I’m pretty sure you can learn your first 1,000 words of Spanish in a couple of hours; or a weekend if you prefer to take your time. It’s just a question of how you approach things.
Well, I’ve written about it before here…
Now, can you learn 1,000 words every single day? Probably not, but it would depend on the language pairs, too. French/Italian or Spanish/Portuguese you can probably go on for a day or two seeing how the lexical similarity between between each of these language pairs is about 90%.
How many words do you need anyways to start using native material to further study a language? 3,000? 5,000? Good enough, right? Unless it’s Toki Pono of course… then just over a hundred words will do.
Strange… German works a lot with affixes (prefixes mostly), so you could just learn that “to run” is “laufen” and then you add ab-laufen, aus-laufen, ent-laufen… ver-laufen, zer-laufen. There’s only a certain number of prefixes and not all of them work with every single verb stem, but that’ll easily put you past 30 a day… especially, since you’ll also have the corresponding nouns… der Lauf, der Ablauf, etc.