Recently I have been reading (well, watching people play) visual novels in order to increase my vocabulary. I am currently reading うみねこのなく頃に and it is a challenge but totally manageable. For some reason, today the thought of estimating my vocabulary came to me and with a quick google search I found this website.
It’s basically a multiple choice quiz completely in Japanese where you guess the correct definiton of the words given. Since the questions are different each time you take the quiz I decided to take the quiz 3 times to see what the average result would be and according to this website I have the knowledge of a
13-14 year old middle school student (around 30,000 words). (decided to blur in case you don’t want to compare yourself with others)
This is of course only a rough measurement of your ability to read and understand/guess words and the result doesn’t necessarily apply to your listening or speaking skills.
Feel free to take the test yourselves and if you feel like it, share your results here! (I would love a bit of friendly competition)
I’m sure it’s going to be new for some people. Just out of curiosity I did it again and I got what you got. I’m not sure what the highest you can get is.
But like I said, I’ve seen the questions before. So take that for what it’s worth.
EDIT: Oh, and I like how 弱冠 is thrown in there as a trick question. The response rate of 5% doesn’t even seem to throw people off. I think they just see すこし and don’t even think about the fact that it’s not 若干.
stats seem inflated because they think you are native.
Iv been dabbling with English recreational medias for 10+ years and I don’t think my vocab is more than 15k words. I rarely encounter new words. 30k is even bigger than natives passively use on a daily basis.
It’s also worth noting that comparing vocab totals between languages can be hard, not just for obvious reasons, but for lots of nuanced reasons like the way you even count words.
It’s normal for the vocab amounts for adult natives in English to be lower than what you hear for Japanese. That doesn’t mean anything other than that there are differences in the languages and counting methods.
I just completed a random English vocabulary test and am estimated to know 13,000 words (I am not a native speaker but grew up with English around me).
I basically live my life in English and of course my English vocabulary is better than my Japanese but I can’t help but feel that I am required to learn more Japanese words in order to reach the same level of comfortability in the language. I always feel as if Japanese people use a greater amount of words for some reason. Maybe it’s due to all of the compund words that are used quite frequently and when translated to English can be separated into multiple more “simple words” like
四方 しほう = the four cardinal directions; north, east, south and west; all directions
満点 まんてん = perfect score; full marks
終電 しゅうでん = last train
I feel as if the the amount of vocab needed would be “fewer” if 満点 was 完璧な点数 and 終電 was 最終の電車.
This ofc depends on how you define what a word is in the first place but you get my point.
It’s a very intriguing game and I can’t wait to get deeper into it. The person playing the game and commentating himself doesn’t even know the words sometimes let alone how to read them so that makes one feel a little bit better.
Keep on going and soon the dream will become a reality!!
I have a friend who keeps track of all he’s learned words in Japanese through immersion in Anki. He says he started to feel fluent ( where you read and understand 98%+ of the text) around the 14k word mark. There are definitely more intricate compound words but on a large scale, I don’t think the difference is that big. Hope when I reach the 10k-12k mark myself I could tell my own opinion on that matter)
I’m not here to diss the test, nor am I here to speak in favour of it, but I’d like to offer some food for thought: while this test can offer some indication of how much you’d be expected to know given the sorts of words you already have in your vocabulary, the results can vary a lot based on how the test confirms knowledge of a word and based on what sort of words it focuses on.
Just to use myself as an example, when I did this test over half a year ago, I got a result that put me at the ‘Primary 6’ level. This test seems to focus on words that are presented in kana, and is quite verb- and adverb-heavy. A correct answer is defined as picking the best definition, and that means that if one can understand each definition, eliminating unlikely ones might be possible. On the other hand, on another vocabulary test that was quite kanji- and idiom-heavy, for which one had to pick synonyms or antonyms, my results supposedly would have placed me in the top 8% of the Japanese population.
I wasn’t surprised given that my kanji knowledge helps me a lot with comprehension when kanji are available. However, I guess this also proves that none of these tests are particularly comprehensive, and don’t necessarily measure all of your knowledge evenly, even if they’re a good way to get exposed to new words the first few times you take them.
