Look up the “General service list” to learn the 2000 most common words in English. https://www.eapfoundation.com/vocab/general/gsl/frequency/ If you know most of those, you can look up an Academic Word List. More on reddit.com

I am not looking for a word frequency list. I am looking for a word priority list from the perspective of a language learner This doesn't really exist in the form your asking for it. It does exist in the sense that this is what ever textbook does - gives you a list of words and an order to learn them in usually going from simple to more complex. But there isn't some magical "universal perfect order" of words out there. Even in your examples "someone who wants to go live or travel" those two situations would have drastically different vocab needs. The person going to live needs a whole bunch of vocab about renting an apartment, setting up a bank account, buying furniture that the traveller never needs. On the flip side the person going to travel needs a whole heap of hotel booking vocab etc that's probably not relevant to someone renting an apartment. There will be loads of cross over for sure, but that crossover is basically just the first one or two thousand words from a frequency lists so there isn't really a need to generate something separate (not to mention that "learners priority list" would be endlessly fought over - is "fridge" something learners need? If you're trying to buy one for your new house then YES, but if you're staying for 2 weeks? Not at all ... so where should it be on the list?). The closest you'll get IS a frequency list. Movie/TV show subtitles based frequency lists are usually best for learning a language because it covers spoken language which is what it seems like your after (as opposed to someone learning for academic reasons who might want a written language frequency list). Having said that, there is this: The 625 Word List - https://blog.fluent-forever.com/appendix5/ (with an overview video here ) It's not an ordered list in terms of "learn A, the b, then c" it's just a list of incredibly useful/common words, where if you know them all, it enables you to talk about the broadest range of topics for your efforts. A minimal set of words that lets you talk about a maximum set of topics. You might not be able to go into great depths on any one thing, but you'll be able to talk around the missing words quite well. More on reddit.com

Could you just write them down, guess based on context, and do the looking up later? So it doesn’t break up the flow as much. I would say these words are like 80% normal everyday words 20% “reach” words. More on reddit.com

I personally use them multiple times a day.

Seriously though, I would say they are not common, but not incredibly rare either. They are definitely used.

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