Somewhere you have a number in mind. Two thousand words. Five thousand. The count that will finally mean you know the language.
Everyone has one. Nobody who reached theirs found it made the difference.
Words Are the Wrong Unit
Count the words in "I want a coffee." Four. Now count the decisions involved in producing it from four separately-learned words in a language you're still learning: which verb, which person, which ending, which article, which order. Five decisions, each one costing time you don't have.
You made none of those decisions in English. The whole phrase came out as one piece, because you store it as one piece.
That's the real unit of speech — not the word, the ready-made phrase. A vocabulary count measures precisely the wrong one.
The Pile of Bricks
A large vocabulary learned as isolated words is a pile of bricks with no plan.
You can name a hundred objects and be unable to ask for any of them. You recognise a word instantly on the page and can't produce it when you need it, because recognising and producing are different acts and only one of them was ever practised.
This is why the count keeps climbing while the speaking doesn't move. You're adding bricks to a pile and wondering why no house appears.
The Words You're Missing Aren't Nouns
Look at what's on your list. Overwhelmingly nouns and adjectives — things you can put on a card with a picture.
Now listen to what people actually say all day. I want. I need. Do you have. Can I. Where is. How much. Something. More. This one. Not any more.
Almost none of that is on your list, because it isn't picture-able and it doesn't feel like vocabulary. It's the entire load-bearing structure of everyday speech, and it's a surprisingly short list.
Count Something Else
Stop counting words. Count the things you can say without assembling them.
It'll be a humbling number at first, far smaller than your vocabulary. It's also the only number that has ever predicted whether a conversation goes well.
And it grows differently. Each phrase you make automatic combines with the ones you already have, so the count doesn't climb by one. It multiplies.
About Outputly
Outputly counts phrases you can produce, not words you can recognise. Four core chunks per song multiplying into 30 or more usable phrases, up to 3,000+ across 100 songs — every one of them ready to come out whole.