How many words do you need to have a conversation?
In short
- Research on English suggests that the 2,000 to 3,000 most common words are enough to follow most everyday talk. In the author’s experience, simple things can be said with far fewer.
- The number depends on how much of a conversation you want to follow, whether you want to understand or to speak, and whether the words suit the people in front of you.
- The most common words do the heavy lifting, but a frequency list knows nothing about your life, so add the words of your own family, kitchen and journey to work.
- You generally need fewer words to speak than to understand: choose a small set for the conversations ahead and learn whole phrases.
- These figures are for English and for understanding, so treat them as a guide. Words you have met are not words you know unless you review them.
You may be wondering: “How many words do you need to have a conversation?” Research on English suggests that the 2,000 to 3,000 most common words are enough to follow most everyday chatter. In my experience, you can say simple things with a much smaller vocabulary.
The number depends on a) how much of the conversation you actually want or need to follow, b) whether you want to understand or to speak, and c) whether the word choices are the right ones for the people in front of you.
If you know only a few hundred words and can’t yet hold a conversation, it doesn’t mean you are bad at languages. Everyone starts there. Keep going, learning the most common words first.
My reason
The first conversation I had in Portuguese was in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, with my language teacher at Caminhos language school in Ipanema. I had progressed through to B2 level (intermediate), having started in A1 (beginner) class about 6 weeks earlier. I had already studied Spanish at degree level in the UK, so I felt I could learn Portuguese really fast. Frustrated with the slow and steady rate of progress in group classes, I asked for 1:1 lessons to really advance my Portuguese. The 1:1 lessons were magic, because very quickly I felt myself being able to have conversations of acceptable complexity with a native speaker. I must have had approaching 1,000 words in my Portuguese vocabulary at the time, with 1,000 to 2,000 more a reasonable guess from the Spanish I already had.
If I didn’t know a word in Portuguese, I took the Spanish and used it to guess at the Portuguese equivalent (la política (politics, Spanish) vs. a política (politics, Portuguese), el presidente (president, Spanish) vs. o presidente (president, Portuguese)). This often, but not always, worked. In these examples, the difference is mostly at the level of pronunciation, with the spelling showing the lexical similarity between the two languages.
Sometimes I would get close to the Portuguese word, but get it wrong because of a false cognate in Spanish. The teacher was alert to false friends, and could simply correct me. Consider, for example: embarazada (pregnant, Spanish) vs. embaraçada (embarrassed, Portuguese), and exquisito (delicious, Spanish) vs. esquisito (strange, Portuguese).
I can’t describe the good feeling from finally being able to converse with a real person about real things. In my experience, people open up in their own language in a way they do not when speaking English as a second language with you. Suddenly I was learning what ordinary Brazilians thought of their president, and of the US. Much harder subjects to broach in English.
How many words do you need to be conversational?
This depends on how much of what people say you are willing to miss. Researchers measure this as the share of the words in a conversation that you know. For example, if you know 90% of the words in a conversation, you miss 1 in 10. At 95% you miss 1 in 20, and at 98% you miss 1 in 50.
In 2013 Hilde van Zeeland and Norbert Schmitt played four spoken stories to 76 people, 36 native English speakers and 40 learners of English, and changed how many of the words each listener would know.1 Most people followed the stories well enough with only 90% of the words, though the learners varied a lot. At 95% the learners did well and varied much less. On that basis the authors estimate that you need between 2,000 and 3,000 word families for adequate listening.
Studies of what people really say give higher figures. In 2003 Adolphs and Schmitt analysed a modern collection of spoken English.2 They found that 2,000 word families (explained under “What counts as a word?” below) covered less than 95% of it, and that about 5,000 individual words were needed to reach about 96%.
Clearly, there are diminishing returns with larger vocabularies as you get closer to knowing every word. Paul Nation calculated that if you want to know 98% of a spoken text, you need 6,000 to 7,000 word families.3 Webb and Rodgers, counting the words in 318 films, found that 3,000 word families, plus names and other marginal words, gave 95.76%, and 6,000 gave 98.15%.4
Remember, all of these studies were on English, and they measured understanding, not speaking. The listening study used 76 people and four stories, and film scripts are not spontaneous chit-chat. Consider the numbers as an approximate guide for other languages, not a measurement of them.
What counts as a word?
When researchers count words, they usually count word families: a base word together with its other forms. Walk, walks, walked and walking make one family. That is a fair way to count English, where most forms are easy to spot once you know the base word.
Polish makes the count harder for a learner, because a word changes its ending more often. I have seen a number of intimidating reels on social media showing the countless forms of common Polish words, which vary depending on case, tense, number, gender, aspect, person, mood, animacy, and degree of comparison (sigh). Babcia (grandmother) becomes babciu when you call her, and to a beginner that looks like a second word, though a word list would usually count them as one. This is another reason I treat the English numbers as a guide. I write about the endings in Is Polish hard to learn? An honest answer.
What are the most common words?
They are the words a language uses most often, and you find them on a frequency list or frequency dictionary, which seeks to rank words by how often they appear in real speech and writing, listing the most common ones first.
The key insight to using frequency lists is this: the most common words do the heavy lifting in everyday life. Research on English found that the 1,000 most common words make up roughly 75% of the words in a typical written text, and the 2,000 most common about 80%.5 The first thousand does most of the work, with each thousand after that adding less and less.
It is clearly also worth asking how a list was built. A list built from speech should suit conversation better than one built from books, though I have not tested that.
Are the most common words enough?
No. A frequency list knows nothing about your life. The words you want for the people you talk to may be far from the top of any general list, and you will need them on the first day. A word like kłębuszek (little ball of wool) is unlikely to sit near the top of a list, yet my wife still called me that as a term of endearment(!) I wrote about choosing words this way in How to learn Polish to talk to your partner’s family.
This is why each Lumessa word bank is ordered by how often its words are used, then adjusted so that typical, easy terms come early and more abstract ones later. Each bank holds more than 1,000 words and phrases, so it is a start on the 2,000 to 3,000, not the whole of it.
How many words do you need to speak?
When learning a foreign language, you don’t need to be able to speak as many words as you can understand. Remember, speaking is the harder skill, so don’t be hard on yourself for finding speaking to be the hardest part. The words you can say are generally a smaller set than the words you recognise. In 2008 Stuart Webb tested second-language learners on both, and overall they understood more words than they could produce.6 I explain why in Why can I understand a language but not speak it?
In my experience, a small set of words goes a long way when you choose it for the conversations you know are coming: greetings (cześć, jak tam? (hi, how are you?)), asking for things (Poproszę kawę (a coffee please)), talking about family (moja teściowa, moje szwagierki (my mother-in-law, my sisters-in-law)). Learn a whole phrase along with the word, so it comes out without a search.
Where do I start?
With three things: a) the most common words, starting with the first few hundred; b) vocabulary inspired by your own life: your family, your kitchen, your journey to work; and c) saying words and phrases out loud early, to a real person if you can, before you feel ready.
How long it takes to reach 2,000 or 3,000 words is simple arithmetic. At 10 new words a day it is 200 to 300 days. A word you never review will fade, though, as I explain in Why do I keep forgetting new words in a language?, so the number of words you have met is not the number you know.
The words you need depend on who you want to talk to, which is why the Lumessa app asks why you are learning: family and heritage, someone you love, travel, work or study, or simple curiosity. Your most useful vocabulary is taught first.