Have you ever come across a study that says fluency can be achieved with around 200 words or so?
Studies say native speakers use as few as 200, 300 words at the most to get by on daily basis. Those who believe fluency relies upon being a walking encyclopedia is quite mistaken. Fluency has more to do with finding as many uses as possible for one expession than the other way around. Book a class and come find out.
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It depends on which definition of fluency you use. Most people believe that fluency means vapid language with a severe case of verbosity. To be fluent means being able to convey what you want to say so that the listener can understand. As you said Rodrigo, you do not need to swallow a dictionary to be fluent, far from it! Listen to Native speakers in conversation, we use short words in various combinations to convey meaning. I don't believe that someone can be fluent with around 200 words or so, I do believe that fluency can be achieved with about 500-750 words and the knowledge of how to combine them to make a meaningful sentence. Like what you've just read? Why not book a lesson!
Hi guys! Thanks for engaging. Pawel - I'm 100% on the same page as you are. I did not go through the detailed study, but as far as i could grasp from it, it seems to me they were considering the vast possibility of making up words with verbs and prepositions as you yourself pointed out - to put + up = to put up with something. To put + down = put something down.... and the list goes on and on. Mira - If you allow me, i disagree in parts with you. I believe Fluency has more do to with conveying a message and therefore pronunciation is indeed important, otherwise if you don't have a clear pronunciation, you can't be understood and task of conveying a message fails. Though, pronunciation is not at the heart of it. The core element is the act of delivering this message itself. Of course, coherence and cohesion - articulating and making sense of a sentence is key to deliver a message.
It might be true. That said, I'd say it's more like 600-800 (at least in English - I don't know how it is in other languages). But we need to take the following into consideration: "come", "up", "down", and "get" are four words that probably count into those 600/800. But we also have "come up", "come down", "get up", "get down", which won't. So when they say you need that few words is true TECHNICALLY, but not ACTUALLY. At least this is how I understand this count of 200/300. Take this with a grain of salt though as I'm not a trained scientist ;)
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It depends what we are talking about. Fluency is how well we pronounce a particular word so that the other person understands clearly whether it is in English or Spanish. Fluency can be noted in writing a sentence, how well it is articulated and expressed. When we talk about a topic, it is how fluent we are to discuss it. It also focuses on emphasis of the grammar and continuity of the topic.
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