How Much Vocab Do I Actually Need to Learn?

Turns out you don’t actually need to memorize very many of these to have a conversation.

Externally one of the most imposing aspects of learning a new language is the thought of tackling all that vocabulary.

If you’ve ever seen an unabridged Oxford English Dictionary, you know just how vast a lexicon can be. Grammar rules and even exceptions can be memorized easily and tend to be finite, learning a new writing system only takes 15 minutes or so, but there are hundreds of thousands of words out...