“How many words do you know?”
That was the question I asked you yesterday.
Here are the results:
The Majority2,001 – 5,000 — 36%
5,001-10,000 — 37%
The Rest of You9% more than 10,000
16% less than 2,000
(If you still want to find out your vocabulary size you can do that on this site: http://testyourvocab.com)
Here are some more facts.
The English language has 1-2 million words.
The Oxford English Dictionary has 171,476 words.
The average English native speaker knows 20,000 – 35,000 word families (ex. master, masterful, mastery=one word family).
And the average eight-year-old American knows 10,000 word families.
So now we’re starting to draw a clear map for your English.
You know where you are — how many words you know.
You know where you need to go — you need more words (because whatever your vocabulary size… everything you want to do in English will be easier when you master more words.)
And now you just need to know how to get there.
How will you remember hundreds of new words this year?
The second question I asked on the survey was “What’s your method for learning new words?”
71% said you had either no system or you memorized words.
That’s like finding your destination on the map, then waiting for a bus in the rain and then sitting next to a homeless person for ten hours.
There is a better way.
In a research study published in the journal “Language Learning”, students who memorized new words remembered 7% after two weeks.