When I try to activate a new shout, I'm told that I need dragon souls. How do I know how many I need?

I've looked everywhere in the shout menu, and could find no indication of how many more I need.

3 souls to max out each shout.

If I remember correctly, its one soul to a word. Most of the shouts are three words, so to unlock a shout completely, 3 souls.

3 shouts, although you get a couple of freebies in the main quest

1 soul? I swear I've slayed a dragon, and tried to activate a new shout, and I still got the "dragon souls needed" message.

I must have made a mistake somehow.

I had to push the draw weapon button to put a dragon soul on a word before I could equip the shout.

1 soul for each word in a shout to max out a shout you'll need 3 dragon souls.

Press the "Sheathe/Unsheathe" button when hovering over a shout and it will ask you to spend a soul to unlock the shout. To see how many souls you have, look at the bottom right corner of the interface.

Are you on PC or console? I found this confusing too because I assumed clicking on the shout text would allow me to apply a soul to it. Be sure to read all the text on the screen. Somewhere on that same screen you'll see 1) the number of souls you have (bottom right corner) and 2) the key you press to consume a soul and learn any of the words (bottom center I think).

Once you've unlocked at least 1 of the 3 words in a shout, you can "select" it.

Your first dragon soul automatically goes to Unrelenting force. Try killing a second dragon, if youve killed more than one, well, you're scrwed. If you are on Pc, I'm sure a console command will grand you dragon souls, just make it so every time you kill a dragon, you use console commands to add one dragon soul, its only a minor inconvienece

There have been more than a few threads on this, including one I posted. It seems everybody completely missed the text at the bottom of the screen. There should be a tool tip that comes up when you are trying to unlock a shout for the first time. They give you tips on alchemy, smithing, enchanting, even when your health or magick gets low for the first time. Why not shouts, which are so integral to the game?

I had a similar problem on the Xbox,

I would try selcting the shout using the select button 'A' and I would get a "you need to assign a soul" it took me 5 or six goes and alot of shouting cause I thought it was a bug, before seeing that to add a soul to a shout I should be pressing 'X' not 'A' lol

go to magic then pick shouts.

you will see the number of dragon souls that you have at the bottom right of the screen.

chose the shout that you want to use a dragon soul on.

you will get a message telling you what key/button to push to unlock the shout.