A matter of speaking...

Question

Just how many words would you need to have an adequate conversation in spanish? I am in my second year of learning Spanish, and i was just wondering. My thanks is for any help that is given.

Answer 1

Although some people don't even need to use 400 words in a normal day, you'll need a minimum of 5000-6000 to be totally fluent in most situations, and about 1000-2000 in more restricted situations. Normally, 3000 words fill at least 95% of a normal conversation in any language.

Ah, but then the trick is... how to put those words into an intelligible conversation! - --Mariana--, Aug 31, 2009

that makes a lot of sense haha - sarahjs, Aug 31, 2009

Answer 2

With the 1k-2k that Lazarus mentions you could probably manage to express yourself (assuming that you don't want to discuss religion, politics, philosophy, literature, etc.) adequately for everyday living. You need two or three times as much vocabulary if you want to be able to understand the everyday conversation of others. (This is simply a result of the fact that you may be able to express your idea in only one way [which is fine as far as it goes] but someone else may use a different way [one that is unfamiliar to you] to say the same thing.) In traditional language-learning terms, your recognition vocabulary needs to be bigger than your active vocabulary.