Can You Actually Learn a Language With Only 3000 Words?
A response to Scott H. Young’s “The Most Important Words When Learning A New Language”
In a post on Medium, Scott H. Young wrote about the popular concept in language-learning that says that The Most Important Words When Learning A New Language (indeed, that was the title of his post) are the 3000 (or 2000 or 1000) most common.
While I agree with many of his smaller points (this is in no way a takedown of his argument), I think the focus on vocabulary is a misguided one, even if vocabulary is a fundamentally important part of understanding a language.
Scott draws on research that shifts the point about 3000 words to 3000 “word families”, but I think this shift just obscures the real difficulties of learning a language by focusing on vocabulary, and it doesn’t do much to stop perpetuating the idea that you can get by on a small number of words.
Part of this shift is based on the premise that, as Scott points out, there are “numerous grammatical inflections that are almost certainly not stored in the brain as separate words (e.g., difficult, difficulty, difficulties, etc.).”
But what it would mean for words like difficult and difficulty to not be “stored in the brain as separate words” isn’t enitrely obvious when you consider the reality of trying to learn these words.
Sure, difficulty and difficulties can be considered the same word (one just the plural of the other), but difficult belongs to a difference class of word altogether.
The words might sound and look very similar, and they come from the same place, but I can’t interchange difficult and difficulty anywhere in a sentence without thoroughly changing the meaning, and without having to add or rearrange words to make that new sentence meaningful.
For the would-be learner of English, making the mistake of putting difficulty where difficult should be would at some stage need to be corrected, and so they would presumably have to “store it in their brain” as a different word.
This is just one example, but if you take all such examples, you’re at least doubling the number of words you actually need to know. And if you’re honest about the 3000 “world families” requirement, the true number of needed words explodes.
As I noted in my own article on the topic, the number of such words and the importance of learning them is different for different languages — you can’t reduce irregular verbs down to their infinitives and say it’s just “one word” if the commonly used conjugations of that verb number several dozen or more.
Either way, I think approaching language learning from this angle is intractable for a reason — approaching a language as a task of learning vocabulary (and learning grammar and syntax, etc.) sets people up for failure because it’s not fundamentally how we acquire languages.
It would be like learning to ride a bike by learning how to sit on the seat, how to put your foot on the pedal, how to turn the front wheel, etc.
The best you can hope for after mastering these lessons is being able to tell people a lot of facts about riding a bike, but you will not be very good at riding it.
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