老外告訴你 英語詞彙量多大才夠？大綱
古人雲，“少壯不努力，老大背單詞”。各位掙扎在紅黃藍黑各種寶書中的同學或許要問，這單詞要背到什麼時候纔算夠？我們不妨來看看外國人的詞彙量是多少。
Britain’s Guardian newspaper, in 1986, estimated the size of the average person’s vocabulary as developing from roughly 300 words at two years old, through 5,000 words at five years old, to some 12,000 words at the age of 12.
1986年，英國《衛報》估算英國人2歲的單詞量約爲300個，5歲時爲5000個，到了12歲，詞彙量在12000個左右。
The Guardian’s research suggested that it stays at around this number of words for the remainder of most people’s lives—adding that this is roughly the same number of words as those drawn on by a popular newspaper in the course of producing its daily editions—while a graduate might have a vocabulary nearly twice as large (23,000 words). Shakespeare had one of the largest recorded vocabularies of any English writer at around 30,000 words.
《衛報》的研究認爲大多數人之後的詞彙量都不會有太大的變化。它還指出，12000詞彙量基本等同於流行報紙每天文章裏的詞彙量。但是大學畢業生的詞彙量大約是其2倍，約23000個。莎士比亞則是所有英語作家中詞彙量最大的之一，高達約30000個單詞。
Francis and Kucera (1982) suggest that the 2000 most frequent word families of English make up 79.7% of the individual words in any English text, the 3000 most frequent word families represent 84%, the 4000 most frequent word families make up about 86.7%, and the 5000 most frequent word families cover 88.6%.
Francis和Kucera在1982年發表的研究結果稱，2000個最常用單詞覆蓋了79.7%的英文文本內容，最常用的3000單詞及變形的覆蓋率達到84%，4000最常用單詞及變形的覆蓋率爲86.7%,當詞彙量增加到5000時，覆蓋率爲88.6%。
綜上所述，英語學習者的第一個目標是2000常用單詞，這樣就能看懂將近80%的英文內容。至於終極目標則是20000單詞，也就是和受過良好教育的英國人的詞彙量相當（想跟莎士比亞PK的學霸當我沒說）。
需要注意的是，認識單詞和會用單詞是兩碼事。詞彙量達到一定水平後，在對話、寫作中使用這些單詞的能力對英語水平的影響更大。
