Les 600 Mots Français Les Plus Usités

One of the things that I hear the polyglot community talking about is the idea of how many words a person needs to know for different levels of language fluency. In many languages, the number of words that are actually used in day-to-day conversation is fairly small, perhaps 1,500-2,000 words, or less.

The words needed to understand college level courses and classic literature are more in the tens of thousands.

One approach that many American teachers use to teach young children to read and spell is to use a high-frequency word list, something like the Dolch word list.

The Dolch Word list is also called the Sight Words or the Dolch 220. It includes the most frequently used words in the English language. Many of the Dolch words cannot be "sounded out" and have to be learned by "sight", and memorized.

To see the 220 Dolch words, cliquez ici.

A book that is famous for using these common English sight words is the Cat in the Hat by Dr. Seuss.

I was searching the internet for something like this in French, and came across this post, which lists the 600 most frequently used mots français.

Combien de mots sont utilisés par un individu « moyen » dans sa vie quotidienne ?

According to the information in this post, la plupart des Français utilisent donc moins de 5 000 mots pour s'exprimer et se faire comprendre.

What I liked about this site is it also provides a test. (I love little quizzes and tests!) You are presented with a list of 100 mots and you click on the ones you know, then it uses some formula to determine what your passive vocabulary level would be.

Being an English speaker learning French is very helpful because of the similarities in vocabulary and the ease of figuring out what the word probably means because it is either exactly the same or very close.

Examples - Exemples:

stereotype - stéréotype
appendix - appendice
collaborator - collaborateur
involuntary - involontaire
pseudonym - pseudonyme

Ce calcul s'appuie sur une base d'environ 43.000 mots de la langue française. D'après vos réponses, vous connaissez environ 43% des mots de ce lexique. Voici donc le total estimé de mots de votre vocabulaire : 18 626.


My results on this test tell me that I know 43% of 43,000 French words, which I think may be a bit high, but who knows, since Michel Thomas says English and French share up to 60% of vocabulary words.

Combien des mots connaissez-vous ?

Faites le test, cliquez ici. 

But the point is, even though I may be able to recognize quite a few words, I still have a LOT of words to learn so that I can really use them. The way I am doing this is by immersing myself dans la langue française tous les jours with podcasts, listening to French radio, reading blogs, books, grammar books, and watching YouTube videos and movies.

To read about how the polyglot, and opera singer, Gabriel Wyner, has learned four languages check out his method, by clicking on his name. He is a fan of using high frequency word lists to get you started in building your flashcard decks in Anki.

Here is another list of about 1,500 French words.

I just found Marie Treps' books, which also look interesting - for building vocabulaire.