BBC – Beth Sagar-Fenton and Lizzy McNeill 
That was the question posed to BBC Radio 4’s More or Less programme by one frustrated listener. Despite learning German for three years, and practising nearly every day, they still couldn’t seem to retain more than 500 words. “I was hoping,” they wrote, “you could give me a shortcut, by working out how many words we actually use on a regular basis.” To work out how many words you need to know to be able to speak a second language we decided to look into how many words we know in our first language, in our case English. (more)