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Number of words in use | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| atama warui Triglot Senior Member Japan Joined 4701 days ago 594 posts - 985 votes  Speaks: German*, English, Japanese | Message 1 of 4 29 July 2012 at 6:43pm | IP Logged | ||
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Inspired by the "languages with larger vocabulary" thread, I thought about something I observed.
I find it amazing how many words in Japanese are actually needed to understand a lot. It's pretty insane ... I'm at over 6000 words, and even that doesn't cut it. I'm pretty confident and can comprehend a good deal, but all those figures of "2000 words to understand 80%, 6000 to understand 90%" (or whatever it was) seem to be plucked out of thin air. I just watched a documentary about giant hornets and even though I normally have no problem getting around, I missed some important points - because I lacked certain words critical for comprehension. And that's Japanese. With around 20.000 words of passive vocab in English (obviously one of the languages with a huge vocab pool), I can basically work like it's my mother tongue (German, another language infamous for the huge vocabulary). I'm never out of words and I never wonder what it was that I just heard (in normal situations - specialized vocabulary is a problem for natives too). I wonder how it is for learners of other languages. Is there even such a difference, or do we need similar numbers of words for every language? If that's the case, why would the total number of words within a language even matter? Edited by atama warui on 29 July 2012 at 6:45pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| The Real CZ Senior Member United States Joined 5649 days ago 1069 posts - 1495 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Japanese, Korean | Message 2 of 4 29 July 2012 at 9:26pm | IP Logged | ||
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I'd have to agree with you. In Japanese, I was probably around 4000-5000 words and still had trouble understanding dramas. I'm probably around 10,000+ in Korean. I can understand the gist of most dramas and can understand just about every word they say in some contexts, but in other parts of a show, I'm back down to around 50% comprehension.
I'm thinking those numbers were supposed to represent word families in European languages instead of just words. If all it took was 3,000 words or so, someone could cram 100 words into Anki everyday for a month, learn some grammar and then they'd be good to go, but it doesn't work like that. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| tanya b Senior Member United States Joined 4778 days ago 159 posts - 518 votes Speaks: Russian | Message 3 of 4 30 July 2012 at 2:00am | IP Logged | ||
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First of all, if you are already at the level where you understand a Japanese documentary on giant hornets, you have left most other Japanese learners in the dust.
It's amazing what TV shows I have watched in other languages just to acquire vocabulary or improve comprehension. I recently watched a Russian documentary on giant squids (at the end of the documentary they concluded that these giant squids may not actually exist). Also, for the last 2 1/2 years I have watched an Armenian TV comedy series, "Banakoum", which is about men serving in the Armenian military. This is not a subject I can personally relate to, but watching it has worked wonders in terms of expanding my vocabulary beyond even what's found in a dictionary. One thing about watching documentaries in foreign languages is that they are easier to understand, because normally a professional narrator is used, who enunciates clearly, reading from a prepared text, unlike game shows or most stand-up comedy, where vocabulary takes a back seat to slang and cultural context. But to me 20,000 words in any language seems rather low, when you consider the variety of TV shows available and the amount of vocabulary necessary to understand them. I don't know what professional language teachers think of TV watching as a way of vocab-u-learning, but I would be nowhere without it. And obviously you have done a lot of heavy lifting before you reached the point where you were confident enough to try watching Japanese nature documentaries. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| hrhenry Octoglot Senior Member United States languagehopper.blogs Joined 5130 days ago 1871 posts - 3642 votes Speaks: English*, SpanishC2, ItalianC2, Norwegian, Catalan, Galician, Turkish, Portuguese Studies: Polish, Indonesian, Ojibwe | Message 4 of 4 30 July 2012 at 2:42am | IP Logged | ||
A lot of native speakers in many languages don't have that amount of vocabulary. They may be able to intuit the gist of an unknown word through context, though. R. == Edited by hrhenry on 30 July 2012 at 2:53am 1 person has voted this message useful |
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