From how big a space must a secret be chosen in order to be secure? To thwart an on-line attack the secret does not have to be chosen from a large space, because the intruder is detected after a small number of guesses or because the amount of time the intruder needs to guess correctly is worth much more than the payoff. For instance, many ATM systems have only four decimal digits worth of secret, which means there are only 10000 different secrets, and this is really sufficiently secure because you only get three guesses.
If there's the opportunity to do off-line password guessing, the secret must be chosen from a much larger space. The general rule of thumb is that a secret needs about 64 bits of randomness, since it is considered computationally infeasible to search 264 possibilities. Therefore a 64-bit secret cryptographic key is reasonably secure.
Humans aren't usually willing to remember or type 64-bit (about 20-digit) random numbers (though one of our children is perfectly happy to remember dozens of digits of , and another of our children seems to know innumerable 7-digit phone numbers). How big does a password have to be in order to have the equivalent security of a 64-bit random number? If the text string is truly randomly chosen from upper- and lower-case letters, the 10 digits, plus a couple of punctuation marks, there are 64 possibilities per keystroke (6 bits), so an 11-character password would be necessary. A human will not remember a randomly chosen 11-character string.
What about a randomly chosen pronounceable password? If a computer were to generate such strings (as opposed to allowing a human to choose), the pronounceability constraint means that about every third character must be a vowel. To be memorizable, the password should be a case-insensitive string of letters, giving only about 4½ bits per character, and only about 2½ bits per vowel (since there are 6 vowels in English). The combination of limiting characters to case-insensitive letters and having a reasonable percentage of vowels yields randomness of about 4 bits per character. This would require a 16-character computer-generated pronounceable string, which is also too long for a person to willingly memorize or type.
What about if people are allowed to choose their own passwords? The general wisdom is that the randomness achievable in human-generated passwords is about 2 bits per character, which would result in a 32-character password, which is also too long.
The conclusion is that a secret a person would be willing to memorize and type will not be as good as a 64-bit random number, and therefore passwords will be open to off-line password-guessing attacks.