Today I decided to calculate roughly how much time it would take to expand my vocabulary to a size comparable to that of an average native speaker.
Let’s take English as an example. According to the Test Your Vocabulary service, the average native English speaker knows 20,000 to 35,000 words.
For simplicity, let’s assume that each word has, on average, 3 different meanings.
For each meaning, you need to know at least 5-7 set phrases (collocations) where the word is used specifically with that particular meaning.
Word combinations differ across languages, so these phrases need to be learned as ready-made units, not just as a collection of words. That is, they need to be memorized by heart, just like the words they consist of.
Let’s assume that memorizing one phrase takes one minute.
Now let’s calculate: 1 minute * 5 phrases * 3 meanings * 20,000 words. This gives us 300,000 minutes, or 5,000 hours.
Actually, it’s not 5,000 hours, but at least 5,000 hours. I think that in reality, it would take about twice as long: around 10,000 hours.
If you study the language for one hour a day, mastering this amount of vocabulary would take about 14 years (assuming well-structured study sessions).
This means you need to master about 60 lexical units per hour (by which I mean both individual word meanings and set phrases).
What do you think? Is it realistic to reach a native-like vocabulary level in 5,000 hours? And does this large amount of time seem daunting to you?