One of the most common questions in language learning – and one with a surprisingly concrete answer. Linguists have been counting for decades which words occur how often, and the result is similar in almost every language: a tiny core of the vocabulary does almost all the work.
The 100 most frequent words of a language already cover around 50% of all spoken text. With the 1000 most frequent words you reach about 85% of everyday language, with 3000 words around 95%. After that the curve flattens sharply: for the last five percent you would need tens of thousands of rare words – which you will hardly encounter as a learner at first.
The consequence is clear: the first 1000 words are by far the most valuable investment of your study time. With them you understand the core of almost every conversation, can hold simple exchanges and – crucially – infer new words from context, because you already understand the rest of the sentence. Roughly translated into levels: about 500 words correspond to A1, 1000–1500 words to A2, and from about 2500–3000 words you are moving towards B1/B2.
What matters, however, is which 1000 words you learn. A random vocabulary list achieves little – they have to be the most frequent ones. That is exactly how 1000 Words is built: core nouns, verbs and adjectives plus the most important everyday sentences, always with example sentence and audio. This turns the statistics into a concrete, achievable learning plan.