Comments from Parents and Students Effect of not knowing the words outside Oxford 3000TM word list Myths about teaching and learning second language vocabulary Perseverance is the key to success
Do you know how many words you need to acquire in order to master a discipline or a language ?
The number required varies a lot from discipline to discipline. Just give you a rough idea, for a 99.9% coverage of words in ordinary journals and articles, Chinese requires : ~3300 characters / ~15000 terms English requires : ~40000 word families Alevel Chemistry requires : ~1200 terms
The reasons behind the differences are rather historical. When I have time, I hope I can write some articles to tell you the stories behind the evolution of different languages and how the present situation came up.
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