"How Many Words Do I Need?"

I read a nice entry about reaching native fluency by Lang-8 user Lotokot, a Polish speaker studying English. Clicking on the text below will take you to the actual entry.

"This is the question asked by many language learners.When will I be able to talk fluently and to understand native speakers?  

Of, course the answer is uneasy.

There are two types of vocabulary: active and passive.Active vocabulary is a range of words you use in a conversation or in writing. 

Passive vocabulary is a range of words you can recognize reading a text or listening to the speaker. Average active vocabulary of English native speaker is about 20.000 words and there is about 40.000 words in his passive vocabulary. 

 I think that I reached the level of about 6.000-7.000 words knowing passively and about 3.000 words knowing actively.

I know it because I use “Learning with Texts” - program which is very helpful in reading texts.There are some statistics about number of words used in texts which I put into the program.Numbers looks frustratingly. 

Every thousand words to learn is a really hard work for me.Luckily 3.000 words provides coverage for around 95% of common English texts. 

Some of this few percent I don't know is possible to recognize from context, but these rare words very often are crucial in the texts I read or listen. 

I read somewhere that about 5.000 actively known words allow to speak the language quite fluently. 

When I reach this level (if this happens) I will be able to recognize probably about 10.000 words. 

However the way to be fluent as native speaker looks infinite.

I took some data to this post from the website http://www.lingholic.com"