Minimale aantal woorden om een vreemde taal te 'spreken'

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One cannot overestimate the usefulness of Schlag and Zug. Armed just with these two, and the word also, what cannot the foreigner on German soil accomplish? The German word also is the equivalent of the English phrase "You know," and does not mean anything at all -- in talk, though it sometimes does in print. Every time a German opens his mouth an also falls out; and every time he shuts it he bites one in two that was trying to get out.

Now, the foreigner, equipped with these three noble words, is master of the situation. Let him talk right along, fearlessly; let him pour his indifferent German forth, and when he lacks for a word, let him heave a Schlag into the vacuum; all the chances are that it fits it like a plug, but if it doesn't let him promptly heave a Zug after it; the two together can hardly fail to bung the hole; but if, by a miracle, they should fail, let him simply say also! and this will give him a moment's chance to think of the needful word. In Germany, when you load your conversational gun it is always best to throw in a Schlag or two and a Zug or two, because it doesn't make any difference how much the rest of the charge may scatter, you are bound to bag something with them. Then you blandly say also, and load up again. Nothing gives such an air of grace and elegance and unconstraint to a German or an English conversation as to scatter it full of "Also's" or "You knows."

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Op donderdag 28 augustus 2008 08:50 schreef DaMart het volgende:
(..)

Je kunt bij wijze van spreken 40 Portugese woorden kennen die betrekking hebben op het gras maaien, maar als je dan met een Portugees over het gat in de ozonlaag wilt praten, heb je er nog weinig aan .

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However, Table 1 also presents some bad news about vocabulary growth. It suggests that after you have learned the most frequent 2000 words of English, then simply continuing to accumulate more words on a frequency basis gives a much lower rate of return. You could learn another 3000 words (up to the 5000 frequency mark) and increase the amount of black ink coverage in an average text by only about 8%. The graph below, which is just the table above turned on its head, dramatizes the drop-off in coverage after 2000 words.