Every word you use, added to your vocabulary.
Your cat remembers the words it has shown you and the words you've reached for yourself.
How a word gets there
There's no list to fill in and nothing to press. Every time you and your cat talk, both sides of the conversation are read for words in the language you're learning — and each one lands in one of two places.
Words you've met
Your cat put this one in front of you. You may well have understood it — but meeting a word and reaching for it are different things, so it waits here.
Words you use
You wrote it yourself, in the middle of a real conversation, because you wanted to say something. That's the moment a word becomes yours, and it moves across on its own.
Words cross from one side to the other the first time you use them. Nothing ever moves back.
Why the first words are worth so much
Languages are lopsided. A handful of words — the, and, is, and their equivalents everywhere — turn up constantly, and almost everything else turns up rarely. The pattern is steady enough across languages that it has a name: Zipf's law. Roughly, the second most common word appears half as often as the first, the tenth a tenth as often, and so on down.
Which means a word count on its own says very little. Knowing a thousand common words and knowing a thousand rare ones are not remotely the same achievement. So rather than counting your words, we weigh them: how much of ordinary European Portuguese do the words you use actually account for?
Words you know (commonest first) → share of ordinary European Portuguese you'd follow. Real figures from the word list this site uses.
| If you use… | You'd follow roughly |
|---|---|
| 50 words | 44% of ordinary conversation |
| 250 words | 60% of ordinary conversation |
| 1,000 words | 74% of ordinary conversation |
| 2,500 words | 84% of ordinary conversation |
| 10,000 words | 96% of ordinary conversation |
The good news is the shape of that curve: the climb is fastest at the very beginning, when you know least. The flatter end is where reading and listening take over from conversation — the rare words arrive one at a time, from the things you happen to care about.
What counts as a word
Each form of a word is counted separately. In European Portuguese that means these are five entries, not one:
That's deliberate, and it's the honest way round. Knowing falo doesn't mean you'll produce falavam when you need it — the endings are a good part of the work of learning a language, and folding them together would quietly award you words you can't yet use.
It does mean your number climbs faster than "words" might suggest to you, and it means the count is measured the same way on both sides: the reference list behind the percentage counts forms too, so the two always agree.
What it can't tell you
Worth knowing before you read too much into a number
- Using a word isn't the same as knowing it perfectly. Your cat notices that you reached for it, not that you placed it flawlessly. That's a deliberate trade: it's counted from real conversation, so nothing is ever asked of you.
- Words your languages share slip through. If a word looks the same in the language you're learning and one you already speak, it's counted. Fair enough, really — you can use it.
- Some languages have no percentage. The weighting needs a big pile of real text behind it, and for smaller languages — Frisian, Low Saxon — that pile doesn't exist. There you'll see your words counted and no percentage, because a made-up number would be worse than none.
- It only knows the conversations you've had here. Everything you learned elsewhere is yours, it's simply not in this picture.
Asking your cat
Send this to your cat, any time, in any language you're learning.
VOCABULARY
Words you use, words you've met, what you've picked up lately, and how much of ordinary conversation that accounts for.