How far could you develop your passive understanding of a language just by memorizing the most common vocabulary?

Of course, I’m aware that you need to study things like grammar and pronunciation to actually speak a language fluently, and that the parameters for this vary depending on the language. But generally speaking, if you were to properly memorize, say, the ~3000 most commonly used words in a language with little to no study of the actual grammar, how good would your passive understanding of it be?

The thought first occurred to me when I visited Portugal and was surprisingly able to make out a couple questions from locals like “how old are you” and “where are you visiting from”, despite never having studied Portuguese, just because the vocabulary sounded similar to Spanish which I half-heartedly studied for a high school class. I can’t actually speak Spanish to save my life, either. I just retained a passive memory of some of the words.

I understand that this is a complicated question since speaking, listening, reading and writing are all distinct aspects of learning a language, but I’m mostly wondering if anyone else has experience with studying a language in this manner and how it turned out for them. Are you able to watch movies and read books comfortably or still just haphazardly make out basic phrases? Does it give you a better foundation for learning the other aspects of a language going forward?

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