What I mean under having learnt a language approximately is being able to understand the news (a newspaper or BBC-style TV news) and express yourself in any ord

What I mean under having learnt a language approximately is being able to understand the news (a newspaper or BBC-style TV news) and express yourself in any ordinary tense in quotidian contexts. This means having intuitive understanding of the basic grammar and an active vocabulary of 500-1500 words. AFAIK the vocabulary of an average newspaper is always below 1000 words, also Spanish and English have thousands words in common. > Do you actually know how many words you know? No. > Speaking as someone who first memorized a substantial subset of the vocabulary of a language (in my case Chinese) before learning to communicate in it I adore you, I would never manage such a boring way. I really need a constant sense of a practical achievement (not a metric like "now I know n words" but something I can apply like "now my degree of freedom of expression in the language has grown to the level when I can say this and that and the exact phrases were not in the textbook") as a reward to fuel my effort.