[masraum]

Originally Posted by David

I was thinking about this the other day as I get closer to retirement and will likely spend at least a month or two a year in Thailand. I was think about watching videos and learning at least a word a day or week. But then I looked up how many words we know by age and realized in a few years I'd only be up to 3 year old vocabulary

Age Average Vocabulary Size
3 ~3,000 words
5 ~6,000 words
10 ~12,000 words
15 ~20,000 words
20 ~23,000 words

I suspect that you might be at a word a day at first (or maybe even 3-5/week), but as you learn more, I believe the rate of learning would increase. You have to remember when we're learning new words when we're young, we don't have exposure to the words, and we're having to learn and understand the meaning and something that's essentially foreign to us. But learning new stuff now, you've got the existing English version/translation of the word in your head, so for most words it will just be learning the pronunciation and correct usage and pairing that to your existing knowledge.