true that the bigger size your english vocabulary you have, the more comfortable you can be to communicate in english. However, it is misleading to think that a learner who possesses more english word can automatically speak, write or understand english better than the one who has less vocabulary. Difference should rather be made between good and bad language learners. A good language learner always knows how to make up for the lack of vocabulary. Good learners are characterized by the ability to guess, to paraphrase or to gesture when he has a problem concerning vocabulary. He would not let the new words in a text hinder his comprehension. He/she would search for their meaning through the context in which the word appears or through analyzing the appearance of this word. Similarly, he is still able to talk about things of which he does not know the name in english. For example, being unfamiliar with the word handkerchief, he could say a cloth for my nose, and for an apartment comples he could say building. Therefore, learning more vocabulary is imortan, but more important is learning how to understand language or get your language understood despite the lack of vocabulary.