How many words?

About how many words does one need to know in order to, say, read a newspaper or have a meaningful conversation, in a given language? I realize that the figure probably varies widely depending on the language, but I'm just looking for a rough estimate.

I think I read somewhere that 90% of everyday speech in Italian is made up of around 2000 words. Does that sound accurate?

In before "OVER NINE-THOUSAND"

What did the scout say about his english level?

I think I read somewhere that 90% of everyday speech in Italian is made up of around 2000 words

But generally the 10% remaining are all the important keywords necessary to understand the topic at hand

bump

2000 seems kind of small

I heard you need to know around 2000 characters in japanese just to read a newspaper, that's at least 2000 words there, sure 90% might be in 2000 but the 10% are going to be way out there. Over 9000 probably is correct, If I was to guess, 10,000-20,000

here's the deal I remember about japanese newspapers
they adhere to the general use kanji list designated by the government which

>>7
oops, hit reply
... which is indeed around 2000
but one can obviously read more than half a newspaper knowing the first 1000 and so on. I remember it was a surprising number (say the first 500 cover 80% of the newspaper, 1500 for 94%)

However, what those numbers don't say is that they'll use kana for words with rare kanji, that plenty of words use kana only and that some of the rarer kanji for the names of places and people have to be known.
Finally that list doesn't tell us about the actual number of words you can make from the 2000 kanji.

Take this with a grain salt but I believe I heard my teachers say a (high school? uni?) graduate has a 15 000 words vocabulary on average, or something. We need some real figures for this... assemble the internets!

In reality you have to know a little over 3000 characters to read a book without any problems.