How many words do you need to know to communicate effectively in a foreign language?

If you are a traveler, then you know how you want to communicate with the locals. Hand gestures, broken English, and finger pointing are not all. Learning a new language, especially as an adult, is not an easy task. But fear not! Reader's Digest figured out exactly how many words you need learnto speak a language well enough to understand the locals.

Linguists Paul Nation, John Reed, and Robin Gulden created a quiz to find out how many words you know in English. It uses only 50 of the more than 200 words of the English language. The theory of linguists is that if you take the number of 000 words you understand and multiply by 50, you will get an approximate value of your English vocabulary.

On the subject: Pairs of similar English words that we often confuse

Stuart Webb, professor of applied linguistics, found that speakers of any given language know between 15 and 000 lemmas or families words... The lemma consists of the root word (say: walking) and all its variations (walked, walked, etc.).

Chances are that if you are learning a new language, you will not be able to understand the 15 lemmas.

Professor Webb discourages people from learning all the words in the language. Instead, he advises them to focus on the 800-1000 lemmas that are most commonly used in the language. According to him, these lemmas will give you enough knowledge to understand 75 percent of the language. This is enough to make you feel comfortable walking the streets. Enough to strike up a conversation, order in a restaurant and chat.

But before you start reading books, think about the purpose for which you are learning a language. For example, are you planning to move abroad for a long time. Watch foreign television without subtitles or read novels in the target language.