Just doing a quick google, you see you need about 2000 words to be conversational in English, and 3000-5000 to be conversational in Japanese. Is this just a matter of differently classifying what makes you conversational? Or do some languages actually use more words on a daily basis? Are these greater number of words conveying more ideas, or using more words for same amount of content?
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First off, those “number of words required to be fluent” stats may come from various different sources: government-mandated educational curricula, publishers of second language learning textbooks, or just plain estimates by random people on the internet. You can’t really scientifically compare them, because the error margins would be huge.
Second off, “word” is a very fuzzy term to begin with, and often rather arbitrary. Why is “living room” two words, but “bedroom” is one? That example is straight from this video, which explains just how hard it is to define a “word”: https://youtu.be/Fap4bdUwelQ
The video also mentions how some languages allow you to string stuff together to form arbitrarily long “words” in languages like German and Turkish.
There have been studies that claim, using information theory analysis of recordings of native speakers, that all languages convey information at roughly the same rate. Some languages have more complex sound systems and syllables, but get spoken at a slower rate of syllables per second.
This is an area of ongoing research, but I think it’s fair to say that all natural languages are about equally good at letting a human express what they mean, and metrics like “words required to be fluent” are just too dependent on the specifics of a language’s grammar and who’s measuring it to be meaningful for comparison.
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