Started a vocab deck 1.8 months ago and have been adding to it daily ever since. So far I've added ~1600 vocab and it's just hit 4000　（in total ((woot!)) but... when will it ever stop!? I added 50 today and that's fast becoming the norm with the amount of reading I'm doing now. I've noticed I can understand whatever it is I'm reading as long as the vocab as known but it's more like decoding and not reading because it's constantly broken up by dictionary look ups and Anki.

But my question really is... At what point did you see your vocab start to round out to a point where you could read for quite a decent amount of time before coming across a new word??

I'm powering through vocab and I'm definitely noticing improvements, adding between 800 - 1000 cards a month. I can guarantee in 6 months I'll be having a much easier time reading but atm it just feels never ending! Lucky what I'm reading is interesting to me and so the only reason this is annoying is because it gets in the way of the actual reading

I feel like I've made a small observation; reading passages uninterrupted at full speed and out loud is what can really help boost your output. Anyone else get the feeling that doing that lays tracks in your brain? It's kind of a catch 22 though, you need to be able to read fluently first and that takes a long time! 頑張って！

I know what you mean. I have a vocabulary of about 8-10k? I really have no idea. It seems like the more I learn, the more the words I don't know stand out. For news there's always some name or specific term. For novels, and other abstract things, there's always some adjective, idiom, etc.

I've been trying to get my SRS reviews under 200, so I've not been adding any new cards for about a week. I'll probably only add 20-30 cards/day this year. I hope that gets me to the point of being able to enter a Japanese university either this fall or next spring...

My vocabulary is probably around ~10k and depending on what I'm reading I can easily find 10-20 new words per page. On the other hand I just read through a new manga I got and there were only a handful of words I didn't know, and for novels, a lot of what I don't know is idiomatic -- like, I know 船 and 乗る but I still added a card for 乗りかかった船.

I would say, though, once you're able to do so it's really important to spend some time just reading uninterrupted chunks, and skipping over what you don't know or guessing it from context. Do I want to spend my whole life looking up vocabulary, or do I just want to read Kanehara Hitomi's story in the new Yom Yom already? That's a decision you can start making. And if you see an unfamiliar word when you're just reading casually, then later when you encounter it again it's more familiar to you.

There are about 230,000 headwords in my dictionary (大辞林) so it really does feel like a neverending process, and it makes it feel less neverending if you can take a break from decoding to just experience reading.

I have no idea how large my vocabulary is, but there are definitely days where I feel like there are probably elementary students with more vocab in their head then me. I can read a lot of manga now with only a little struggle everyone now and then; usually when a character starts spouting walls of kanji. One thing I have noticed though especially as I'm now working through RTK as a way to improve word memorization, is that I may not always know what a word is but I can usually guess its meaning based upon what kanji make it up and context. I still look them up later on (I usually read a few chapters w/o looking up, before I go back and recheck, feels like I accomplish more that way), and maybe 40-50% of the time I'll find my guess was fairly close, which has gotten me really excited.

The way I view the struggle with vocab is like this. At one point when I was growing up, I would pick up a hard book and look at the words in the book and be like "WTF is this?!" Sometimes I would use a dictionary but I honestly can't remember doing that very often. I also remember my elementary and middle school years when we had vocab tests in English class and none of the words made any sense. So I'm basically a big kid in a new language building a vocabulary ever so slowly until one day I can go into Book1st and walk into the novel section or non-fiction section and pull a book off the shelf and skim through it and decide if it seems interesting or not; and not worry about "Hmm I've never seen that word before, but I recognize the kanji..." It's all a process, that's all.

The one thing we have over our youthful self though is that (hopefully) we have more motivation to learn and better tools to learn. So we can defiantly learn more in a quicker time frame.

I think it's all depends on which words you learn. Some are more useful than
others. Some words are useful, but will never be used.

I have a terrible habit of only being able to memorize useless vocabulary.
Like all the weird funny words that make my language partners start laughing.

But the basic fundamental (i.e. BORING) words, go in one ear and out the other.

Like I just learned a new word "べっぴん", which means "別嬪; 別品 【べっぴん】 (n) (1) beautiful woman; beauty; pretty girl; (2) (別品 only) high-quality goods; special article"

In this drama, the main male character's dad was on his deathbed. When his girlfriend(after a makeover) came in, his dying dad was like "Damn, your girlfriend looks hot now".......

Honestly, I would not ever bother worrying about the number of words learned.
Language is something that creeps up on you so slowly that you'll never realize it.

Just have fun.

Somewhere between 15k and 20k, probably. Depends on what kind of words you know though.

Never? The best I found as to the number of words required to know Japanese was a textbook introduction which said that Japanese know about 50 000 words. That's probably nothing more than a guess but I see it as a ballpark estimate.

It sounds like a huge number but I figure that if I read around 10 books in Japanese, I should have a big enough vocab to be able to read a book without using a dictionary. I'm still far from that objective but I can already read through light novels and news mostly without using a dictionary.

Quick extract from wikipedia (see full link below)...

A 1995 study estimated the vocabulary size of college-educated speakers at about 17,000 word families, and that of first-year college students (high-school educated) at about 12,000.

Vocabulary Size Written Text Coverage

0 0%
1000 72.0
2000 79.7
3000 84.0
4000 86.8
5000 88.7
6000 89.9
15,851 97.8

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vocabulary

OTOH, the Japanese version of the page has this:
http://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E8%AA%9E%E5%BD%99

満年齢で6歳になる子どもの場合、理解語彙の総量は、およそ5000～6000語ほど。13歳では3万語前後。20歳ではおよそ4万5000～50000語ほどという調査結果が出ている[1]。

By the age of six, a child can understand approximately 5000-6000 words; by 13 years old, 30,000 words; by 20 years old, 45,000-50,000 words. [Not a translation, just a paraphrase.]

That's for English though. Here's what Japanese wikipedia says:

6 years old 5000～6000 words
13 yo 30 000 words
20 yo 45 000~50 000
small dictionary 60 000~100 000

Edit: Looks like Fillanzea was faster.

Estimating the vocabulary knowledge of native speakers is a notoriously inexact process so you shouldn't take any of those figures as gospel. IMO there's not much value in trying to pinpoint how many words you know.

[要出典]。。。

I wouldn't trust wikipedia that much. 50k words is way too much for a speakers of the more complex Slavic languages (which are HARD, even for us native speakers), let alone Japanese which is far poorer in expressive than most.

If anything, the English Wikipedia says word families while the Japanese just states 50000語. There is a huge difference between the two.

unauthorized Wrote:let alone Japanese which is far poorer in expressive than most.

How?

Found another document: http://www.jpf.go.jp/j/japanese/survey/b...pdf/06.pdf

It's about how they selected words for the new JLPT but they reference research on vocab size. There's not that much more information. The main study on the subject seems to be the 1951 study quoted on Wikipedia.

押尾和美・秋元美晴・武田明子・阿部洋子・高梨美穂・柳澤好昭・岩元隆一・石毛順子 Wrote:阪本（１９８４）の調査では、小学校から中
学校にかけての義務教育の９年間に理解させるべき単語は、小学校６年間で約１０，０００語、中学
校３年間で約１０，０００語、合計で２０，０００語という結果が出ている。
また、森岡（１９５１）は義務教育終了者（高校１年生）がどれぐらい理解語彙を持っているか
を調査したが、それによると、最高３６，０００語、最低２３，０００語、平均３０，０００語、被験者全員が
知っていた語は１２，０００語ということである。更に日本人の一般成人の理解語彙について見ると、
林（１９７４：１４９）は、「阪本氏や森岡氏の調査から、日本人の成人の理解語彙量は大体四万語程
度であろうと推測される」と述べている。これらをまとめると図１のようになる。
次に、雑誌やテレビといった特定のメディアを対象とした語彙調査についても見てみる。国
立国語研究所（１９８４）の『現代雑誌９０種の用語用字』によると、９０種全体でその順位までの
見出し語が延べ語数のどれぐらいの割合を占めるかを調べたところ、上位１０，０００語までで、
９１．７％をカバーしたという。この結果を受けて、玉村（２００２：５１）は、日本語の基本語は
「１２，０００語ぐらいは必要であろう」と述べている。テレビについても、同じく国立国語研究所
（１９９９）の調査だが、『テレビ放送の語彙調査』によると、話し言葉（テレビ音声）の場合
新しい日本語能力試験のための語彙表作成にむけては上位１７，４２２語、書き言葉（雑誌９０種）の場合は上位３９，９９５語を知っていれば、対象となった媒体に現れた語を１００％カバーするという結果が出ている。
最後に、辞書の見出し語に注目してみる。甲斐（１９８６：３）は「小学生用の各国語辞典は平
均して約２５，０００語の見出しを持っている」と述べている。また、一般的に、小型国語辞典の見
出し語数は６０，０００～８０，０００語と言われている。これらの数字は、対象となっている使用者が持
つ上限に近い語数と考えられる。

According to a 1984 magazines study, 10 000 words cover 91.7% of words. According to 玉村（２００２）, 12 000 words cover the basic Japanese vocabulary. Another 1999 study says that 40 000 words will cover 100% of the words in the studied media (90 different types of magazines). Also a 1984 study by 阪本 determined that 3rd year middle schoolers should be required to learn 20 000 words in total.

I don't care how many Japanese words some silly online encyclopedia thinks I should know to be considered native/fluent/functional whatever you want to call it. When I'll be able to watch a movie, browse the web and enjoy comedy in Japanese, I'll consider my language goal reached.

Whether I can do that with 2k, 6k or 60k vocabulary doesn't matter.

I agree with thurd, especially considering some words are specific to one aspect or hobby.

thurd Wrote:I don't care how many Japanese words some silly online encyclopedia thinks I should know to be considered native/fluent/functional whatever you want to call it. When I'll be able to watch a movie, browse the web and enjoy comedy in Japanese, I'll consider my language goal reached.

Whether I can do that with 2k, 6k or 60k vocabulary doesn't matter.

2000 words is definitely not enough. I say 10000 words will allow you to understand pretty much everything but not perfectly. Of course, this is a very broad statement. Even if you say movies, there are different kinds. How about a movie with lots of scientific terminology? Law terminology?

The thing is, when you get to native material there will be a range of topics. You can certainly learn a thousand or so vocabulary specific to cooking and you will probably be able to read cooking books perfectly.

Bring it on 40,000 words.

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........('(...´...´.... ¯~/'...')
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..........''...\.......... _.·´
............\..............(
..............\.............\...

Listen, and understand. That vocabulary is out there. It can't be bargained with. It can't be reasoned with. It doesn't feel pity, remorse or fear. And it absolutely *will not stop*, ever, until you are dead!

So I've basically turned 5. Sweet....

My goal this year (and ima get there) is to over the next 11 months build up a vocab of 15,000. I usually hit an avg of 35 words a day but sometimes it's up to 50 with a record of 80, then again some days it's 0 but those are rare.

I'm just way to tired of frequency lists and pre-cooked stuff to bother with it anymore. Tbh I'm loving reading interesting news articles usually that involve crime or death. I guess I will start to notice a big difference towards the end of the year hopefully.

Though, riddle me this...

Who can estimate or tell me what the average vocab of a college graduate who Majored in Japanese would be? Learning with traditional methods and no SRS of course....

I just wonder because it seems like it's going to take me the better part of 2 years solid of just building vocab to actually be able to read at a comfortable near native level and that's going at a damn good pace.

btw the whole "children learn language faster than adults" myth is so busted. 5 years for 5k vocab? An adult could do it in 5 months... They should change it to "children learn language easily, adults have to bust their ass". Now that's the truth.

I don't want to ignite another one of those children learning debates again, but I'm pretty sure that the critical-period proponents usually say that children learn language more easily and in a different manner than adults, not necessarily more quickly. You also have to remember that the "5 years for 5k vocab" includes having to learn what language is and how to make sounds as well. I think the major vocabulary development is concentrated in a fairly small period of those 5 years. It's not like they're learning 1000 words before they turn 1, 1000 before they turn 2, etc.

mezbup Wrote:I'm just way to tired of frequency lists and pre-cooked stuff to bother with it anymore. Tbh I'm loving reading interesting news articles usually that involve crime or death. I guess I will start to notice a big difference towards the end of the year hopefully.

I'm trying to cover a huge amount of vocab in a short time as well. I just added another 2,000 words within the last month but the thing is I actually like frequency lists because I just seperate them from my reading. When I read I want to just read. I don't want to be bothered stopping and adding everything I don't know into my SRS. If I don't know it I don't worry about it unless I REALLY just have the urge. The frequency lists allows me to pile on a bunch of vocab without doing much work...well as long as it is an easy to find/make list.

I want to hit about 15,000 vocab as fast as I can manage, definitely 10,000 before this summer. My routine is going to be add 2,000 new vocab one month, next month add no new material and just let the SRS reviews calm back down while reading as much native material as possible. Next month add another 2,000. Rinse and repeat.

1000 a month gives me 20 mins a day reviews. I also feel that when Uni starts it's a pace I'll be able to maintain because it's not stressful. I have noticed an increase in listening skills too from learning more vocab

Part of me is pondering when abouts and in which way to really start power-leveling my speaking abilities.

40,000 is way higher than is in practical use. I'd say it's closer to 15,000~20,000 base + specialty words. I'm pulling these numbers out my make believe hole, but the majority of the words past the 15-20k mark are really specialized and/or "not really new".

For example if I read something about cooking, art, etc in English, I'm completely clueless. My English is my first language, but I spend almost all my time in technical related areas, so my English vocabulary will be very different from somebody in psychology/culture/etc areas.

So basically you're done when "you're done". The required vocabulary really is very different for each subject. However I think as language learners we really need to dip into each field at least a little bit. There's lots of vocab that's very "specialized", yet every Japanese person knows. I was watching a cooking show for the first time today and learned 惣菜. It's not a very common word for me at all, but I'm sure 100% of Japanese know it.

hmm, learning necessary vocab first is essential. Then going onto other vocab is good. For me i'm going through some more basic sentences again+kanji odyssey+tae kims grammer. Once those are done, but i already have a sentence deck of 6900 so far. But with the additions of those and a vocab deck which i can blaze through in 10-15mins no problem. So overall i just need some more months get everything together.