brianobush Wrote:How would one measure their vocabulary?

I guess you could try the statistical approach based on a dictionary, if you have a sensibly sized dictionary:
http://www.askoxford.com/worldofwords/wo...b/?view=uk

kazelee Wrote:I shall become fluent. From there I shall become rich.

Can you please explain to me the correlation between being fluent in Japanese and becoming rich? I'm stranger to that notion.

YogaSpirit Wrote:

Rooboy Wrote:I shall become fluent. From there I shall become rich.

Can you please explain to me the correlation between being fluent in Japanese and becoming rich? I'm stranger to that notion.

You've misattributed the author of the quote - i've never said that. Can you correct it pls.

brianobush Wrote:

yudantaiteki Wrote:Although I would think that by the time you hit the 15000 mark you would long ago have lost track of how many words you know. I have absolutely no idea what the size of my Japanese vocabulary is.

How would one measure their vocabulary? If I have an anki deck of my sentences, I can measure my Kanji count, which is a crude measure since it doesn't measure density (number of times each character is seen in sentences). Any ideas?

Measuring the size of vocabulary is extremely difficult; even your anki deck may not measure your kanji knowledge correctly since you can never tell exactly what kanji you might know when you see them in real life or not -- you could know ones you haven't technically studied, and forget ones you have studied.

woodwojr Wrote:

Tobberoth Wrote:I know over 98% of the words I encounter

I should hope so. I realize you're going for a general sense of "almost all", but with a recognition rate of as low as 98% you'd be hitting new vocabulary several times a page—some random person on the internet quotes 80,000 words in a representative book, so taking that simply for argument you'd need better than 99.9999875% accuracy to expect to not find new words in a given book (if you want "likely" rather than "expected", it gets even worse).

This, incidentally, is the bane of speech-to-text and OCR; "poor accuracy" can start with three nines.

~J

Reading an old English novel or an academic paper, I would expect to run into several unknown words each page.

How old are we talking about here? That seems really high to me, considering that you compare your reading to your native language—or am I reading too much into that?

~J

woodwojr Wrote:How old are we talking about here? That seems really high to me, considering that you compare your reading to your native language—or am I reading too much into that?

~J

Seems reasonable to me, and English is my native language. For sure, when I started doing hard-core academic stuff with postmodernism and semiotics and blah blah blah, I had to look up a word a page. And I tried the first chapter of George Eliot's "The Mill On The Floss" (1860) and found "withes" and "withy" that I didn't know, and perhaps half a dozen other words that might be difficult: remonstrance, cur, impetuous, wharves, croft, haunches. Heck, Cormac McCarthy uses some words I don't know, and he's contemporary...

You'll notice I ask "how old" only, and leave the academic papers alone (though actually they tend to only be like that if you don't read papers in that field very often.)

I'm surprised you identify those words as difficult, but you do have a point that the author also makes a substantial difference; I guess my newly-encountered-word count spiked briefly back when I started reading through Lovecraft's works, for example.

~J

I looked at Walter Scott's "Heart of Mid-Lothian" and in the first page or so the only word I didn't know at all was "esplanade", although "firth" and "impost" I felt like I only had a general idea of what they meant.

Honestly even less old things can have unknown words; Tolkien uses a lot of rare words in Lord of the Rings, particularly names of plants and other natural features.

So, anyone to explain me the correlation between being fluent in Japanese and becoming rich?

YogaSpirit Wrote:So, anyone to explain me the correlation between being fluent in Japanese and becoming rich?

When I'm rich, I can stay home all day and watch doramas and read Tanizaki.

Wait, is it supposed to go in the other order?