The short answer: in our ten courses, reaching A1 takes between 242 and 576 words and phrases, A2 takes 448 to 942, and B1 takes 650 to 1,378. The spread is not noise. It comes from how each language works and from what each course chooses to teach first.
The CEFR (Common European Framework of Reference for Languages) describes what you can do at each level. It does not prescribe a word count. So instead of quoting a rule of thumb, we counted what our own courses actually teach.
What we counted
Flowzy Talk has ten courses, written by hand against the CEFR, with more than 7,000 lessons between them. For every course we took each word or fixed phrase that gets its own card (hallo, por favor, wie geht's?) and recorded the level where it is first taught. A verb counts once, together with its forms. Letters and characters (kana, kanji, Hangul, Cyrillic, Arabic letters) are counted separately, because learning a script is a different job from learning words.
The numbers
Words and phrases taught by the end of each level, counted on 10 October 2026:
| Course | A1 | A2 | B1 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Spanish (Latin America) | 304 | 517 | 650 |
| German | 437 | 796 | 1,141 |
| French | 242 | 448 | 717 |
| Italian | 397 | 659 | 1,180 |
| Brazilian Portuguese | 396 | 653 | 1,117 |
| American English | 442 | 785 | 1,084 |
| Japanese | 375 | 625 | 780 |
| Korean | 576 | 942 | in progress |
| Russian | 437 | 809 | 1,159 |
| Arabic (Modern Standard) | 526 | 930 | 1,378 |
On top of these words, the script courses teach their alphabet: 194 kana at Japanese A1 (plus 370 kanji from A2 to B2), 41 Hangul letters for Korean, 33 Cyrillic letters for Russian and 38 Arabic letters.
The two longest courses keep going: Spanish reaches 1,038 words at C2 and German 1,858 at C1.
Three things the numbers show
1. A1 is smaller than people think, and it still gets you talking
French A1 teaches 242 words and phrases, Spanish 304. That is enough to greet people, introduce yourself, order in a café, shop, ask the way and talk about your day. The reason it works: A1 leans on whole phrases. ¿Cómo estás? is one card, not three words you have to assemble.
2. New scripts make the first level bigger
Korean (576) and Arabic (526) have the largest A1 vocabularies, on top of a new alphabet. Japanese A1 teaches fewer words (375) because 194 kana come first. If you are starting a language with a new script, expect the first level to take longer, and give reading its own time.
3. After A1, the size of a level depends on its job
Some levels are grammar levels and some are vocabulary levels. Spanish B1 adds only 133 words, because it is built around the subjunctive. French B2 adds 877, because the course pays back the everyday words it saved for later. The same level can feel very different from one course to the next.
What this means if you are learning
- Aim for phrases, not word lists. A few hundred well-chosen phrases get you through real A1 conversations.
- Give a new script its own head start. Learn to read it before you judge your progress in words.
- Count speaking, not just words. Every Flowzy Talk chapter ends with a spoken call where you use what you just learned, because knowing 500 words and being able to say them are two different things.
How we counted, and the limits
- Counts come from the published Flowzy Talk course content on 10 October 2026, not from learner data.
- An item is a card: a word or a fixed phrase. A verb's forms count once with the verb.
- Courses make different choices. These numbers describe our ten courses, not every course in existence, and the CEFR itself sets no official word counts.
- Korean B1 is still being written, so it is not in the table.
If you use these numbers, please link to this page.
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