Yeah, that's it. I think you can get by with about a thousand; some are rare. Until you learn those thousand, though, you can't go to dances, which means you really have to memorize!

Fortunately, every so often someone gets together "tape groups" -- small groups of people who dance to tape-recordings of live dances -- for people to learn by doing. I'm in two such things. We stop the tape a LOT. :-)