How Many Words Do You Need to Learn a Language?

I love words. They are like tiny, beautiful puzzle pieces. Choose the right ones, and you can assemble beautiful and meaningful sentences. Sentences that convey your thoughts with surgical precision. The number of words you know is one of the most reliable indicators of your language level. If you track the size of your vocabulary, you should be able to tell (more or less) what level you’re on, assuming, of course, that you learn the right words. Not knowing where you are heading can be frightening. It’s like straying in the fog. There is a lot of confusion around how large your vocabulary should be for each level, and I am on the mission to change it.

Vocabulary Size and Language Proficiency

There is no magic number of words that we need to know in order to speak a language. The natives speaker knows a lot of words, more than we do, and will inevitably use some of them when speaking with us. However, there are 4 most important vocabulary milestones in language learning. Just in case you wonder - the following rules stand roughly true for most of the languages, be it Asian or European.

It is tempting to believe that we can just acquire a small number of very useful words and sort of get a jump start in a language. Of course we need to learn key words like “I”, “you”, “he” and “she” and the like, or “where”, “when” “why”, etc. and the phrases that they are used with. Furthermore, these words usually trigger a context of language where we find ourselves quickly lost if we don’t have enough background in that language. It is not difficult to find a list of the most frequently used words in a language. You can look them up or use Google Translate. This is no doubt useful. These can become lists that you refer to over and over. However, before you can really use them, you need lots of exposure to them in a variety of contexts.

Core Vocabulary Milestones

250-500 words (Functional Beginner): After just a week or so of learning, you’ll already have most of the tools to start having basic, everyday conversations. In most of the world’s languages, 500 words will be more than enough to get you through any tourist situations and everyday introductions. That’s roughly what it takes to pass the A2 level on the CEFR scale.
1,000 words (Threshold Level): JUST 1000 words, and you understand that much! In theory, it sounds great. Unfortunately, the remaining 20% is what really matters. Even with 1,000 words in most languages, you’ll be able to ask people how they’re doing, tell them about your day and navigate everyday life situations like shopping and public transit. For that accomplishment, you’ll need knowledge of approximately 1000 words. But the problem is not the amount of words. How exactly are these words counted? Take the word “run” in English, for example.

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3,000 words (Conversational): Sure, you understand a lot of words. It seems like a lot. With even 3000 known words on the LingQ count, I am able to have meaningful exchanges with a tutor. Sure, on this level, you will be able to hold a decent conversation. Still, there is no shortage of enthusiasts who claim that such level is high enough to start picking up new words from context.
5,000 words (Advanced Comprehension): 5000 words allow you to understand about 98% of most ordinary texts (Nation (1990) and Laufer (1997)). It means that you can function surrounded by this language without bigger problems. As you grow past the 3,000 word mark or so in most languages, you’re moving beyond the words that make up everyday conversation and into specialized vocabulary for talking about your professional field, news and current events, opinions and more complex, abstract verbal feats.
10,000 words (Near-Native Fluency): 10000 words allow you to understand about 99% of most texts (Nation (1990) and Laufer (1997)). With that many words, you can express yourself with fantastic precision and pass for a native speaker if your accent is good enough. It is the minimum goal for every language I learn. At around 10,000 words in many languages, you’ve reached a near-native level of vocabulary, with the requisite words for talking about nearly any topic in detail. Furthermore, you recognize enough words in every utterance that you usually understand the unfamiliar ones from context. At this point, you should be able to reach C2 level in the Common European Framework for Reference (CEFR) in most languages.
10,000-30,000+ words (Native): Total word counts vary widely between world languages, making it difficult to say how many words native speakers know in general.

What Counts as a "Word"?

Before you can wrap your head around the difference between 1,000 words and 5,000, you’ll need to think about what a “word” is.

Some word counts count every form of a word. For example, from the verb “to run,” we get “run,” “runs,” “ran,” “running” and many more. By some counts, these would all count as individual words, all with slightly different meanings related to person, number and tense.

Other counts only look at headwords or word families, the forms by which most words are listed in the dictionary and the root word from which all other forms are derived. When counting this way, “house” and “houses” would be two forms of the same headword, “house.” The same would be true of “am,” “is,” “was” and “be,” all forms of the headword “to be.”

Taking the latter approach to counting up our vocabulary, you can think of a verb like “to run” as a “word” that you’ve learned, and your ability to conjugate it to “the dog runs” would count as grammatical knowledge, rather than an entirely new word. This second way of thinking closely mirrors organic language learning, in which we learn one form of a word and, as we learn more about the language and its structures, we’re able to generalize it and apply it to other situations. The grammatical understanding you acquire over time allows you to make the word plural, past tense, future tense or a direct object.

Perhaps you can already see the gulf of grey area between these two approaches. For instance, if “run” and “ran” count as one word, what about the verb “to run” in the sense of “to manage” or the noun form, as in “a quick run to the store”? Where do we draw the line between one cluster of meanings and the next? When attempting to count words, it’s important to adopt a consistent standard (what you’re counting and how you’re distinguishing one word from another).

For the sake of this post, let’s say that our vocabulary counts are using headwords and word families that are included in our active vocabulary. So, we’re not counting all the various forms of a given word, and we’re not counting anything that’s only in our passive vocabulary. When we narrow our perspective down like this, we can start making approximations.

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Active vs. Passive Vocabulary

Passive vocabulary, on the other hand, involves words that have gone into reserve. We have to stretch to remember them because we use them less often. For example, this happened to my English when I spoke primarily German for a few years.

Promoting passive vocabulary to active vocabulary is a question of use-it-or-lose-it. Once you’ve gotten acquainted with a new word and seen its different sides, it’s time to embark on the anxiety-inducing path of trying it out and using it yourself.

Tips for strengthening your active vocabulary:

Translating children’s books: Translating children’s books is one of the easiest ways to start using your new vocabulary. Pick a familiar book (maybe the same one you read in your target language to help gain more passive vocabulary), and translate it into the language you’re learning.
Practicing new vocabulary in FluentU’s learn mode: With FluentU, once you’ve had a chance to wrap your head around a new word in context, learn mode or quiz mode gives you a chance to put it to work by using it actively.
Vocabulary games: Engaging your new vocabulary to accomplish a task is not only good for long-term retention, it’s also fun!
Online or in-person language exchange: It doesn’t get better than actual conversation. Check out some apps and sites for language exchange, or look around sites like Couchsurfing and Meetup for local language exchange events you can attend in person.
Writing in your target language: Keep a diary just for you, and don’t worry about correctness or spelling-just use your words! You can also chat with friends on social media or use sites like HiNative to have native speakers check over your writing.
Talking to yourself: Sometimes you’re your own best conversation partner. Find some quiet time to read or watch some target language material and talk out your understanding of new words you hear, playing around with it until you think you’ve got it right. You can also record yourself and listen back to what you said.
Taking a course: If you need a more structured way to learn, you can take a course to help you along.

Strategies for Vocabulary Acquisition

Learning New Words Daily

Often in these types of questions it’s useful to work backwards from the solution. How many words is ‘good enough’? The number varies but I think a good enough number of words that you have to memorize is 10,000. This is going to make you sound ‘fluent’ in a language (although I argue the term fluent shouldn’t really exist).

Some people say you need as high as 15,000. Some people say you need as low as 5,000. I decided to just split the difference and say 10,000 is good enough. It’s probably not going to make you sound better than a native speaker but you aren’t going to be constantly tripping over your words either.

Then the next thing to do is calculate your time scale. How much time do you want to spend learning a new language? And for me the answer is obvious. 2 years. When you look at polyglots they often say they take 2 years to learn a language comfortably.

Now there are some ‘gurus’ that say you can learn a language in a lot less. But for the most part what the gurus are selling is just the ability to say a few basic words. Not what you want.

So now we have 10,000 words we want to learn and we have 2 years or 730 days. Now you just divide the two numbers and you get that you have to learn 13.69863 words a day. Rounded up that’s 14 words a day. Of course this is assuming you study every day which you really should.

So spaced repetition apps like my app Litany make it very easy to change how many new words you learn a day. Because they don’t rely on structured lessons. They use an algorithm to teach you new words with flashcards. This allows them to show you words right when you’re about to forget them leading to a significant increase in recall.

But if it’s so easy to set the number of new words you learn a day what number should you set? So the answer will actually vary a little based on how much free time you have but I think most people should be aiming to learn at least 14 new words a day. And here’s why.

The Importance of Context and Immersion

In the past I have delayed speaking with a tutor via Skype, until I have at least 10,000 known words at LingQ. Since we introduced the mini-stories at LingQ, I find that I am able to engage with a tutor much earlier. I am not normally in a hurry to start speaking, however, unless I have set myself a special goal. This was the case with my 90 day challenges in Arabic, Persian and Turkish, where I wanted to produce an exit video in these languages. Therefore, I don’t make a special effort to learn the high frequency words. They will take care of themselves. I prefer to immerse myself in language content. I start with easier content with a lot of repetition, and eventually more interesting, compelling content. LingQ enables me to do this. I can look up words and phrases that I don’t understand. I can save these words and phrases for occasional review. The most useful words, the highest frequency words, keep on appearing in the content I am reading and listening to. Almost like magic, in an order that I cannot control, they become part of me. There are also less frequently used words in my reading and listening, words that I need in order to understand what I am reading or listening to. I save them as well in LingQ but I make no special effort to learn them or even worse to memorize them. They are in my database at LingQ, and in my brain somewhere, but will probably not be activated for quite some time. I create lots of LingQs, in other words I save lots of words and phrases to my database at LingQ. I do this not only for words I do not know, but also for common little words that work differently in the new language, like “meu” or “minha” in Portuguese versus “mi” in Spanish. My experience tells me that there is no shortcut. I just need to continue enjoying immersing myself in the language and learning about new things via the language. In time I will seek out the opportunity to speak. I know that in order to have meaningful conversations, I will need to understand lots of words, not just the most common hundred or so. If I don’t have a large enough vocabulary, I will be lost in my attempts to engage people in conversations. Unfortunately many other words that I need, and know passively, still resist my effort. But, in time, more and more of them move into my active vocabulary. Meanwhile, knowing these words, even passively, enables me to participate in meaningful discussions. That is what I am now doing in Arabic and Persian. I am enjoying my import activity, learning a lot about the Middle East and when I feel like it. I’ll start speaking again. I know from experience that even though I have not spoken in these languages for quite a while, my ability to converse will have greatly improved, just through my input activities, because my comprehension will have improved and my vocabulary will have grown significantly. These are the key goals I set myself.

To learn more words in a language, you’ll need to saturate your passive vocabulary with new information constantly. That means exposing yourself to linguistic input like TV, videos and reading material, as well as plenty of real-life conversation.

Beginning learners, don’t fret over not understanding all the new words you expose yourself to every day. Every new word starts as an unfamiliar word, and repeated exposure is the only way to truly learn (rather than memorize) unfamiliar vocabulary.

Tips for strengthening passive vocabulary:

Watching children’s shows: TV shows for small children speak in a slow, articulate manner with a simple vocabulary and lots of context clues. This week’s episode about colors might not be as exciting as “Game of Thrones,” but it’ll help you expose your brain to the new vocabulary in context, just like children do.
Reading children’s books in translation: “Green Eggs and Ham” only used fifty words in the whole book. Hunt down some Dr. Seuss or other familiar children’s classics and learn new words easily by reading these, as the vocabulary is simple and you’ll already be familiar with the context.
Watching Disney or other animated films: Watching a movie you’ve already seen a hundred times (but doing it in your target language) works on the same principle as reading familiar children’s stories. The vocabulary is simple, and you already know the story so well that you’ll understand much of what you hear without ever needing to open a dictionary.
Learning vocabulary with authentic videos: When you expose yourself to media from real native English speakers, you give your mind a chance to hear the natural sounds of your target language. Listen passively to reinforce known vocabulary and grammar, or watch actively to discover new words in context and pick up vocabulary like slang and filler words that you might not learn from a more traditional approach.
Watching documentaries and educational programs: Learning a language with TV is one of the best ways to build vocabulary, and documentaries and educational programs in particular often (1) speak slowly and articulately, and (2) speak about something you see visually on the screen, making for a natural language learning setting in which you can start making connections between the words you hear and the images you see.
Reading public signs, menus, etc.: “Stop,” “exit” and “emergency” are all words you can learn quickly by taking a stroll through nearly any town in the world and looking around.
Wikipedia pages on familiar topics: Once you’ve moved beyond Dr. Seuss, try pulling up your professional field or favorite pastime on Wikipedia and finding the version in your target language on the left-hand menu. Once again, your familiarity with the subject should allow you to recognize and passively understand new words easily.
Flashcards and flashcard apps: It’s old-fashioned, but spaced repetition works.

Core Vocabulary and General Service Lists

Another French linguist, Paul Rivenc, conducted a similar study of (again) spoken French. This "sun" is basically a representation of a language from the lexical point of view. Vocabulary was found to consist of five major parts:

Morphemic nucleus: As a previous study has shown, the language nucleus consists of a very small number of grammatical words. Determiners (a, the), auxiliary verbs (have, be, do), pronouns of all sorts (I, you, his, mine), prepositions (in, at), and so on. These words show up in every single sentence because they help to build a grammatical one. However, even a hundred of these nucleus morphemes won't allow you to create a meaningful thought. Without an inflow of fresh words, you will hit the max line fairly soon. This is mine, not yours. Got it?
Core vocabulary: Only 1000-2000 words show up frequently enough to be counted as the core of a language. However, not all high-frequency words are "service" ones. Those notorious grammatical words would consist of just 25% of the core. The rest would be distributed between nouns (40%), verbs (22%), and adjectives (11%). They are indispensable. You won't be able to go for a day without using them. Core vocabulary is simply popular and useful words that appear a lot in our speech. They are not specific at all. All they can refer to are very general and vague ideas like "to like", "to want", "to have", "to come", or "to work". Or, when it comes to nouns, to fairly common things like "day", "thing", "home", "water", "life", or "people". People are a fairly common thing in this life, aren't they? By the way, all nasty things like irregular verbs, the remaining old declensions, and so on show up on this level. So if something is irregular, damn, you have to learn it.
Frequent vocabulary (Rays): Here, things become complicated. "Ray" vocabulary slips from our mouths all the time but… but it's domain-specific. Do you know how many words you need, for example, to ask for directions, to buy stuff in a grocery store, or to order something edible in a foreign language? The range of things you have to know how to name is really immense: Types of transport: a car, a bus, a taxi; Directions: left, right, and a Toronto-specific "North-West"; Time: tomorrow, Saturday, in a week; Edible stuff: 1 kg of tomatoes, chicken breasts, ice-cream; Restaurant-specific: please, vegetarian, deep-fried. And so on, just think about it! Of course, you don't need to know how to say "vegetarian" in French when you are lost in Lyon. But the time will come, my friend, when you get hungry. The "ray" vocab penetrates all possible domains of our life, and it's very easy to have gaps on this level. Why? Because it's estimated to cover around 4000-5000 words. And this is a lot when you're a beginner.
Semi-specialized vocabulary: "A man with a scant vocabulary will almost certainly be a weak thinker. The richer and more copious one’s vocabulary and the greater one’s awareness of fine distinctions and subtle nuances of meaning, the more fertile and precise is likely to be one’s thinking. Knowledge of things and knowledge of the words for them grow together. If you do not know the words, you can hardly know the thing." ― Henry Hazlitt, Thinking as a Science That’s the prominent problem for all language learners. Basic vocabulary doesn't give us much flexibility of expression, and more refined vocabulary requires a lot of time to learn. Meanwhile, some native speakers look at us as if we were some kind of funny creatures with undeveloped speech. Not all, thankfully. In any case, if you want to pass for a learned person in a foreign country, you have to use high-end words and expressions. This level consists of around 25,000 words that are mostly redundant to your basic vocabulary. All those synonyms of "good" and "bad", the 79th and 132nd meanings of "to go", Latin derivations, and so on would be included at this level. As you can guess, the only way to memorize all this vocabulary is to read, and read a lot.
Technical vocabulary: However, high in the sky, there's another level, and most of us never reach it, even in our native language. These other 200,000-300,000 highly technical, or scientific, words are so domain-specific that they almost never overlap. Linguists attack you with formidable terms like "suprasegmental properties" or "degemination"; mathematicians - with "manifold" and "quaternions"; nuclear scientists - with "antineutrino" and "photomultipliers". I hope it's enough. There is absolutely no chance for this vocabulary to be used in everyday speech. But again, you come across them in many technical books on a related topic.

So, you've found out how many words you need to learn. Now, how do you do this? You have to know your enemy. You can't learn thousands of words without knowing what they look like. And the perfect tool here is the General Service List. Briefly, the GSL is a long list of the 2,000 most frequent words in English compiled by Dr. West in 1953.

Wow, that’s an old one, you might say. And I would totally agree, as would hundreds of linguists and lexicostatists. Fortunately, there were a number of people who went beyond simply saying that the West’s list is outdated. Dr. Charles Browne and his team published an updated (and slightly expanded) version of the GSL in 2013. The new list includes 2800 words deliberately extracted from an immense 273-million-word written corpus of English. With the New General Service list, learners can understand 92% of English texts (on general topics, of course).

Multilingual Resources

I can sense your question already. “But I don’t need a list of English words, I need one for [insert your target language here]!!!” In that case, you'll want to access the blog of Hermit Dave, who created frequency word lists for 39 languages based on the Open Subtitles Org database. Most lists include more than 50,000 words. For example, the one for the Russian language included 450,029 unique words. And, since it's all subtitles, you have access to authentic spoken language.

GSL's 2000 words are quite inferior to the number of words you need to know to function in real life. Nevertheless, you won’t be able to build a wide vocabulary without this foundation, so I recommend starting here. As you progress, you'll naturally acquire new vocabulary through reading, listening, and real-time conversations.

The 80/20 Principle

Learning a language is not just cramming new words for the rest of your life. As the Pareto Law goes, "20% of efforts give 80% of results," and the smart thing to do is not to waste a single minute covering the other 20%. And since an average adult native speaker knows around 20,000-35,000 words, your 20% target would be to cover 4,000-7,000 words. If we refer back to the Rivenc’s Vocabulary Sun, we will see that the core and frequent vocabulary together comprise around 5,000-7,000 words. These are the words you want to concentrate on.

Overcoming Challenges and Embracing the Journey

Sadly, some would-be learners just can’t get past the embarrassment. And of course, we need to realize that even as experts in our mother tongues, we still sometimes misspeak. I recommend meditation and simple stretching exercises a few times a day. And everyone should. Personally, I’ve never stressed about it.

I’ve learned 1200 words for A2, reached B1 and probably now have 16,000 words for German by now. But as I’ve tried to show in this post, what matters is not your word count. And the more you base the words and phrases you learn on what you regularly say on a daily basis, the faster you’ll reach functional fluency.

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