How many Japanese words do you know?

Index » General discussion

  • 1
 
Reply #1 - 2008 February 11, 5:37 am
alantin Member
From: Finland Registered: 2007-05-02 Posts: 346

An English teacher once had us test how how many English words we knew with a nice piece of software that threw English words at us and according to the responces calculated an estimation of the amount of words we knew. It was interesting to know and now I started wondering if similar software existed for Japanese.
All I could find is behind this link, but i wonder how accurate that can be.
The words that it asked were few in comparison and the first set gave the answer "８０００語", the next one "1700語", and the third "2600語".

It implies quite a bit of variation though..
Would that mean that I know approximately 4100 words?

What do you think and has anyone found similar, perhaps better, applications?

宜しく

Reply #2 - 2008 February 11, 6:51 am
nac_est Member
From: Italy Registered: 2006-12-12 Posts: 617 Website

Hmm it gave me 3600, 8900 and 16900 respectively, but I'm quite sure I know fewer than 2500-3000. And the difference between the results means that the method is totally unreliable, imo.
Unfortunately I don't know of any good tools of this kind sad

Reply #3 - 2008 February 11, 7:23 am
Ramchip Member
From: Canada Registered: 2006-09-22 Posts: 108

I got 4800 on the first test, also more than what I really know. I think it assumes you're japanese and know the basic words, so it just tests for the rarer stuff (eg: parallax and Engel's coefficient, which many probably don't know even in english).

Advertising (register and sign in to hide this)
JapanesePod101 Sponsor
 
JapanesePod101
Reply #4 - 2008 February 11, 1:27 pm
nagisa Member
From: Canada Registered: 2005-12-26 Posts: 21

In my case it gave me way less than what I actually know.

I'm quite sure I know more than 800 words tongue (I was only checking the ones I was 100% positive about.)

Reply #5 - 2008 February 11, 3:39 pm
yorkii Member
From: Moriya, Ibaraki Registered: 2005-10-26 Posts: 408 Website

Wow, it said that I know 1,000,000語. I must be some sort of native or something :p

Reply #6 - 2008 February 12, 1:41 am
alantin Member
From: Finland Registered: 2007-05-02 Posts: 346

m(_ _)m

Teach us in your ways o' yorkii-sensei!


Seriously! No one seems to know any better application?

  • 1