Take heart… here come good news :
According to the Dubois-Buyse scale, which lists the words of the French language according to their frequency of use, the “average French“ uses about 5,000 words to make him/herself understood.
Obviously, this average hides important distinctions:
– The daily and practical vocabulary varies from 300 to 3,000 words, depending on the environment in which one evolves;
– Active vocabulary has 800 to 1,600 words for high school students and some 3,000 words for the average adult;
– The vocabulary of “general culture” – the words whose meaning we know, but that we hardly use in everyday life – varies between 2,500 and 6,000 words for high school students, and between 20,000 to 30,000 words for scholars.
Soooooo… 300 to 3,000 not bad to survive in everyday life. I’m sure you can manage really well with 500 to 1,000. And it comes a lot faster than we think 😉