How many words do you need to know?

How many words do you need to know to understand a language? Many students have asked me this and I'm sure it's also a question you have asked yourself at times. This episode is an answer to that question. I found an article by the BBC that I think is very interesting and that answers this question pretty well, so I thought I would share. It turns out that (resulta que)  if we know the 800 most frequently used word families (listen to the episode to find out what a family is), we can understand 75% of everyday speech. But, it gets more complicated than that. Check out the episode and let me know what you think!