The German vocabulary The German language consists of about 5.3 million words – with a rising trend. About one third of those words was added in the last 100 years.
Dictionaries are regarded as authoritative collections of words in a given language, so they might seem like a good source to use for answering this question. It looks like Korean tops the list with over a million words!
Compared to languages that are widely spoken in the West, German stands out somewhat for its ability to create increasingly complex compound words. Technically, there's no limit to how long German words can get. German was made to be infinite!
In order to feel comfortable speaking German, you really only need to learn about 3,000 words. In contrast, being fluent in German is defined as understanding 10,000+ words.
If you want to reach C1 level of proficiency in German, you'll need an active vocabulary of at least 5,000 words.
But it's not enough to cover all the needs of someone who wants to work or study in a foreign country, for example. If you want to reach an advanced level, then you'll probably need between 6,000 and 10,000 words. And if you want to speak as fluently as a native, you'll need to learn 10,000 to 15,000 words.
A major uniqueness of Arabic language lies in its richness. While English, French, and Russian languages have around 500,000 words, 150,000 words, and 130,000 words in its vocabulary respectively, Arabic language has 12,3 million words in its own, making it the richest language in vocabulary, by far.
It is the most widely spoken and official or co-official language in Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Liechtenstein, and the Italian province of South Tyrol. It is also an official language of Luxembourg and Belgium, as well as a recognized national language in Namibia.
The German vocabulary
About one third of those words was added in the last 100 years. This means, the German language contains eight times as many words as the English language.In the everyday conversation, we use much less words: only 12.000 – 16.000 words including about 3.500 foreign words.
The language with the most overall swear words is English. As the world's most spoken language, this comes as no surprise, but the number of people who speak the language comes twelfth overall. The languages with the politest language per speaker are Mandarin and Portuguese.
Sonja Elen Kisa, Sonja Lang). Toki Pona was constructed by the Canadian translator and linguist Sonja Elen Kisa (Sonja Lang).
Sumerian can be considered the first language in the world, according to Mondly. The oldest proof of written Sumerian was found on the Kish tablet in today's Iraq, dating back to approximately 3500 BC.
When it comes to the number of letters used per word, German is at the top with an average count of 6.380 letters.
The official German A1 vocabulary includes, according to the German Goethe Institut, 650 words – that's the bad news. Wow, that's a lot, you may think. The good news is: You're already on the way, and we're am here to help you.
There unfortunately have not been any wide-ranging studies on language speed. One 2011 study from the Université de Lyon looked at 7 languages, which reported the order as Japanese (7.84 syllables per second), Spanish (7.82), French (7.18), Italian (6.99), English (6.19), German (5.97) and Mandarin (5.18).
German people refer to their country as Deutschland. Throughout history, however, it has had many names depending on which part of modern Germany was being discussed. One of Germany's old names was Almany. Another was Prussia, named for a dominant kingdom in the 1800s.
There are three main branches of the Germanic language group, itself a smaller subset of the huge Indo-European language family. Of these three branches, only one has now disappeared. The Eastern Germanic languages, of which only Gothic is known about in some detail, have become entirely extinct.
That metaphorical process is at the heart of Toki Pona, the world's smallest language. While the Oxford English Dictionary contains a quarter of a million entries, and even Koko the gorilla communicates with over 1,000 gestures in American Sign Language, the total vocabulary of Toki Pona is a mere 123 words.
Some linguists believe that 800 words are enough to hold a basic conversation. However, your vocabulary should be over 8,000 words if you want to speak a language as well as a native speaker.
If you're writing your first novel, the general rule of thumb for novel writing is a word count in the 80,000 to 100,000 range. While anything over 40,000 words can fall into the novel category, 50,000 is considered the minimum novel length. Anything over 110,000 words is considered too long for a fiction novel.
The same rule can be applied to language learning and teaching. It is commonly believed that 50% of all conversation in English is made up of only 100 basic words, and that 80% of conversation only uses about 3,000 words. Similar figures have been attributed to most other languages as well.
The average reader will read 100,000 words in 5.6 hours when reading at a speed of 300 words per minute (wpm). Typical documents that are 100,000 words or more include full-length novels.