Vocabulary: size, acquisition and review
How many words you need, how words are actually learned, and what deserves a flashcard.
Vocabulary is the single best predictor of how well you read, and the numbers around it are more slippery than they look — the same knowledge can be described as 3,000 items or 6,000 depending on what is being counted.
These articles cover what the counts mean, the thresholds that matter, and how to combine reading with spaced review so that the words you meet actually stay.
How Many English Words Do You Actually Need?
Two thousand words gets you most of a page. Nine thousand gets you a novel. Here is why the gap between those two numbers is so large.
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TOEFL Reading Strategy: The 2026 Format, the Clock and the Task Types
Around fifty items in thirty minutes, adaptively delivered, reported on a 1-6 CEFR-aligned scale. What the new section demands and where the old advice is now wrong.
Read the articleHow to Learn Vocabulary from Reading (Without Making 4,000 Flashcards)
The evidence on incidental learning, the spacing effect, and a filter for deciding which of the words you met today are actually worth reviewing.
Read the articlePractise on passages at your own level
LingoRead generates reading passages at the CEFR level you choose, with comprehension questions and a vocabulary list built from the passage itself — so the difficulty stops being a guess.
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