Kilo Lingo

French Vocabulary by CEFR Level: What You Actually Need at A1 to C2

French vocabulary acquisition follows a steep curve: the first 1,000 lemmas cover around 80% of everyday spoken French, the next 4,000 add another 10 percentage points, and the remaining 95,000+ words in the language account for the last 10%. The arithmetic decides the curriculum: front-load the first thousand, sequence them by frequency, and resist any vocabulary detour that costs working memory without delivering a marginal sentence in return. The position is set out in full on the first 1,000 words article and applies across every language this site covers.

French has one twist that Spanish and Italian do not. The gap between written and spoken French is larger than in any other major Romance language. Silent plural -s, silent verb endings (je parle, tu parles, il parle, ils parlent are all pronounced the same), and a dense layer of mute letters mean a French learner's reading vocabulary outpaces listening vocabulary far more aggressively than in Spanish. Build both sides explicitly from day one. A learner who can read Camus but cannot follow a French conversation has skipped half the work.

This page maps the CEFR levels onto concrete vocabulary counts, gives real example lemmas at each band, and links to the word pages on the site that build the lexicon for you.

The vocabulary count at each level

The numbers below are defensible against the published lexical-coverage research (Paul Nation's Learning Vocabulary in Another Language, Cambridge 2006), the Council of Europe CEFR descriptors, and the Lonsdale and Le Bras Frequency Dictionary of French (Routledge 2009).

CEFR levelActive lemmasLexical coverage of spoken FrenchWhat that buys you
A1 (beginner)50070 to 75%Survival transactions. Coffee, prices, directions, the toilet.
A2 (elementary)1,000 to 1,50080 to 85%Daily life. Buy a train ticket, complain about the room.
B1 (intermediate)2,500 to 3,00088 to 92%Opinions, jobs, planning, abstract conversation if slow.
B2 (upper interm.)5,00094 to 96%Full adult conversation. Films without subtitles most of the time.
C1 (advanced)8,00097 to 98%Professional work. Novels for pleasure. Newspapers at speed.
C2 (mastery)10,000+98%+Indistinguishable from an educated native in almost any context.

The lexical-coverage numbers are not the same as comprehension. Knowing 80% of the words in a sentence does not give you 80% comprehension; one unknown word in a key position can sink the whole sentence. The honest target for comfortable listening is 95%+ coverage, which is B2 territory in real terms.

A1 (beginner)

At A1 the lexicon is around 500 lemmas, almost all of them concrete, high-frequency, and structural. Articles, subject pronouns, basic verbs, numbers, days of the week, family terms, food and drink, basic adjectives. There is almost no abstraction at A1; the words name things you can point at or actions you can mime.

The structural reason: function words and the four highest-frequency verbs do a disproportionate amount of the grammatical work in French. The articles (le, la, les, un, une) carry gender and number. The pronouns (je, tu, il) tie the verb to a subject. The four big verbs (être, avoir, aller, faire) build tenses, possession, motion, and idiom. Together those eleven lemmas appear in roughly half of all spoken French sentences. Drill them to automatic.

Sample A1 lemmas from the site (all in Core 1,000):

By the end of A1 the learner can hold a transactional exchange in the present tense, say where they are from, ask for a coffee, and read a menu with help. They cannot yet handle the past tense, which is what A2 is for.

A2 (elementary)

A2 doubles the lexicon to around 1,000 to 1,500 lemmas and unlocks the past. The decisive grammatical event at A2 is the passé composé, and the decisive lexical event is the layer of verbs that combine with avoir or être to form it. Daily-life expansion: weather, food in detail, clothes, the body, common adjectives, simple time markers.

The structural reason A2 is the right home for these: the apps tend to push past-tense work into B1 because the conjugation tables look intimidating, but a learner who has hier j'ai mangé at A2 can describe a day; a learner who is still stuck in the present at A2 cannot describe what they did yesterday and stalls in real conversations. Bring the past forward.

Sample A2 lemmas:

A2 is also where the negation system stops being optional. Ne ... pas, ne ... jamais, ne ... rien, ne ... plus all appear in roughly the right places at A2 in adult learner output, and the words underneath (jamais, rien, plus) belong in the active list by the end of the band.

B1 (intermediate)

B1 is the inflection point. The lexicon climbs to around 2,500 to 3,000 lemmas and shifts from concrete to abstract. Opinion verbs (penser, croire, sembler, trouver) become productive, the subjunctive begins (triggered by il faut que, je veux que, avant que, and the emotion verbs), and the imparfait vs passé composé split stops being avoidable.

This is also the level the gamified apps quietly stop at. Streaks are doing real work up to B1; after B1 the curve flattens hard and the apps lose their advantage. The structural reason: the first 1,500 lemmas appear in concentrated form in every conversation and every app sentence, so flashcard-style drilling has high return. The next 1,500 are register-specific and only appear at meaningful volume in real native input. Reading and listening at scale become the curriculum.

Sample B1 lemmas:

The plateau warning: most adult French learners stall here for six to twelve months. The methods that got them to B1 (apps, basic textbook, occasional tutor) do not get them further. The fix is input volume and structured grammar, both covered in the intermediate grammar guide and the French reading list by CEFR.

B2 (upper intermediate)

B2 is roughly 5,000 active lemmas and the first level at which an adult can credibly say they speak French. The lexicon broadens in two directions at once: register variety (formal vs informal, journalism vs casual speech, professional vs street) and abstract reasoning vocabulary (arguments, claims, evidence, qualifications).

The structural reason this band is qualitatively different: B2 is where productive use of the subjunctive stops being a parlour trick and becomes mandatory. The subjonctif présent is everywhere in B1-level emotional and volitional contexts (il faut que je parte); the subjonctif passé ( bien que j'aie compris) and the rarer subjonctif imparfait in literary writing arrive at B2. The French subjunctive explainer covers the conjugation and the triggers in full.

Vocabulary categories that fill out at B2 (most do not yet have dedicated word pages on this site, so build them from a frequency dictionary):

  • Argument and opinion verbs beyond the B1 set: considérer, affirmer, soutenir, envisager, estimer, prétendre
  • Formal connectors: cependant, néanmoins, toutefois, désormais, auparavant, en revanche, par ailleurs
  • Journalism and politics: enjeu, mesure, démarche, ministre, citoyen, réforme, scrutin
  • Register-specific synonyms: where A2 has voiture, B2 also has bagnole (informal) and véhicule (formal); where A2 has manger, B2 has bouffer (informal) and consommer (formal); where A2 has bien, B2 has convenablement and correctement

The register layer is the part the apps do not teach and the part that distinguishes a B2 speaker from a B1 speaker with a big vocabulary. A B2 learner picks the right word for the social context; a B1 learner picks the only word they know.

Reading Le Monde daily and one Annie Ernaux novel a quarter is the conventional input prescription for B2 to C1 vocabulary growth. See the French reading list for the full progression.

C1 (advanced)

C1 is around 8,000 active lemmas. The new layer is specialist: literary, legal, medical, scientific, technical. C1 is the first level at which a French learner can operate professionally in the language. They handle full adult conversations on any familiar topic, read novels for pleasure rather than for study, follow films without subtitles, and write reports a native colleague might lightly edit but not rewrite.

Vocabulary categories at C1:

  • Literary register: archaic forms (jadis, naguère), literary tenses (passé simple in writing), elevated synonyms (dérober for voler, ouïr for entendre)
  • Legal and administrative: conjoint, justiciable, ester en justice, préjudice, ordonnance, the apparatus of French administrative life
  • Medical: anatomy, common conditions, the public-health vocabulary of a typical GP visit and hospital stay
  • Idiom and culture: idiomatic expressions, allusion to canonical French literature and film, the political shorthand of French current affairs

The honest note: C1 is the highest level most adult learners realistically reach without a long immersion stretch (a year living in the country) or a partner who speaks French at home. The hours involved (around 1,000 to 1,300 from zero, per FSI Category I data) reflect the work; the CEFR explainer sets out the framework in full.

The DALF C1 certificate is what you sit if you want to work in a French-speaking professional context. The pass mark is genuinely C1-level work; the test is not generous.

C2 (mastery)

C2 is 10,000+ active lemmas and effectively native fluency across every register. The vocabulary is a long tail: poetry, dense philosophy, technical specialisations, regional dialect, the layer of cultural reference that only comes from years of immersion. Very few non-immersed adult learners get here.

Most adult learners should stop aiming for C2. C1 is where you operate professionally; C2 is where you sound like an educated native of the country you grew up in, which is a different and rarer achievement that requires either childhood acquisition, a long immersion stretch, or a domestic partner who speaks French at home. Aim for C1, ship at C1, and let any C2 fragments arrive through the life you happen to lead rather than a study plan you grind for.

The conventional marker of high C1 to C2 French literary fluency is reading a full volume of Proust comfortably. If you can finish Du côté de chez Swann without abandoning it, your French vocabulary is in the right neighbourhood.

How to actually build this

The Kilo Lingo prescription, in the order it does the most work:

  1. Front-load the first 1,000 by frequency. Use Core 1,000 on this site. Do not stray off the list until you have it. The why the first 1,000 matter article sets out the lexical-coverage maths.
  2. Drill the four big verbs and the article-pronoun set to automatic. Être, avoir, aller, faire plus the articles and subject pronouns appear in roughly half of all spoken French sentences. Conjugation work belongs in the conjugation guide.
  3. Read at level, not above it. A graded reader you finish beats a Camus you abandon. The French reading list by CEFR ranks books by band; pick the one a band below where you think you are and start there.
  4. Build receptive vocabulary and productive vocabulary in parallel. Because of the silent-letter and silent-ending problem, French listening lags reading harder than in Spanish. Add daily listening (podcasts, radio, TV with French subtitles) from A1 onward, not from B1 onward. The French alphabet and pronunciation guide and the accents guide cover the orthographic and phonetic side; the Core 5,000 page is the B1-to-B2 vocabulary engine.
  5. At B1, switch from app-driven to input-driven. The apps run out of work to do somewhere around B1, and the only way past the plateau is volume native input. Read Le Monde, listen to France Inter or RFI, watch Plus belle la vie or Dix pour cent with French subtitles, and accept that the next CEFR band will take twelve to eighteen months.
  6. Use register, not just count, as the B2 marker. The vocabulary that takes a learner from B1 to B2 is not the number of new words but the register variety attached to the words already known. Reading widely (newspapers, novels, journalism, casual blogs) is what builds that layer.

The French pillar page covers the broader learning approach and the intermediate grammar guide covers the structural side that vocabulary alone cannot fix.