How to quantify your language learning — a path to fluency

Learning a language is often an abstract and intangible task. It’s hard to know if one is making progress, regressing, or going nowhere at all. Having someway to quantify one’s learning can bring perspective, help define more realistic and workable short and longterm goals, and pave the way for definite results.

One of the easiest and most effective ways to start quantifying one’s language learning is through structuring and tracking one’s vocabulary acquisition. Vocabulary is the basic building block of a language. And it’s is the most quantifiable aspect of learning a language. Lacking vocabulary means lacking the materials to build and create. The more vocabulary one acquires, the more one can verbally build and create, and ultimately the more one can express and say.

And when one starts tracking vocabulary properly, one’s progress becomes undeniable. The problem is, most learners don't know how to quantify their vocabulary, what numbers to aim for, or how to measure their growth.

In what follows, I will break it down for you, using some linguistic insights so you can finally see your progress in more black and white shades rather than just grey.

How many words do we need to know?

Let's start with realistic expectations. How much vocabulary can you actually acquire in a day, a week, a month?

Research on first-language acquisition shows us something fascinating: children aged 6-8 learn around 6-7 new words daily, while 8-10 year olds jump to approximately 12 words per day. For adult learners, at intensive language programs like the Defense Language Institute in the states, students are expected to learn around 80 words daily, through full-immersion, all-day-every-day learning. That's not a rate of learning an average learner can achieve, but it shows what’s possible.

For most adult second-language learners they can sustainably acquire 2,650 base words annually, which is roughly 7-8 words per day. To give that further context, I often hear linguists say given 1,500 to 3,000 words, one can express most things one would ever need to. That sounds immensely debatable but it’s welcome context. Meaning at a learning rate of 7-8 words a day, a learner could easily get conversant in a language of their choice after a year.

Even further context can be gained when we have a perspective of the size of vocabularies people are walking around with in their heads. It’s estimated an average person may know between 20,000 to 30,000 words, and very educated or big brained people know in excess of that, nearing 50,000.

To put all this in context, English has a working vocabulary around 170,000 and 600,000 words in total, when we consider all technical terms and words.

This gives us all the base lines for understanding what we need to aim at. Learning about 20,000 to 30,000 words would put us in the fluent category of speakers. Considering that we remain lifelong learners we could always add to that hoard of words approaching 40-50,000 words.

The question now is what does the path to 20,000-30,000 words look like?

Understanding the numbers

We see above that learners from children to expert adults, have impressive learning rates. For the average adult learning 8 to 9 new words a day is a tall order.

In my experience daily targets are too ambitious and impractical for most busy people. What’s much more pragmatic and reliable are weekly and monthly goals. These are easier to define and stick to.

The reason for a weekly target is that we can structure weekly learning around a specific activity. For some people this might be a one week session of sitting down and doing focused language learning. For others this might be a weekly habit of doing focused watching or listening, while making notes of new vocabulary. In my own work, I can attest to the rates at which students learn in weekly conversational English lessons.

Generally speaking, in lessons students can learn between 15 to 30 new words per week, including fixed expressions and idioms. This can be straight through conversation or with the aid of close reading. This means reading an article or text in detail, and stopping to discuss and debate ideas and concepts, or vocabulary.

In this way, students can learn between 60 to 120 words per month. Over 12 months that equates to 720 to 1440 words. Assuming a conversational English learner begins with a working vocabulary of around 1,500 to 3,000 words, to achieve 20,000 words they would need 25 years at a rate of about 720 new words a year. I use the target of 20,000 here as it’s a more realistic scale. At a rate of 1440 words a year they would need about 13 years for that same more modest target of 20,000 words. This is all keeping in mind that people remain consistent and make an effort to revise and practice the words they are learning.

Derivative words and powering your vocabulary

An important thing to remember is that derivative words are also counted as separate words. That means that a word like ’practice’ and its derivatives i.e. ‘practical’, practically’, practitioner’, practician, ‘’practicable’ ‘practicum’, ‘impractical’, ‘impractically’, are considered words in their own right. This is a very important detail and should guide how one approaches vocabulary acquisition.

Whenever, we come across a new word, if it’s not a verb, we should search out if the word derived from a verb, or led to a new verb. Starting with a verb, we can then ask, does the verb lead to any adjectives, nouns, or adverbs. That way, whenever we come across a new word, we can power our vocabulary, by not merely learning one word, but three, four, or five instead.

In this way, the act of learning 15 or 30 words in a lesson, can quickly multiply to 30, 45, or 60, 90 or more words. This approach to learning greatly enhances the rate of vocabulary acquisition and hastens our path to future fluency.

Numbers to fluency

To layer in some more context here, I often meet clients who’ve been learning English for 20 or 25 years, or more, without feeling like they’ve made any progress. Here we can see if they had simply stuck to quantified weekly learning, thanks to the compounding effect, they would have hit the fluency level by that time. Better still, if they had reached the upper figure of 120 new items of vocabulary, they would have hit fluency levels in 13 years. These are respectable amounts of time, considering one is learning once a week — for such a small weekly investment, fluency in the future is a huge payout. As they say it’s never too late.

Now we can play with the rates of acquisition to get a picture of how we can tweak the rates of learning to create more optimal learning. Given that through one focused activity a week we can learn 30-60 words, we can double that by aiming to do a minimum of twice a week, and learning between 60-120 items of vocabulary a week. That would get us between a varying range of 120-240 items per month, and a range of 1,440-2880 per year. At that rate we would be at fluency levels in 10 years. This is really no time at all when I think how many people I come across who’ve been learning for that time or twice that amount and more, and still struggling with fluency.

With these types of numbers we can easily tweak things to achieve different outcomes. Learning more, learning faster, or learning less or more intensely. These numbers are not set in stone but are rather a framework to build with. For some people this path to fluency with be half, say 5 years, thanks to frequent immersion, more intense periods of study, and more diverse learning appraoches.

It’s not only the numbers of course…

The quantity of vocabulary we get into our heads isn't the only thing that drives fluency of course. Simply smashing big numbers, or consuming and revising vast amounts of vocabulary will not lead to fluency in and of itself.

By now, you might have thought what about that daman thing called grammar, or listening and writing, the skills we often can't live without. Indeed, vocabulary as I described represents the materials we verbally build and create with. But grammar gives us a framework and patterns and formulas to build with. However, grammar can be acquired in different phases and a different strategy to vocabulary. I will cover this in a separate article Learn grammar without obsessing about grammar.

Suffice to say here, that you needn't be obsessive about grammar, if you're simply not learning enough vocabulary on a week by week basis, grammar alone is not going to save you. Grammar can be learnt strategically, and in my opinion and experience much more sparsely than vocabulary. This should be music to most people's ears. This is because vocabulary more so than grammar opens up the doors to sense and meaning.

Knowing words and their connections help builds sense and meaning. If you can see the connections between words their origins, their references...cultural, social, historical, then you may be able to understand a lot of what's going on in a language and communication. This doesn't obviate grammar, a basic framework and understanding is vital to making sense of the words you're hearing.

Likewise, learning vocabulary is not a substitute for conversing in the language you are learning. Communication is vital for consolidating the vocabulary that you already know, and at a non-negligible rate, you can pick up words through conversation alone. i'm often picking up new words through my conversations with others at the rate of 1 or 3 per conversation.

In short, just being able to quantify vocabulary won't be enough, if one doesn't pay attention to how much time one also spends communicating the language one is learning, or strategically learning grammar. Those numbers should also be used to quantify learning to fluency. But they are harder yardsticks to measure by. It's hard to quantify how much grammar one is learning, or the amount of time one is communicating with others. Thus, tracking vocabulary should be our go-to tool.

What to do with all those words?

It's all well and good learning at a rate of 120-240 words or more a month, but it's not much good if you're not doing anything once the initial meet and greet is over.

In my article, Words are like friends — the best way to learn vocbulary in English, I go into great detail on the best ways to learn and retain vocabulary. There you will find the consistent revisiting and revision of words will aid and accelerate retention, and hasten your path to fluency.

With all that said, remember language is all about communication and creating and communicating meanng: use it or lose it. This means the best thing we should be doing with all those words is using them as often as possible conversing with others. Number alone won't take us to fluency, but lots of words and lots of conversations certainly will.