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/w … b/?view=uk

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.

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.

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...

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.

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?