How many words do you need to speak a language fluently?

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Sometimes on this blog, I ask a deceptively simple question in the title and then offer a different way to look at it. This is one of those times.

I've been getting asked this and similar questions a lot lately: how many words do you need, before you speak a language “fluently”?

The question is understandable, but it hides several harder questions. Let me start with an analogy:

It's like asking a composer “How many notes do you need exactly, before you have a musical masterpiece?”

A composer would need to know what kind of piece you wanted to create. Language works in a similar way: the words you need depend on what you want to do.

A raw total cannot tell you how well you can communicate. What matters is whether you can retrieve and use relevant words in context.

Whenever someone quotes a single number, I have questions. What counts as a “word”? Do dog and dogs count as one or two? What about relevance? Are “red” and “armadillo” equally useful for your life? Is the estimate counting words you recognise, words you can produce, word families or dictionary headwords?

It's just another attempt to put a language in a convenient testable and extremely measurable box, rather than let it be the free-flowing interactive and flexible means of communication that it truly is.

A note from the Fluent in 3 Months team before we get started: You can chat away with a native speaker for at least 15 minutes with the “Fluent in 3 Months” method. All it takes is 90 days. Tap this link to find out more.

Reading a menu

To give you an example; I remember seeing the word “impossible” a lot in comments on my mission to speak Mandarin in 3 months. Most of them get added to my “ignore asap” stack, since they clearly don't get what I'm doing here.

However, one point brought up which deserves a reply, is that I won't be able to get by in restaurants in Chinese in terms of reading the menu after just 3 months. As well as there being x bazillion Chinese characters to learn, the terms themselves for any given menu item may be very complicated.

For example, dishes such as Buddha Jumps Over the Wall, Goubuli buns, Ants Climbing a Tree and Lion’s Head have established names whose literal components do not give a learner a reliable ingredient list. Recipes also vary, so the name alone may not answer a dietary question.

So yes, if I was taking a Chinese menu test at the end of these 3 months, I'd fail miserably – and this is even if I somehow knew every single character/word's direct translation. Reading is a low priority for me over speaking, so I'll be very far from this.

But here's the thing: I'm not going to take a Chinese menu test; I'm going to eat in Chinese restaurants. Those are different tasks. A broad vocabulary test and a real meal draw on different context, priorities and communication strategies.

For example, I'm vegetarian. Recognising a promising description such as 季節蔬菜咖哩飯, “seasonal vegetable curry rice”, is useful, but it does not confirm every ingredient or preparation method. My practical priority is learning how to ask and understand whether a dish fits my diet.

Menu sections and the character 肉, “meat”, can provide clues. Nearby dishes are not necessarily vegetarian, however, and broths, sauces or garnishes may not appear in a short name. Context helps narrow the question; it does not replace asking staff about ingredients when the answer matters.

I do not need to memorise every colourful dish name at the start. If my immediate goal is ordering a suitable meal, ingredient questions and a small set of relevant words deserve more attention than rare menu trivia.

For my mission, speaking had a higher priority than broad reading. If I could not read one menu item, I could ask a member of staff what it contained. Another learner may need a different balance, especially if reading is central to their work or daily life.

The pointlessness of learning everything

One trap in language learning is feeling that you must know absolutely everything before you begin using the language. You can postpone a low-priority word such as obsidian without treating your learning as incomplete.

It's better to take a Pareto approach to realize the huge amount you can do with the little you initially learn, and discard non-essential words and come back to them later. I've discussed in detail elsewhere that I have a “triage” approach to language learning. I deal with the essentials right away, and get to the rest with time. You don't need to know everything right now. It's wasteful – people keep telling me that they have been learning a language for years and don't feel ready to speak it yet. As if there is an invisible barrier of x (hundred) thousand words you pass and then can call your level “good enough”.

Actually, even if you knew every single word in a language, you can still be far from fluent!! Fluency to me means that I can live my life entirely through that language in the real world without natives needing to adjust for my benefit.

On top of this, there is a long-forgotten art of figuring it out from the context. You absolutely don't need to know every word – in many cases, it can be pretty obvious what it should be, and if you don't know… just ask!!

Oral examinations test more than a word total

“But Benny, you're aiming for C1 oral level, and in C1 you need to know X amount of words!”

A CEFR level is not defined by one universal vocabulary total. Oral examinations assess how you communicate, and the exact criteria depend on the examination.

I've sat three high level European examinations, where I got a very good grade in the oral component (96% in Spanish and 74% in my German one: both C2), and yet I'm sure that I don't know the amount of words “recommended” to have that level in German, and it's unlikely that I know 96% of all Spanish words.

My oral tests from the Instituto Cervantes and Goethe-Institut assessed communicative performance rather than asking me to translate a random list. The official rubric, not my memory of the experience, is the authority on what a current examination measures.

For example, in the German test, I had to discuss deforestation. The thing is, I can't even discuss this in English! So, I talked my way through it – because they weren't testing to see if I knew the word for particular trees or whatever, they wanted to see how good my German was flowing. I didn't hesitate and I explained myself pretty well in how I put my points together – this is despite not having the vocabulary necessary to discuss deforestation. I worked around this. They weren't actually testing my deforestation knowledge, they were testing my fluency.

When I'm presented with any situation where I need to discuss any given topic, I try my best and talk around words I don't know, while not making it obvious that I am doing that. This has gotten me through very professionally styled academic tests fine.

The most important things in knowing a language are untestable or unmeasurable

If you corner me and ask me to be a dictionary without any context – I can't answer you. I don't know what the Spanish for toothpick is if you ask me out of the blue, but it will flow out of me if I'm speaking the language consistently and I will always recognise it when I hear it in context.

Technically speaking, I don't “know” words like this and would fail your tests, but I'm not trying to be a walking dictionary I'm trying to actually use the language in the real world!

This is why I haven't really defined any tests to take at the end of my language missions and would prefer to just make a series of videos where I'm using the language with natives – I know from experience what level of comfort I need for C2 and am aiming a bit below that. I'm not sure if I'll reach it, but your tests are worthless to me in terms of knowing that I have. Flow in conversations and living my life through the language in complex social situations is the real test.

Formal tests can measure valuable things, but no single score captures every relationship or experience a language makes possible.

Large vocabulary estimates can look precise while hiding how the study defined a word, knowledge and fluency. The useful question is what the number actually measured.

I measure my language successes in important things that are less easily quantifiable than mathematical concepts like “numbers of words I know”. And these are for things that I'm not really interested in measuring, like number of friends, or how many times I've laughed when speaking that language.

These are probably things I could track, but why would I want to? I'm learning a language here, not trying to score very high on some leader-board to wear as a badge. I want to talk to people. Friendships are something worth counting upon for success, not some empty number that to most of us can only be described as “more than you could ever realistically count”.

Sometimes having a quantifiable target to aim for can be very helpful if it motivates you – but that's all it is – an extra motivational tool. It doesn't actually mean anything. Learn as many words as you possibly can, because the more you know (as long as you are applying an efficient triage) the more you can say. But rather than measure the exact number, why not focus instead on using as many words as you can? 🙂