The honest answer depends on what you want to do. The useful way to measure it is coverage: of all the running words on a page, what share do you know?
The coverage curve
Counting the list's words from the most frequent down, here is the share of running text in UberText 2.0 each milestone covers:
| Words known (most frequent first) | Share of running text |
|---|---|
| 100 | 33.12% |
| 250 | 42.43% |
| 500 | 51.2% |
| 1,000 | 60.81% |
| 1,500 | 66.54% |
| 2,000 | 70.58% |
| 3,000 | 76.04% |
| 4,000 | 79.58% |
| 5,000 | 82.07% |
| 6,000 | 83.92% |
| 8,000 | 86.57% |
| 10,000 | 88.42% |
| 12,000 | 89.77% |
The curve flattens fast. The first thousand words cover 60.81%; the next two thousand add only 15.23 points more.
By learner level
The list's words are graded by the PULS validated profile of Ukrainian vocabulary. Here is how much text each level's words cover, and the running total:
| Level | Words | Share of running text | Cumulative |
|---|---|---|---|
| A1 | 860 | 37.95% | 37.95% |
| A2 | 996 | 13.23% | 51.19% |
| B1 | 1,604 | 13.03% | 64.21% |
| B2 | 2,179 | 9.05% | 73.27% |
| C1 | 764 | 1.87% | 75.14% |
So the 860 A1 words alone account for 37.95% of running text, and A1 plus A2 (1,856 words) pass the halfway mark at 51.19%.
What coverage feels like
Reading research usually puts comfortable reading at 95 to 98 percent of running words known (Laufer 1989; Hu and Nation 2000). At 75 percent, one word in four is unknown, which is a puzzle, not a read. The gap between "I know the common words" and "I can read the news" is real, and it is mostly made of lower-frequency words, names and set phrases.
Measure your own
- The free vocabulary-size test estimates how many of the 12,000 words you know.
- The text profiler shows what share of any Ukrainian text you can already read, word by word, and nothing you paste leaves your browser.