How many words for each level
How many French words do you already know? The free test shows your vocabulary size and CEFR level in 3 minutes.
Take the test →| Level | Words | What you can do |
|---|---|---|
| A1 | up to 1,500 | Introduce yourself, order a café crème, ask for directions and understand prices and times. |
| A2 | 1,500–2,500 | Talk about work, family and weekends, read short messages and simple notices in a French town. |
| B1 | 2,750–3,250 | Travel in France on your own, follow a slow podcast and explain an opinion in a few sentences. |
| B2 | 3,250–3,750 | Keep up a conversation with native speakers, read Le Monde articles and watch series with French subtitles. |
| C1 | 3,750–4,500 | Work or study in French, read novels and follow fast speech, slang and humour most of the time. |
The ranges come from Milton and Alexiou (2009), who compared receptive vocabulary size with CEFR level; no separate French table with the same method is available, so these are estimates of words you recognise, not words you actively use. All levels in one table: how many words you need for A1–C1.
How much of a text the most common words cover
When Cobb and Horst compared Reader’s Digest articles with their French translations, the most frequent 1,000 French word families covered about 76% of the words and the first 2,000 about 84%; in European Parliament speeches the figures were about 78% and 89%. Full comfort takes far more: a Swedish study found that 7,000–9,000 lemmas are needed to know 98% of the words in French novels.
Start with these words
These words appear in almost every French sentence, and the verbs on the list are also the irregular ones you need for every tense. Learn nouns with their article, because the article is how you remember the gender.
- être to be
- avoir to have
- faire to do, to make
- aller to go
- dire to say
- pouvoir can, to be able to
- vouloir to want
- savoir to know
- qui who
- que what, that
- où where
- quand when
- comment how
- pourquoi why
- mais but
- parce que because
- aujourd’hui today
- demain tomorrow
- hier yesterday
- maintenant now
- toujours always, still
- encore again, still
- le jour day
- la semaine week
- l’homme (m.) man
- la femme woman, wife
- l’enfant (m./f.) child
- l’ami (m.) friend
- la maison house, home
- la ville town, city
- le pays country
- le travail work, job
What makes French vocabulary easier or harder
After 1066 French flooded into English, so words like nation, possible, important and restaurant are almost free. Learn the patterns too: English -ly often becomes -ment (rapidly, rapidement).
Some shared words have drifted apart: actuellement means currently, a librairie is a bookshop and sensible means sensitive. Keep a short list of these, because they cause the most embarrassing mistakes.
Every noun is masculine or feminine, and the ending does not always tell you which: le problème is masculine, la plage feminine. Always learn the noun with le or la, never the bare word.
Many final letters are silent and several words sound the same: vert, verre, vers and ver are all pronounced alike. Learn each word with audio, otherwise you will recognise it in print but miss it in speech.
Which topics to learn at each level
- A1. greetings, numbers, family, food and drink, the café, days and times; aim for phrases you can say tomorrow.
- A2. work, home, shopping, transport, health, weather and holidays; add the passé composé verbs you need to tell a story.
- B1. travel problems, feelings, opinions, media, studies and money; learn linkers like pourtant and donc to sound connected.
- B2. society, environment, technology, politics and culture; focus on collocations such as prendre une décision.
- C1. abstract and academic vocabulary, idioms, formal and informal registers and slang like bouquin or bosser.
Type a topic or a level into the generation chat in the app, for example “B1: work and career”, and get a word set with examples in context, audio and smart reviews. Any other topic works too.
How long it takes
At 10 new words a day with regular reviews you add about 300 words a month and about 3,600 a year, roughly the vocabulary of B2. At 20 a day you get there in about half the time. The US Foreign Service Institute puts French in its easiest group for English speakers, about 30 weeks or 750 class hours to professional working proficiency. In practice the words that stay are the ones you review and meet again in real French, so reading and listening count as much as new cards.
How NewLexi helps you build your vocabulary
In NewLexi you type a level or a topic into the generation chat, for example “B1: travel in France”, and get a word set that is already split into categories. Every word comes in context with audio, and spaced repetition brings it back right before you would forget it. Stories and dialogues are written for you, at your level and with your words, so you meet them again in real French. You can also import words by photo or from Anki and Quizlet, and the free vocabulary test shows where to start.
