How to count words in Japanese?

Thank you for that, it was really enlightening. I’m assuming you’re a researcher in linguistics?

I definitely learned a new word in your post - lemmas, which I’d never heard before.

Yes, 6300 words according to wkstats.com as Naphtalene said. But it would also be interesting to know the number of unique word family, as you described in your previous post. Because WK can be a little frustrating sometimes, by being too redundant. I’m thinking mostly of する verb here.

I can see the merit in lower levels, because complete beginners probably don’t know about する verb yet, but in higher levels it become a bit annoying to learn xxx then immediately after xxxする. I would prefer to just keep the noun tagged as a suru verb and free up the space for more useful words. Maybe also nouns made from adjective さ-nomalization and nouns made from 連用形 get also redundant at this stage.

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You’re welcome. Yes, I teach at the university level (in Japan) and do research on second language acquisition.

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Yeah, that sounds frustrating. At Level 20, I haven’t seen that too much yet but I would agree with you. More words! That’s what really is useful for me.

Actually, I was curious, so I took the wanikani vocab anki deck and did some stats ! :smiley:

Nouns tagged as “suru verb” (anki search “Suru verb -する”) : 676
Suru verb (Anki search “Suru verb Vocab:*する”) : 117

(The queries are a bit blunt, maybe I missed a few vocabs)

Anyway, it’s not that bad ! Only 117 vocabs that are a bit redundant because they are plain suru verbs.

Edit : WOW. Actually, after browsing manually a bit more, it looks like the Crabinator, in its great wisdom, already answered my request ! Past level 40 there is almost no suru verbs anymore.

What? What do you consider “almost no” to be? I picked two levels in the 50’s and had no problem finding plenty of する verbs.

Maybe I’m just misunderstanding your point.

EDIT: Oh, I guess you’re only calling “する verbs” the ones that are taught on WK with する in the vocab item itself.

する verb is the tag for nouns that can have する attached, so it sounded odd to me to say that there were no more nouns like that after level 40.

Sorry, I wasn’t clear.
What I meant by “suru verb” is the actual vocab xxxする that Wanikani propose sometimes, even after learning a vocab of the form xxx tagged “suru verb” . But past level 40 there is almost no vocab anymore of the form xxxする, I guess because WK at that point expect us to have picked the pattern “noun tagged as Suru verb” can be used attached to する.

Is there any rhyme or reason as to when WK includes or omits the “する” from the end of words that can be suru verbs?

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