How many words for each level
How many Spanish 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 | You order a coffee, ask “¿Dónde está…?” and fill in a form with your name and address. |
| A2 | 1,500–2,500 | You talk about your week, shop, rent a room and understand simple messages from a landlord. |
| B1 | 2,750–3,250 | You follow a chat between friends on familiar topics and tell a story in the past tense. |
| B2 | 3,250–3,750 | You watch a Spanish series with Spanish subtitles and argue for your opinion at work. |
| C1 | 3,750–4,500 | You read El País without a dictionary and understand jokes and regional accents most of the time. |
The ranges come from the general study by Milton and Alexiou (2009); we found no separate CEFR word counts for Spanish. They estimate receptive vocabulary, the words you recognise when reading, and you can usually use fewer of them actively. All levels in one table: how many words you need for A1–C1.
How much of a text the most common words cover
Mark Davies counted lemmas in a 20-million-word corpus of modern Spanish while preparing the Routledge frequency dictionary. The 1,000 most frequent lemmas cover about 88% of the words in conversation and 76–80% of the words in written texts, and each further thousand adds less: about 5–8% for the second and 2–4% for the third. For 90% of a conversation you need about 4,000 lemmas, for 90% of a novel about 7,000.
Start with these words
These words show up in almost every Spanish conversation, so each one pays off from day one. Learn them in phrases, not alone: “tengo que irme”, “¿qué quieres hacer?”.
- ser to be (who or what)
- estar to be (where, how)
- tener to have
- hacer to do, to make
- poder can, to be able
- decir to say
- ir to go
- querer to want, to love
- ¿qué? what?
- ¿cómo? how?
- ¿dónde? where?
- ¿cuándo? when?
- ¿por qué? why?
- porque because
- pero but
- también also
- hoy today
- mañana tomorrow
- ayer yesterday
- ahora now
- siempre always
- el día day
- la semana week
- el año year
- la gente people
- el amigo friend
- la familia family
- la casa house, home
- el trabajo work, job
- la ciudad city
- el país country
- la calle street
What makes Spanish vocabulary easier or harder
Words ending in -tion, -ty and -ly often turn into -ción, -dad and -mente: nación, universidad, rápidamente. You can guess a big part of an academic or news text before you study it.
Some lookalikes mean something else: embarazada is “pregnant”, not “embarrassed”, and actualmente means “currently”. Learn these few dozen early, because they cause the most awkward mistakes.
One verb has around fifty forms across persons, tenses and moods: hablo, hablaste, hablaría, hable. You learn the verb once, but you need time to recognise all its endings by ear.
Every noun is masculine or feminine, and some break the -o/-a pattern: el problema, la mano. Spelling is regular, so once you hear a word you can almost always write it.
Which topics to learn at each level
- A1. greetings, numbers, family, food and drinks, the house, days and times. Learn the verbs ser, estar, tener and ir with them.
- A2. shopping, travel and transport, health, weather, free time, clothes. Add past-tense forms of common verbs.
- B1. work, studies, feelings, plans, the city, the news. Learn linkers like sin embargo and aunque.
- B2. society, environment, technology, money, opinions and arguments. Collect set phrases rather than single words.
- C1. politics, science, culture, idioms and colloquial Spanish from Spain and Latin America. Read and listen to native media every day.
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 learn about 300 a month, roughly 3,600 a year: B1 in about ten months from zero and B2 in a year. At 20 a day it goes about twice as fast, if you keep up with reviews. The Foreign Service Institute puts Spanish in its easiest group for English speakers, about 24–30 weeks (600–750 class hours) of full-time study for professional working proficiency. In real life, with a job and a few minutes a day, plan on one to two years to reach B2.
How NewLexi helps you build your vocabulary
In NewLexi you generate word sets for your level or any topic in the chat, and they come already split into categories. Every word appears in a real sentence with audio, and spaced repetition brings it back just before you forget it. Stories and dialogues are written for you, at your level and with your words, and you can import words by photo or from Anki and Quizlet. Start with the free vocabulary test to see how many Spanish words you already know.
