How many words do you need to speak a language?
More or Less: Behind the Stats
BBC
4.6 • 3.5K Ratings
🗓️ 22 June 2018
⏱️ 10 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Ein Bier bitte? Loyal listener David made a new year's resolution to learn German. Three years later, that's about as far as he's got. Keen to have something to aim for, he asked More or Less how many words you really need to know in order to speak a language. Reporter Beth Sagar-Fenton finds out with help from Professor Stuart Webb, and puts Tim through his paces to find out how big his own English vocabulary is. (Image: The World surrounded by Flags. Credit: Shutterstock) Presenter: Tim Harford Reporter: Beth Sagar-Fenton Producer: Charlotte McDonald, Lizzy McNeill
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Just before this BBC podcast gets underway, here's something you may not know. |
| 0:04.6 | My name's Linda Davies and I Commission Podcasts for BBC Sounds. |
| 0:08.4 | As you'd expect, at the BBC we make podcasts of the very highest quality featuring the most knowledgeable |
| 0:14.3 | experts and genuinely engaging voices. What you may not know is that the BBC |
| 0:20.4 | makes podcasts about all kinds of things like pop stars, |
| 0:24.6 | poltergeist, cricket, and conspiracy theories and that's just a few examples. |
| 0:29.7 | If you'd like to discover something a little bit unexpected, find your next podcast over at BBC Sounds. |
| 0:36.0 | Hello and welcome to more or less on the BBC World Service. |
| 0:43.1 | We're your guide to the numbers all around us, in the news and in life, |
| 0:46.6 | and I'm Tim Harfin. |
| 0:48.1 | Now I've lived in England nearly all my life. I like to think I'm a bit of an |
| 0:56.0 | intellectual. Or at least I wear a black polo neck sometimes which seems to be |
| 1:00.1 | much the same thing. So I was rather surprised when Beth, one of our producers, asked me |
| 1:05.8 | how well I can speak English. |
| 1:08.0 | Yeah, sorry about that, Tim. You see, the thing is, we've had an email from a listener in Ireland called David Hurley and he's got a problem. |
| 1:16.0 | I've been trying to learn German for about three years on the back of a New Year's resolution. |
| 1:22.0 | I've been using apps, German TV shows, German newspaper |
| 1:25.8 | websites trying to build up my vocabulary, build up my language skills. |
| 1:30.1 | Hello, my name is Inigo Montoya, who has my infatigate at it. |
| 1:37.0 | Yet spous toudes, to days. |
| 1:40.0 | I feel like I'm kind of hitting a wall with it now. I think I would have maybe 500 words of German. |
| 1:48.0 | I was hoping that more or less could give me a shortcut by working out how many words we actually have in our vocabulary and more importantly how many |
... |
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