How many French words should I learn per day?

Five to ten words a day, reviewed regularly, beats fifty words learned once. Consistency matters far more than volume: five words daily is roughly 1,800 words a year, which is well past the vocabulary needed for B1.

Why is testing yourself better than rereading a list?

Because retrieval strengthens memory more than exposure does. Trying to recall a word — even unsuccessfully — makes the next attempt easier, while rereading creates a feeling of familiarity that disappears under pressure. This is why quizzes outperform lists.

Should I learn French words with or without the article?

Always with the article. Learn la table, not table. The gender is part of the word in French, and relearning it later costs far more effort than storing it correctly the first time.

How many words do I need to speak French?

Around 1,000 words covers most everyday conversation, roughly A2 to B1. About 3,000 is comfortable for B2 and most exam requirements. The most frequent 100 words alone account for a very large share of everything said in a normal day.

French Vocabulary Quiz: 5 Words at a Time

Almost every student I meet has a vocabulary list somewhere — an app, a notebook, a spreadsheet with two hundred rows. Almost none of them can produce the words under pressure. The list is not the problem. The problem is that reading a list is not practising, and thirty seconds of self-testing beats twenty minutes of rereading.

🎬 Five words, one timer. Answer before the reveal.

Why five, and not fifty

Three reasons, all boring and all true.

Retrieval beats exposure. Trying to recall a word — even failing — does more for memory than seeing it again. Rereading produces a comfortable feeling of familiarity that evaporates the moment someone asks you a question.
Five fits in the gaps. A five-word quiz takes thirty seconds. It survives a bad week, a busy month and a holiday. A fifty-word session gets postponed until it is abandoned.
The maths still works. Five words a day is about 1,800 a year — far past what B1 requires, and roughly the point where reading the news stops being painful.

How to use a quiz properly

Answer out loud. Silent answers let you skip the hard part — actually producing the sounds.
Answer before the reveal. If you wait to see it, you have converted a test into a list.
Say the article too. La table, not table. Gender is part of the word — see le or la.
Keep only what you miss. The words you get right do not need your attention. The three you fumbled do.

The spacing that makes it stick

Review a new word after roughly 1 day, 3 days, 1 week, 1 month. Each successful recall pushes the next review further out. Any flashcard app does this automatically, but a notebook with four columns works exactly as well — the schedule is what matters, not the software.

Which words to choose

Not the exotic ones. Frequency is what pays: the most common few hundred French words make up an enormous share of everything spoken in a normal day. Concretely, work through the themed sets first — basic words, colours, numbers, days, family, the supermarket — then let reading supply the rest.

And do not overlook the free ones: around 3,000 French words you already know arrive at no cost because English borrowed them.

Three more quizzes

Thirty seconds each. Answer out loud, before the reveal.

A realistic daily routine

One quiz with your morning coffee. One five-minute review of yesterday's misses in the evening. That is it — under ten minutes, and it will outperform the weekend study session you keep planning and not doing.

Practise this on your own

Reading about vocabulary is the easy half — you only own it once you've produced it yourself. On parisly.app you can work through this material at your own pace — reading, listening, writing and speaking practice with feedback, so the vocabulary in this lesson turns into French you can actually use.

When you want the words in sentences rather than in isolation, shadowing is the natural companion exercise. And to find out which words your level is actually missing, book a first lesson — I assess that in the first session.