G'day mate. How's it going? Today, I am going to be touching upon how many words you need to know to be considered "fluent" like the average native speaker. My simple answer is tonnes of words, in other words, as many as possible. Let's elaborate it further.
First of all, the way of counting the number of words depends upon experts or linguists. If you exclude all derivative words, then the total number of words would be much lower, right? For instance, you know the word, "instant". And, you count one word. That's it. But, if you include all the possible derivative words, then it should include instance, instantly, instantaneous, instantaneously, instantaneousness, instanter, instantiate, instantiating and instantiation. So it comes to 10 words in total, right? From my point of view, the latter way of counting is correct as it reflects your real vocabulary knowledge and practicality. But, of course, both active and passive vocabulary have to be taken into consideration.
Nonetheless, it's almost impossible to come up with an exact number of words that demonstrate "fluency". It’s mysterious how to measure vocabulary size. For me, I've technically done the precise calculation of approximately how many words I've known so far whereby I read an English dictionary and counted the number of words page by page. I know it was extremely time-consuming, and nonsensical for most of you guys. It was just a kind of experiment. Believe it or not, I possibly know approximately 110,000 words, 75% of which are passive vocabulary, and the rest of which are active ones. In this case, active vocabulary means that I can use them without hesitation in my thoughts whenever I talk or write. So, I know 100% usage of them in a correct manner. Otherwise, I could barely recognise and understand the word but I'm not really comfortable using it in conversation and writing either.
If I dare to say how many words, I'd say like the number of active vocabulary ranging from 10,000 to 30,000, which is, I believe, sort of the appropriate number of words for people to be able to comfortably talk and write without hesitation. To reach this level, the more you expose yourself to the English environment, the more fluent you will become. The more you hear and read words in the language, the more you will understand new words and new meanings in context. Apart from this, there is unfortunately no panacea for boosting your vocabulary level. You don’t need to count the number of words you know. Instead, you should put more time and effort in learning the most commonly used words, checking all the derivative words, and of course mastering etymology like prefix, suffix and word roots. Ultimately, knowing how many words you know could prove to be meaningless.
Thanks for reading my blog. Ta!