The Italian reading room
How many Italian words do you need?
Any figure you are handed for this — two thousand, three thousand, «the commonest thousand» — is a figure about some particular text, and the honest ones name it. This page names its text: eight Italian tales, from Collodi's «Cappuccetto Rosso» to Pirandello's «La giara», 15,682 running words built out of 2,015 distinct dictionary words. The counting is done afresh whenever the page is opened.
Five thresholds
| Share of the print | Dictionary words it takes | In practice |
|---|---|---|
| half | 63 | the grammar words: you recognise the skeleton of each line and none of its meat |
| 80% | 376 | every fifth word a blank: you are guessing at the plot |
| 90% | 771 | every tenth: you follow who did what and lose how |
| 95% | 1,231 | one in twenty: possible with a gloss beside you, and unhurried |
| 98% | 1,702 | one in fifty: where studies of reading place comfort without help |
Said as one line: 1,231 words for 95% of these eight real Italian tales, and 1,702 for 98%. The ceiling is 2,015, because that is all the vocabulary four authors spend on them. And since 46% of those turn up a single time, the last few per cent are bought dearly: a longer book has a larger vocabulary and would ask for more at every row.
63 words do half the work
Here are the busiest of them, each with the number of times the shelf prints it: the hinges an Italian sentence turns on.
| Italian | English | Times printed |
|---|---|---|
| e | and | 651 |
| il | the | 490 |
| la | the | 467 |
| essere | to be | 388 |
| di | of, from | 363 |
| a | to, at | 325 |
| che | that, which, who | 261 |
| un | a, an | 250 |
Where an Italian word begins and ends
Before anything is counted, somebody has to rule on «l’albero», on «un po’» and on «della». Here the cut falls at the apostrophe, which makes «l’» an entry in its own right. A preposition welded to its article — «della», «nella» — stays whole, exactly as the printer set it. And a pronoun riding on the end of a verb, as in «dirgli», goes home to the verb. Those are the rulings the room itself applies whenever a word is tapped; a tally made under other rulings will not match this one, and neither is wrong.
Covering the print is not reading the sentences
Two different things are easily confused. The opening 100 entries of the shelf's word list account for 41% of all the print, yet only 14% of the sentences come out clean. Go as deep as 1,231 entries — the 95% mark — choosing them so that whole sentences fall soonest, and 1,326 of the 1,571 sentences are clear while 245 still hide something. At 1,702, 92 still do. What you lack is scattered thinly, a word here and a word there, so there is no day on which reading begins: the clear sentences just become more numerous.
Met a single time
920 of the 2,015 words on this shelf — 46% — are printed exactly once. Frequency lists bury them and courses never reach them, so a reader alone must halt for each. That is the case for glosses: inside the reading room each of them answers with its dictionary form and its meaning on the spot.
A place to begin
«Cappuccetto Rosso» runs to 741 words and is open entire, no account asked. The reading order tells you what every later tale costs in vocabulary you have not yet got.