Weird self tests: how many vocabulary words do you know in Japanese?

[sara_tanaquil]

This one was really interesting! (From the koohii forums, again. I'm not sure if I need to spend more time there, or less. So full of interesting ways to waste time.) It purports to be a test that can determine roughly how many words you know in Japanese from a fifty-word quiz. (Brought to us by the publisher of an electronic CD dictionary,

Comments

[sara_tanaquil]

Wow, cool! As always, you give me something to aspire to.

I used Rikaichan (the firefox plugin) to check a bunch of them. If the compound meant what I thought it did and was pronounced the way I expected, I marked it as known, otherwise not. But mostly they weren't even close; the words were either familiar or totally unfamiliar to me.

It was funny how far some of the meanings were from the kanji. I don't think I would ever have guessed that 道化方 meant jester (road-change-direction?), but then again, I wouldn't have remembered that 道化 was "clown", even though I know perfectly well what a どうけ is. (道化のバギー！) Oh, Japanese.

Curiosity led me to try out a comparable test for English. Interestingly, if the statistics on that page are correct, most native adult English speakers recognize 15-30K words and the statistical curve tops out around 40K. (I was around 39K - way, way too much time spent with my nose buried in a book as a child.)

I knew the common-use vocabulary for English was smaller than that for Japanese (again, according to that site, the average foreign speaker of English would know 5-9K words), but it was surprising to see that even when counting all the wacky only-ever-seen-in-Dickens words, the working vocabulary for English seems to be significantly smaller than that for Japanese. I wouldn't have expected the gap to be that great.

[wednesday_10_00]

I wouldn't have expected the gap to be that great.

Yeah, me neither. I got 27,700 for Japanese (junior high level, sighhhh) and 29,800 for English, and I certainly don't feel like my vocabulary levels for the two languages are comparable.

As a note of interest, if I check 輪タク (a word that made me facepalm when I looked it up), I go up to 41,900. Well, I guess I'll never forget that word now.

[sara_tanaquil]

As a note of interest, if I check 輪タク (a word that made me facepalm when I looked it up), I go up to 41,900. Well, I guess I'll never forget that word now.

Ha! I wonder how many thousands of words' credit I got for recognizing ライニング?

[wednesday_10_00]

I just checked (for science!), and it seems you have to have three boxes checked in the last column to make any difference. So 輪タク only matters to my score because I already have lining and parallax checked.