Blog · The research
How many words do you need to read a novel in another language?
To read a novel comfortably without any help, research suggests you need about 8,000 to 9,000 word families (Nation, 2006). With some support, such as a dictionary or sentence explanations, readers manage with around 4,000 to 5,000 (Laufer and Ravenhorst-Kalovski, 2010). Books written for children, and graded readers, need far fewer.
It's one of the first things learners ask once they think about reading: how many words do I actually need? The research gives a surprisingly clear answer for reading without help, and a more encouraging one for reading with it.
Start with coverage
Researchers approach the question through lexical coverage: the share of the running words in a text that you already know. If a page has 300 words and you know 294 of them, your coverage is 98%.
Two thresholds come up again and again:
- 95%. Batia Laufer's work in the late 1980s put the minimum for reasonable reading comprehension around here. That's one unknown word in every twenty, roughly one every other line of a printed book.
- 98%. Marcella Hu and Paul Nation's 2000 study found that most readers needed about this much to understand a short story well without help. That's one unknown word in fifty, roughly one every four or five lines.
The difference between 95% and 98% sounds small. On the page it's the difference between stopping every line and stopping every few lines.
From coverage to a number of words
Coverage depends on the book, so researchers count how many of the most frequent word families you'd need to reach those percentages in typical texts.
| Study | What it estimated | Word families |
|---|---|---|
| Nation (2006) | 98% coverage of written text, including novels and newspapers | 8,000 to 9,000 |
| Nation (2006) | 98% coverage of spoken English | 6,000 to 7,000 |
| Laufer & Ravenhorst-Kalovski (2010) | “Optimal” threshold, about 98% coverage, for independent reading | About 8,000 |
| Laufer & Ravenhorst-Kalovski (2010) | “Minimal” threshold, about 95% coverage, for reading with some support | 4,000 to 5,000 |
| Goulden, Nation & Read (1990) | Average vocabulary of the educated native speakers they tested | About 17,000 |
A word family is a base word and its related forms, so run, runs, ran, running and runner count once. In a language like Spanish or Italian, where each verb has dozens of forms, that matters: knowing hablar gets you hablaba, hablaron and hablando for free, once you know the endings.
What this means for you
8,000 is the number for reading with no help at all
Most learners take years to get there. If you waited until then to open a novel, you'd miss the thing that gets you there fastest. The 8,000 figure describes the end of the road, and reading is one of the main ways to travel it.
With help, you can start at roughly half
Laufer and Ravenhorst-Kalovski's “minimal” threshold of 4,000 to 5,000 word families is for reading with some support. Support used to mean a teacher or a dictionary. Today it can be a tap on a sentence that gives you the translation and the grammar, which costs you a few seconds instead of a few minutes.
Easy books need fewer still
The estimates above are for ordinary adult text. Books written for children, or in a deliberately plain style, use a much smaller vocabulary. That's why the classics marked beginner in Passage, such as Cuentos de la selva or Pinocchio, are readable long before you reach 8,000 families.
Book length changes the experience
Length doesn't change the vocabulary you need, but it changes how long you need to keep going. In Passage's editions, Cuentos de la selva is under 18,000 words; La Regenta is over 300,000. Starting short means you finish while the book still feels manageable.
Try it on a real bookPassage is free to start on iPhone, iPad and Mac. Pick a classic at your level and tap any sentence you don't get.
Download on theApp StoreHow to test a book quickly
You don't need to know your vocabulary size to pick a book. Read one full page, count the words you'd need to look up to follow what happens, and compare:
- Up to about 5 unknown words on a 250-word page is around 98%. Read it.
- 6 to 12 is around 95%. Read it with help.
- More than that, and you'll spend more time decoding than reading. Pick something easier for now.
There's a fuller version of this test in how to choose a book at your level.
How reading grows your vocabulary
Here's the loop that makes the numbers less scary. Reading at 95–98% coverage means you meet a few new words on every page, surrounded by words you know. Context gives you a guess; meeting the word again confirms it. Over a whole novel, useful words come back many times, and research on learning from reading finds that repeated meetings are what make words stick (see extensive reading and comprehensible input).
Saving a word and reviewing it a few times speeds that up. That's the reason Passage keeps the sentence with each saved word and brings it back in short review games.
Find a book at your level: Spanish, French, Italian, Dutch, Turkish, English.
Sources
- Laufer, B. (1989). What percentage of text-lexis is essential for comprehension? In C. Lauren & M. Nordman (Eds.), Special Language: From Humans Thinking to Thinking Machines. Multilingual Matters.
- Goulden, R., Nation, P., & Read, J. (1990). How large can a receptive vocabulary be? Applied Linguistics, 11(4).
- Hu, M., & Nation, I. S. P. (2000). Unknown vocabulary density and reading comprehension. Reading in a Foreign Language, 13(1).
- Nation, I. S. P. (2006). How large a vocabulary is needed for reading and listening? The Canadian Modern Language Review, 63(1).
- Laufer, B., & Ravenhorst-Kalovski, G. C. (2010). Lexical threshold revisited: Lexical text coverage, learners' vocabulary size and reading comprehension. Reading in a Foreign Language, 22(1).
Questions
What is a word family?
A base word plus its inflected forms and common derived forms. Read, reads, reading and reader are one family. Vocabulary research counts families because once you know the base, the related forms cost little extra effort.
How many words does a native speaker know?
Estimates vary a lot. In Goulden, Nation and Read's 1990 study, the educated native speakers of English they tested averaged around 17,000 word families, with wide differences between individuals.
How many words do I need to read a children's book?
Far fewer than for an adult novel, though no single number fits every book. Graded reader series usually run from a few hundred headwords at the lowest levels to a few thousand at the top, which gives a sense of the range.
Do these numbers apply to Spanish, French and Italian?
The best-known studies were done on English. The principle (you need to know almost every word on the page) holds across languages, but the exact family counts will differ. Treat them as a rough guide.