To intermediate/advanced (whatever you consider JLPT1 level and above to constitute) learners of Japanese, what stage are you at with building vocabulary and how satisfied do you feel with your current knowledge?

Right now I'm probably at around 13-15k known words but feel I'm still only really halfway with respect to achieving native level reading ability and that vocabulary is still one of my biggest hindrances. I'm aiming for about 30k by the end of the year as a rough plan, since online sources seem to indicate the average vocubulary for an educated person hovers around 30-40k words, which makes RTK seem like a cakewalk.

What are other people's experiences?

You're going to need to read. A lot. And then more.

Educated people have big vocabularies because they needed to them to educated things. They didn't get it from studying word lists. They got it from studying things that needed to be studied, and learned the words as a consequence. And from reading. A lot. A whole lot.

Why the obsession with numbers?

I'm guessing you have no idea how many words you know in English, passively or actively.

English is not my native language, but while I have no idea how many words I know, I do know that I no longer have to study vocabulary.

There is no point in stressing yourself out over numbers; learn new words as you encounter them, as you need them. The worse thing you could do is waste time on words you've never seen, words you may indeed never see again either.

Lastly -- not all native speakers have a large vocabulary. Many do lots with little.

I'm roughly at your level, probably 12k vocab, hard to be sure. Whenever I read a book (especially non-fiction) there are still many words to be learnt.
Do whatever is quickest and most efficient.
If you're gonna have a massive 30k Anki deck to review, perhaps you'd rather just read a lot instead. Up to you.

The obsession with numbers, is that the sooner one builds one's vocabulary, the more one can focus on practicing reading, and the less one needs to stop to look things up in the dictionary. (I know some people feel okay with skimming over difficult words, but I'm one of those OCD people who always looks up difficult words when they come across them, even in English). I think I probably know around 25-30k words in English judging by research and online tests.

If one just learnt through osmosis as school children do, then it would take as long as school children take. Similar to the goal of RTK being to fast track kanji ability, vocabulary can be learnt rapidly in the same fashion, and it's done wonders for me so far.

At 11.5k in my anki deck now (probably know another 3k or so), it takes me about 15 mins a day to review, so I'm not so worried about review times or words I haven't encountered yet. I always forget words if I don't add them to anki.

I'm at 11.8k, we really are around the same level
Unfortunately, I let them build up at one point and am having a hard time getting them back down.
Yeah, I find it rather impossible to go past a new word without entering it into Anki as well.

The point is, if you're really at JLPT 1, you should already be reading, not focusing on some abstract number or list of words.

Reading isn't just a collection of words on a page that eventually make sense; it's practice. You're not instantly going to be fluent at reading just because you know all the words; you need to have the experience of how they're put together.

That said, it also depends completely on what you're reading. You probably don't need to know as many words to read Doraemon than you do to read Banana Yoshimoto, more for Murakami, more (and completely different ones) to read philosophy textbooks, and still more and different to read the original Genji.
What are you even considering as "native level?" Elementary school? Graduate school? Somewhere nebulously in between?

Figure out what you like to read in your native language, then pick up something in a few different levels. If you like a certain anime/drama, get what it was based on; I find that having already seen/heard the words in context, then reading them, can really help (as can knowing the basic plot for context/not immediately looking something up).

Whenever I go and cram a few thousand extra words, my reading ability improves drastically though. It really does help when used in conjunction with reading. I can learn 500 words in a day if I have the time, so it's not really much harm.

What vocab lists do you use?

At the moment I'm picking up stuff from what I read and making sure I know all the common words in the jdict list at the moment (even though some aren't that common, most are) which will probably take me another 2-3 months or so, I'll be reading intensely after that though.

Also, to raeesmerelda, learning words is fun, whether you use them or not.

Hm.... I don't know my vocabulary size -- I think it's somewhere around 8K (active).

For me 20,000 is my final goal but like everyone says don't get so caught up with the math.

At that high of amount of words I'd be focusing on acquired inference of a word instead of mote memorization. It's how I learned most of my words in English. Eventually you'll reach the number anyway.

dizmox Wrote:The obsession with numbers, is that the sooner one builds one's vocabulary, the more one can focus on practicing reading, and the less one needs to stop to look things up in the dictionary.

I treat these activities as one and the same... I don't see any reason to separate them.

dizmox Wrote:online sources seem to indicate the average vocubulary for an educated person hovers around 30-40k words

They may be talking about English. English has 2-3 times as many words as French or Spanish.

Here is some useful stats:

# Frequency of Words Appearing in 4 Years of the Mainichi Newspaper.

# 592 words were used more than 10,000 times.
# 5,039 words were used more than 1,000 times.
# 7,654 words were used more than 500 times.
# 19,602 words were used more than 100 times.
# 26,813 words were used more than 50 times.
# 38,389 words were used more than 20 times.

http://ftp.monash.edu.au/pub/nihongo/wordfreq_ck.gz

I'd say with Japanese 20k words is well into "smooth sailing" territory, meaning you're fluent and just picking up something new once in a while. JLPT1 level is supposedly around 10k.

http://d.hatena.ne.jp/MrJohnny/20060614 is interesting too.

My native friends seem to say they're around the 3-4万 mark on these, I think it's reasonably accurate.

Yeah, I think 20,000 has been the known fluency defacto for a while now. Who needs to learn words via constant studying that will only show up maybe 5 times a year?

KMDES Wrote:Yeah, I think 20,000 has been the known fluency defacto for a while now. Who needs to learn words via constant studying that will only show up maybe 5 times a year?

It's fun to know more, right?

gyuujuice Wrote:Hm.... I don't know my vocabulary size -- I think it's somewhere around 8K (active).

For me 20,000 is my final goal but like everyone says don't get so caught up with the math.

Pretty much true, just keep going.Eventually everyone will be at their goal.

I don't know, is it? If I spent most of my time just looking up various words from lists in English that I didn't know I'd get bored very quickly.

I learned the vast majority of my English vocabulary reading voraciously as a youth. If possible, I would like to follow that path in my Japanese study, but probably with frequent dictionary look-ups since I'm compressing the time towards fluency.

My far-off goal for now is to get to a point where I can get through a book/magazine, and then find as much reading material as I can. I'm worried more about if I will be able to read this blog or that mook. But I think reviewing vocab decks will be essential to keep on top of words (and kanji)! Learning a 2nd language approach has to be definitively different than learning one's native language.

KMDES Wrote:Yeah, I think 20,000 has been the known fluency defacto for a while now. Who needs to learn words via constant studying that will only show up maybe 5 times a year?

5 words a year isn't that rare, If there are 1000 words that come up 5 times a year then they'll add up...

"5 words a year isn't that rare, If there are 1000 words that come up 5 times a year then they'll add up..."

I can usually guess the meanings of these words through context though -- at least in English. (I have a 65/45 ratio of success with Japanese.)

ta12121 Wrote:

KMDES Wrote:Yeah, I think 20,000 has been the known fluency defacto for a while now. Who needs to learn words via constant studying that will only show up maybe 5 times a year?

It's fun to know more, right?

Not as fun as learning your first words, which you will encounter a lot!

....meaning if you would learn 2000 new words in japanese( in your case) they wouldn't be as fun as those 2000 new words in chinese(assuming that you haven't studied chinese yet).

jettyke Wrote:

ta12121 Wrote:

KMDES Wrote:Yeah, I think 20,000 has been the known fluency defacto for a while now. Who needs to learn words via constant studying that will only show up maybe 5 times a year?

It's fun to know more, right?

Not as fun as learning your first words, which you will encounter a lot!

....meaning if you would learn 2000 new words in japanese( in your case) they wouldn't be as fun as those 2000 new words in chinese(assuming that you haven't studied chinese yet).

True, I noticed that in the beginning when I learned my first few thousand words. It felt amazing. But now it's all about gaining more knowledge,never stop learning and keep that goal of fluency in mind(motivates me)

I think Chinese words are usually more entertaining than Japanese due to tones and interesting combinations of characters.

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