Children start to communicate using very simple, short words. They're not afraid to speak using just the basic vocabulary, cause they intuitively know they will speak better by speaking. They are also confident that we'll understand them. By repeating a relatively small number of simple words, they can navigate many situations naturally and intuitively.
How young children develop their vocabulary
- At six months, babies babble and make silly, cute sounds that might not resemble words yet. Maybe they can show their agreement or disagreement, but usually they observe the world with their big eyes and take it all in.
- By the time babies reach one year, they can say a few simple words like “mommy,” “daddy,” and “eat.” Although these words might be hard for strangers to understand, parents usually know exactly what their baby means. Sometimes, babies even make up their own words, and parents learn to understand these special, creative expressions.
- At 18 months, toddlers can say 5 to 40 words. They able to tell their parents what they want or need.
- By the time they turn two, children know 150 to 300 words. They start using two to three word sentences and can be very strong willed in their communication.
- At the age of three, children know 900 to 1,000 words and are able to ask short questions. Their curious minds spin with questions about the world around them and they don't hesitate asking.
- When children turn four, they know about 2,000 words, can form sentences with five or more words and are usually able to talk about anything without any problems. By this point, their grammar skills are almost fully developed.
Why is it that as kids, we could communicate so well with just a few words?
By listening to our parents, older siblings, or grandparents, we quickly figured out which words were most important and learned those first. We picked up handy phrases that worked in many different situations, which helped us gradually understand the grammar and start using the language more creatively.
As children, we naturally followed the Pareto Principle (the 80/20 rule), which states that: Roughly 80% of consequences come from 20% of causes.
This means that knowing just 20% of the most important words lets us handle 80% of everyday conversations. Even though each language has over 100,000 words, we really only need about 1,000 to 2,000 words to navigate most conversations (this can differ across languages).
This principle is great because it shows that we only need to learn a small number of words to start speaking our new language. By repeating those words over and over, we get more comfortable with them and start using them automatically. This boosts our confidence and keeps us from feeling overwhelmed by too many words at once.
Another reason we could get by with just a few words as kids is that we used simple, short sentences. This was a big plus because it let us say what we needed without having to use complicated grammar.
As kids we also didn't stress too much about making mistakes at first. We knew that if we kept trying, we'd eventually fix them—just like we did when we started walking.
Our own experience as kids show us that we don't need to use complex sentences and know thousands of words right from the beginning to be able to speak and understand a new language. At this stage, just a few hundred words are enough to communicate well!
That's why at Mooveez, we design all our stories and situations to be useful from the very beginning, so you can start using them right away. We build our stories around the most common and useful words. To do this, we rely on frequency dictionaries for each language and start with the words people use the most. Everything is taught using simple, short sentences, called language patterns. For example, if you learn to say “I want coffee with milk,” you can swap out “coffee with milk” for anything else, and that simple formula will work for dozens of different situations.
We all have the ability to learn any language. We’ve already proven it by learning our native language, and we can tap into that ability again.
