To be "fluent" in a language, you need to learn the words. (Aside from also learning the grammar and idioms and becoming able to pull them from your mind without needing to think about it.) To be able to converse readily on any topic that might come up in a commonplace conversation, you might need to know something like 15,000 words. Actually, that is a rather sparse vocabulary. A native speaker knows more like 20,000 to 35,000 words. So do the math. Think about how many words you would have to memorize per day.