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Originally Posted by Michael Tipper

The key thing to understand when you are learning a language is not that you develop the ability to recall lots and lots of words, but that you develop the skill and understanding of being able to use those words yourself in the right context and with the right pronunciation. You also need to be able to recognise the words when spoken to you so that you can understand their meaning in the context you hear them.

Absolutely true, though a few experienced language learners (a minority) start by cramming a few thousand vocabulary words + basic grammar so they can read native materials as soon as possible. WARNING: this does -not- lead to fluency by itself, or even being able to make yourself understood to native speakers. It's probably not the right technique for a first foreign language, or for anyone who doesn't know how to supplement it.

Originally Posted by Michael Tipper

Whilst having a good memory for the words is good, it is only part of the challenge in learning to speak another language.

Extremely true. It's arguably not even the biggest part (idiomatic use and vocabulary are the two major contenders).

Originally Posted by Michael Tipper

The other contributors have already given you som great advice and some good resources to try out and I'd suggest you have a look at some of them. However the one thing I would suggest you consider when you memorise the words is this:

Within 1-2 days of learning something new, you will be unable to recall 80% of it because of something called the "Ebbinghaus Curve of Forgetting" - essentially everything you encounter and experience is stored in your mind as a very weak memory trace. If left in that fragile condition, you will quickly lose the ability to recall it because of it becoming "confused" with all of the other equally faint memory traces. It is for this reason that most people cram for their tests and exams the night before, pass the exam but if they sat it 2 weeks later would fail.

So the important thing for you to do, however many words you end up memorising every day, is that you should also recall them from memory after 10 minutes, a day, a week, a month, 3 months and 6 months. Each time you strengthen the trace until eventually you can recall the word at will.

It will take a bit of discipline but combined with the conversational practive you should be doing and the other exposure you should be having with the language it will help reinforce your memory of the words so that you will always be able to recall them.

The easiest way to do this, by far, is with software helping you. Anything which uses a "spaced repetition system" works on basically this principle. Mnemosyne is a good open-source, cross-platform program of this type; I've used it a bit. Another alternative is supermemo, but it's apparently buggy, and I've never used it.

Originally Posted by Michael Tipper

But one final thing to be aware of, most languages have a working vocabulary of 1500-2500 words. At a rate of 100 a day you could be done in just over 3 weeks! My advice is to take your time, ease the pressure off yourself a bit and start with a small number. If you want to increase the number of words, do so by adding 1 every day until you find the figure that you can comfortably handle.

That's a working vocabulary for spoken language. Written language requires at least a passing knowledge of perhaps ten times that many. Furthermore, figuring out which are the right 2500 isn't entirely obvious, and a small percent will vary by context. Understanding informal language and slang is an additional challenge.