Virtuous English AcademyA2 English Vocabulary — Elementary
600 high-frequency words for real social and lifestyle situations. Choose a topic below — each opens a full word list with pronunciation, example sentences and one-tap flashcards. Altogether this level covers 600 words in 20 topics.
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What A2 vocabulary covers
The 20 topics above are not a random selection — they fall into four blocks, and knowing which block you are in tells you what the words are for.
Handling real situations
Travel, restaurants, shopping, directions and celebrations. A1 gave you the nouns for these; A2 gives you the vocabulary to deal with them when they go wrong — to change a booking, send something back, ask someone to repeat an address, explain that you are running late.
Talking about people
Feelings, personality, relationships and appearance. This is the block that most visibly separates A2 from A1: instead of she is nice you can say she is generous but quite shy, and instead of I am sad you can distinguish disappointed, worried, homesick and annoyed.
Work, study, health and fitness
The vocabulary of the four institutions most adults deal with in a second language — the workplace, the classroom, the clinic and the gym. These topics also carry a lot of A2 grammar with them, because describing a job or an illness pulls in the present perfect almost immediately.
Home, technology and what you do with your time
The house, the daily routine, phones and the internet, hobbies, sport, media and the weather. Ordinary, high-frequency and unglamorous — and between them they account for most of the small talk you will ever need to make in English.
How to learn these words so they stay learned
A2 is where collocation starts to matter more than the individual word. English does not let you make a decision or do a mistake, and no amount of knowing what decision means will tell you that. So record every new word with the word that lives next to it: make a decision, heavy traffic, strong coffee, catch a cold. When you meet the same word in a story or a video later, add the second collocation underneath the first. A word with three collocations attached is a word you can actually use.
Which topics to study first
If you are moving up from A1, start with Feelings & Emotions, Personality & Character and Relationships & People — they are the fastest route to sounding less mechanical, because they let you add opinion and detail to sentences you can already build. If you are preparing for a trip or a move, take Transport & Travel, City & Directions, Food & Restaurants and Shopping & Money first. Leave Technology & Internet and Entertainment & Media until later; they are useful but you will absorb much of them incidentally.
Questions learners ask about A2 words
What is the difference between A1 and A2 vocabulary?
Range and precision rather than difficulty. A1 covers the objects and actions immediately around you; A2 covers the same world with more discrimination and adds the situations you meet as a visitor or a new employee. In practice the marker of A2 is that you stop reaching for a general word — nice, bad, go — and start finding the specific one.
How many words should I know at A2?
Estimates for A2 usually fall between 1,000 and 2,000 word families, so the 600 words on this level, added to the A1 list, put you comfortably inside that band. Remember that a word family counts decide, decision, decisive and undecided as one item, so your raw word count will look considerably higher than the headline figure.
I recognise words when I read them but cannot use them when I speak. Why?
Because recognition and production are separate skills, and almost every learner’s receptive vocabulary is several times larger than their productive one. The fix is to practise retrieving rather than reviewing: cover the English, look at the meaning, and force yourself to produce the word before checking. That effort of recall is precisely what builds the pathway you need when speaking.
Do I need to learn phrasal verbs at A2?
Yes, and this is the right moment to start. Phrasal verbs are not an advanced ornament — get up, turn on, look for and put on are among the most frequent verbs in spoken English, and avoiding them is what makes otherwise correct English sound written rather than spoken. The A2 phrasal verbs list on this site is built to sit alongside these topics.
How do I stop forgetting words I have already learned?
Space the reviews out instead of massing them. Reviewing a word after one day, then three, then a week, then a month takes a fraction of the total time that daily review takes and holds the word far longer — this is the single best-supported finding in the whole of memory research. The flashcard trainer on this site schedules that for you; a notebook with dated pages does the job just as well.