The first thousand words are the hardest, because every one of them is a stop. You meet a word, you look it up, you lose the thread, you start the sentence again. It feels less like reading than like archaeology — brushing dirt off one artifact at a time and never seeing the whole site.
The decoding phase
Early on, almost every word is new, so almost every word is a decision: guess from context, or break the flow to check. Both are tiring, and both make the page feel longer than it is. This is the stage most learners quit, convinced that reading “isn’t for them yet.” It is — they’re just paying the entry fee.
When it clicks
Past a certain point the lookups thin out. The frequent words — the connective tissue of the language, the the-and-of-but that holds sentences together — are simply known. Your eyes start to move the way they do in your first language: forward, not back. You finish a paragraph and realize you understood it without translating it.
A word you can recite is fragile. A word you’ve met fifty times is yours.
That threshold sits at roughly a thousand words — not a thousand flashcards, but a thousand words met in context, often enough that they stuck without your trying. The exact number matters less than the shape of the curve: brutal at first, then suddenly, gratifyingly downhill.
Getting there faster
Read material that is slightly too easy rather than slightly too hard — you want volume, not struggle. Resist the urge to look up every unknown word; look up the ones that block meaning and let the rest wash past. And reread. The second pass through a chapter is where the frequent words quietly become permanent.