You can easily find various sets of basic English words to learn on the Internet, in old-school vocabulary-themed textbooks or in more modern online vocabulary learning tools (including mobile apps), but how can you be sure that those sets are truly complete and actually beneficial to enhancing your English language skills?

Let’s get some things straight first:

• There are 171,146 words in the Oxford English Dictionary alone
• They say, there are actually about 500,000 words in the modern English language
• Most adult native English speakers know and use around 20,000-35,000 words on average
• Anyway, it’s all just way too much and for any non-native English learner 😔

So what are the most important words that will really help a beginner to improve their English speaking skills?

Learning 2000 most basic and common words (and why 2000?)

Based on our data, we assume that 2000 most common words specifically make up the actual basic English vocabulary. Those simple yet important words cover around 80% of the vocabulary that you must know so you can feel much more confident when holding an everyday conversation. And learning more advanced vocabulary is a whole another story.

Another great thing about them is that this vocabulary is really easy to learn as you’ll regularly see or hear it around you because those words are very popular while also tremendously useful for improving your conversation skills.

So the best thing to do right now, apart from your regular courses and exercises, would be to study and memorise about 20 new words a day in order to wrap them all up in about 3 months. And the more new words you remember, the easier it will be for you to learn the rest.

Improve your English vocabulary today:

[Download the 2000 most basic English words as a PDF worksheet for convenient learning]

How to work with the worksheet:

• Print the PDF file
• Skim through all the words in the list and highlight the ones you don’t know yet
• Find all missing meanings (or translation)s and write them down in the corresponding fields
• Study them one by one
• Also, continue to learn English by reading books, watching TV series etc. as usual

Be sure to check out a better way to do this: Download our great mobile app that will help you master your English vocabulary even faster. It utilises a well-thought-out discovery and memorization approach and focuses only on the vocabulary that will significantly improve your English fluency from the very first day of learning.

Examples of the most common English words, ranked by frequency:

• be
• even
• million
• already
• son
• possible
• attention
• author
• size
• main
• eventually
• bay
• necessary
• yellow
• complete
• aside
• belong
• boot
• buck
• jet
• button

Download the complete list