A while back I found a website that claimed the average German vocabulary needed to conduct normal day to day conversations consists of 8,000 words and that the average German vocabulary consists of 20,000 words.
After searching the web for a couple hours trying to find this site again, I have decided to ask the excellent googlers of the SDMB for assistance.
If someone could also find out how the number of words in an average German vocabulary compares to the number of words in an average American vocabulary, that would be a bonus.
I once discussed this with a friend who has a degree in linguistics. He maintained that there is no agreed-upon definition for a distinct word. He wasn’t talking about word boundaries - he was talking about whether two words are considered to be really different from each other. For example, are the words “work,” “worked” and “working” really separate words in English, or are they variations of a single word?
This is a particularly hard problem in German, since the language allows one to tack together words to make new words at will. How does one determine when to consider a compound to be a separate word in a speaker’s vocabulary?
So what it comes down to, according to my friend, is that there is no way to compare the sizes of vocabularies across languages.
Well, I was referring to root words. And the second half of my inquiry isn’t all that important. That was just to satisfy my curiousity. Perhaps I should start another thread with a different subject title.
I know that I saw this website that made a claim for the average number of words in an average German’s vocabulary. Furthermore, I think it was referring to root words, not compounds. I was really hoping to find this site again.
I hope I have clarified this some, and futhermore I hope that some Doper will come along with a link that will provide the information I am looking for.
Things like this annoy me to no end. It’s doubly frustrating when I know that I had this very information (although to some, it might seem to be dubious information) on my screen not that long ago.
I haven’t found any source on the Web (other than a marketing text arguing for simpler product names that mentioned an average active vocabulary of 6000 words but did not give a source).
If you specify no compound words the I’d expect the number for the German vocabulary to be smaller than a number for an English-language population, because a lot of words are compound words in German that are not in English. Examples:
“To be reasonably fluent in a foreign language (be it German or any other tongue), most experts say you need to understand around 8,000 words and be able to use about 2,000.”