First half good, second half no so good...

Fabio Capello (England's football manager) whose command of the language leaves something to be desired, has said that he only needs to know 100 words to be able to manage the team.  There have been various suggestions as to what those 100 words should be - mostly humourous - but it does raise the question of just how big a vocabulary do you need to get by in another language?  The general consensus seems to be that a "survival" vocabulary needs to have about 500 words, and to achieve anything like fluency probably needs five or six times that number.  So we're going to have to continue to put up with Capello's mangled explanations of why England underperformed yet again for some time to come it seems.