Hi people. I wonder how many words do you know in English and are they enough for you to understand Advanced texts and live in an English speaking country?
I don’t live in an English speaking country but I read scientific text in english and I don’t find difficult at all.
I think when you get something between 10.000 to 15.000 know words you’ll be fine.
From the perspective of an english speaking native, you will need to know about 20000 words or more as lingq counts them. If you are just going by roots of words (infinitive forms) then you could get by with less. Of course, this will vary according to the type of text or subject under discussion. For example, I am a minister and there are over 5000 forms of words in the English bible, and that is just if you are looking at religious texts. There will be some very technical terminology for some other fields.
THe most important thing is not how many English words you know, but how well you know all the words.
The number of words in lingq.com is not the number of your known words, but only the words that you met in different texts here. Moreover, they don’t indicate HOW WELL you know these words.
For example, I have more than 30,000 French words in my account here. But in fact, I can remember by reading immidiately only 5000-7000 words, by listening - 2000 words, and I can use in my French conversations only 1000 words.
Passive knowing and active knowing are quite different things!
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Out of curiousity, how did you find these numbers?
I found this cool. “This” being “I’m a minister” and the number of word forms in the Bible.
I should of course say that I could be wrong on the number of words you will need since I am no authority. I just look at Steve’s videos like everyone else 
Anyway, the over 5000 word forms comes from a numeration from Bible Works. This is popular Bible software that has a flashcard module for studying koine Greek. Anyway, I took a set of data I found on the Internet for spanish words compared to Greek in the Bible and merged the data fields so that the flashcard module would show the English and then the Spanish corresponding to the various greek words found in the New Testament. I was wrong in the previous post, I should have said New Testament. If you add in Old Testament you will get many more words. Anyway, I ended up with over 5000 entries for the New Testament based on the Greek lemma.