Vocabulary is the most neglected measure of level and the most predictive one. If a single number tells you how far you get in Italian, it is how many words you recognise.
The figures, with the caveat they need
The estimates most used in language acquisition research place the levels roughly here, counting word families you recognise rather than ones you produce:
A1 around 500 to 800 words. Enough to introduce yourself, order, ask for directions.
A2 around 1,500. Enough for predictable daily life.
B1 around 3,000. The threshold where an ordinary text becomes readable with gaps.
B2 around 5,000. Here a newspaper article reads without a dictionary.
C1 around 8,000.
C2 beyond 10,000, plus the shades of register.
The caveat: these are orders of magnitude, not marks. Nobody counts the words you know, and two people on the same number can differ a lot depending on which words they are.
Why 3,000 matters more than any other number
Because it is the coverage threshold. The 3,000 most frequent Italian words cover about 95 per cent of an ordinary text. That sounds like a lot, and that is exactly the trap: at 95 per cent you meet an unknown word every twenty, which is roughly one per line. Reading is still hard work.
At 5,000 words coverage rises to around 98 per cent, one unknown word in fifty. That is the threshold where you read for pleasure instead of for practice, and it is the real jump from B1 to B2.
A thirty-second check: open an Italian newspaper and read one paragraph, counting the words you do not know. Zero or one: you are above B2. Two or three: around B1. More than five: vocabulary is your bottleneck, whatever your grammar says.
How you actually get to those numbers
Not with lists. Learning isolated words works for the first thousand concrete terms and then stalls, because the words you need next are abstract and shift meaning with context.
What works is meeting them many times in texts you almost fully understand. The research on extensive reading agrees on this, and I have written about it in this piece on extensive reading. The practical rule: if you do not know more than five words in a hundred on a page, that text is growing you. If it is twenty, it is only tiring you.
Spaced repetition is support, not engine: it is how you keep what reading has already put in front of you. The relationship between the two is set out here.
How many words a day
From B1 to B2 is roughly 2,000 word families. At ten new words consolidated a day that is about seven months. At five, over a year. Those numbers are frightening if you picture studying them one by one, and reasonable once you realise that twenty minutes of daily reading puts far more than ten in front of you, and some of them stick on their own.
Measure it instead of guessing
The level test I wrote measures vocabulary range separately from grammar, precisely because in most people the two numbers do not match. At the end it tells you which of the two is holding you back.
