halle heckin lujah
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These slides reference 6 studies on it. Unfortunately, I can’t find all of them online.
Study 1 (from 阪本 in 1955): 50,000 for 18 year olds
Study 2 (from 林 in 1971): 48,000 for 20 year olds
Study 3 (from 中尾 et al. in 2012): 34,900 for female college students
Study 4 (from 松浦 in 2015): 33,611 for college freshmen
Study 5 (from 荻原 in 2016): 45,354 for college seniors
Study 6 (from 佐藤 et al. in 2017): 42,000 for college freshmen
In English, it is pretty easy to check that the ranges tends to be 20k - 40k, which is lower than this 30k - 50k range. Applying conservative to conservative estimates, and high estimates to high estimates, and it does appear that Japanese is bigger.
Now, I haven’t exactly looked into the methodology for each of these studies, so yes it is difficult to compare. But my feeling is that that the gap may even be underepresented by just checking younger people, since with the changes the language has went through in the past century, I feel like the union of a young person and an old person would actually produce a decently larger pool as well. Of course, that is just my gut feeling.
Edit: I added links to what I could find. I couldn’t find an online source to study 1, so there is none, and study 3 I found what was referenced but I couldn’t find the number mentioned anywhere in the source, so I decided to omit it.
I feel like its especially problematic comparing english to japanese for a couple reasons
Japanese has verb conjugations tied to the words in all cases while we only do this in some cases. I’ve seen studies like this actually count certain conjugations as their own word.
Some words in japanese are really just two words put together and its a lot more common than how we do it in english. In english, you can easily say ok words that are hyphenated can count as one word, but for Japanese its a bit harder to draw the line.
Japanese can have a few ways of writing the same word. 解る、分かる、判る, 訊く、聞く、聴く can be considered to be 6 words or you could consider it 3 forms of two different words. Honestly I learn towards the former, but I think you could make a valid argument either way.
Theres probably more but I wanna go do my reviews.
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I’m assuming that conservative Japanese studies/high estimate English studies account for this though.
What I’m saying my issue is is the fact that theres literally different criteria you can set for words. So the “average” youre talking about is the “average of different criterias’ average vocabulary size” when in reality, what an individual person considers to be the criteria for a word can vary. That coupled with the large ranges just makes it seem kinda pointless to even bring up on its own.
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In any case, the “good amount of vocab” the OP says they know is probably in the couple thousand words range or less, so I’d guess none of this really matters to them.
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Seems like something me and Mega can agree on
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Isn’t naruto being translated already? Look for the version already translated into English by someone and use it to check the particular meaning or nuance of any part you don’t already get. Manga is particularly easy to do this since stuff is usually in the same panel in both.
Depending on how patient you are, you could do this for everything in order to check for any nuance you might have missed.
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My personal method (that I picked up from watching a Youtube video of a professional JPN>ENG translator and then adjusted to my needs) is to put the sentence into some sort of spread sheet. I have a column for the speaker’s name, a column for the original Japanese sentence, and a column for things I want to remember (grammar or vocab) from that sentence.
Sometimes just the act of writing out the sentence myself does the trick and that’s all I need to do, which is nice. When that’s not enough, I give different font colors to individual parts of the sentence to break it down into chunks. Grey for things I understand, a bright color (blue or green) for things I don’t, or just to separate things into pieces that are easier to link together. Sometimes I write down a bit of context so I don’t forget what the scene was about.
I don’t actually translate it into English because my goal is to understand it in Japanese, but you could add another column for the English translation if that’s what you’re aiming for.
I use A Dictionary of Basic Japanese Grammar (and also the Intermediate version) to look up grammar, or JLPTsensei. I use jisho.org for vocab.
If I can’t find the piece of grammar anywhere in English I look it up in Japanese by copy-pasting into a search engine with the word ‘例文’ after it.
By default, I keep the rows all white. When I fully understand a sentence I color it green. I leave it white if I want to come back to it. If I can’t understand it even after a second review the next day then I turn it red. I’ll go back sometime much later to try again.
If I can’t wrap my head around it no matter what, I bring it to one of the quick-questions thread here.
Here’s a screenshot of what my document looks like.
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I’d like to weigh in because this is exactly what I’ve been doing for months now! I’ve found it more motivating to learn grammar as it comes up “in the wild” vs. to learn grammar through a textbook. The process is tedious, but it also feels really satisfying (to me, at least). Since you have a good foundation via Genki I, you should be in a good place to seek out grammar knowledge on your own. I have some resource recommendations and advice!
First, resources.
I’ve found the first few videos in Cure Dolly’s giant beginners playlist really helpful with just understanding the underlying mechanics of the language. Specifically, I watched up to lesson 16, but more can’t hurt. She discusses the different types of sentence structures, verb conjugations, and particles in a clear and succinct way that worked for me. Later on in the playlist, she also goes over a portion of an example story to show the thought process behind her understanding of Japanese.
You’ve already got japanesetest4you as a resource, but I have a few more that I kept coming back to a lot in the beginning:
- Maggie Sensei’s website - blog with really simple explanations by a native Japanese speaker! What makes her blog stand out for me is that she goes over every single way the particular grammar point can be used on one page, including extremely casual speech (very important for manga) or somewhat atypical circumstances. On the other hand, she doesn’t use linguistic terminology and doesn’t always go into detail on why that grammar point is that way.
- Imabi - on the other side of the spectrum, this is a website with incredibly detailed explanations. Although the author is not a native Japanese speaker, the explanations seem to be complete and correct (at least, according to what I’ve read from others - I’m certainly in no position to judge that). This is a great resource if you’re interested in knowing why a particular grammar point is the way it is. On the other hand, the explanations are very dry and very detailed, so it may take some working up to.
- ichi.moe - invaluable at the beginning, this website will help parse long lines of Japanese text into their individual grammatical parts. In the beginning, I had a really tough time knowing when a verb conjugation ended and the next part of the sentence began, or whether this kana is part of this word or a new word or a particle, etc. The parsing is not 100% perfect, but it brought me a long way in terms of getting used to the flow of Japanese writing. At this point, I consult it maybe once a week vs. almost every line in the beginning.
- A Dictionary of Basic Japanese Grammar (and presumably the rest of the series) - a physical book with grammar points listed from A to Z like a dictionary. I’ve only gotten this recently, but it provides some more in-depth grammar explanations that seem to work well for me. It throws around a lot of linguistic terminology (adverb, adjective etc.), which I like, and the explanations are more concise than Imabi. I like that it includes exceptions in each entry, and it also explains the difference between similar grammar points.
- DeepL Translate - generally better than Google translate, but try to avoid using either one as much as you can. Japanese is very difficult for an automated translation services like these because English and Japanese are just so fundamentally different. I use DeepL or Google Translate as a final check to make sure I’m on the right track sometimes, but you’re much much much better off consulting the English translation of Naruto that has been done by professionals. (though often a translator will completely re-write a line vs. translating from the Japanese literally - when this happens, you’ll at least know if you got the right gist)
- the Japanese stack exchange, hinative, etc. - sometimes, especially in the beginning, you just have to google it. I’ve found Stack Exchange extremely useful for contractions in casual speech for example. I couldn’t know a particular verb conjugation was actually a contraction, so I couldn’t just look it up using one of the other resources. Sometimes, you just don’t know what to search for. If you google the verb conjugation or whatever thing is stumping you + “explanation” (for example: “て form plus て explanation”), a Stack Exchange page might come up with the information you need to point you in the right direction.
- a tutor can also be helpful! There are tutors out there on websites like iTalki that will go through manga with you, but they do cost money.
I also have some advice. Don’t get too bogged down by understanding every sentence 100%. Learning a language is a process - and a long one at that! The goal here is to keep yourself reading and keep yourself learning. Trying to understand too much at once might result in burn-out and frustration. If a sentence is frustrating you, it’s okay to move on and come back to it later. In fact, I would recommend reading the same pages again a few days, weeks, or months later because you might be able to apply some new information to old sentences and reach a better understanding. That line that stumped you on page 1 may become clear (or at least clearer) by page 100 or page 1000. In fact, you will probably find that you misunderstood something the first time around, or you will pick up on additional nuances. That’s okay! It’s all part of the process. It’s also okay to reach out for help here on the forums - I believe the short grammar questions thread has already been linked!
Similarly, don’t worry too much about the translation itself. Your goal, for now, is to translate enough of the Japanese into English as you need to make sense of it, not to produce beautiful or even decent prose. It only needs to make sense to you. Of course, the eventual goal is to not have to translate anything at all, but some translation is helpful in the beginning. (I’m still in the translation phase myself).
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Are you actively translating, or just reading? Because those are different skills.
In terms of just reading, what I tend to do with the manga I’ve read is skim over anything I don’t quite understand, and go back at the end of the chapter and look up anything that I didn’t grasp. Usually I’ll get it through the rest of the context given, but I’ll make a note of it and add it into my grammar/vocab studies. Then I’ll keep reading.
I don’t spend much time ruminating on what I didn’t understand, because that breaks the flow and brings motivation down for me, and I don’t want to get bogged down by “Ughhh, it’s too HARD waaaah” just because some old-man character decided to bust out some archaic structure. Reading is for fun after all!
I do make sure that whatever I didn’t understand comes back to me eventually though. Even if it seems useless at the time to learn - it’s worth doing so, because it came up that one time, and it would have been nice to at least have an idea of what it was.
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Thank you for the links.
I would personally throw out the study from 1955 and likely the one from 1971 as well, as in the world of linguistics those are honestly like a lifetime ago. But, rather than the quality of the study, I suspect the formulas themselves are significantly different, and that accounts for the large difference between 33k and 50k. The difference between 33 and 34, and even 32 is basically nothing since these are all done in the same way. “Have people see if they know X words” and then extrapolate from there.
You also bring up an interesting point. I could say, know a shit ton of archaic vocabulary, but in the modern world that’s just useless. Like, if I know the entire sentence “Hwæt. We Gardena in geardagum, þeodcyninga, þrym gefrunon, hu ða æþelingas ellen fremedon.” That might be more vocabulary, but it’s literally useless outside of a very specific context.
What I’m doing right now is going through the studies to see if I can find how words were defined. But as the other posts said, the problem here is still that “word” is not a singly defined concept, even in Japanese, what is one-word is complex. Like I said, are する and した two words or one, is 私は different 私? Is は a word? These are all the kinds of questions that need to be answered. And if you say は is a word, it’s an entire class of words that English doesn’t have. So already from that it’s an unfair comparison.
And yes, to the other posts, none of this actually matters to OP. This is a more theoretical discussion.
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I currently read about 10 pages at a time and then go back to words that I’m unfamilirized with and sentences that don’t make sense and then figure out what was happening in that specific dialog. I do it both for enjoyment and for improving my japanese.
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This is what I had been doing lately! I love the idea of just learning the grammar as it comes up “in the wild” like you said. I also got started with genki 2 but I am taking it rather slowly than usual… Thank you very much for all the sources that you have used before and I will definitely watch Cure Dolly’s videos.
Although, I think I will get the “A dictionary of basic Japanese grammar” book later down the road. Thanks to you I have many sources to go off and I find it fun research and learning about new grammar and having some kind of text to connect it to. Let me know if the book was really helpful, right now I literally just use hinative, japanesetest4you, genki, etc. for decyphering the “grammar”.
I really appricaite the help!
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Wow! How often do you see your self writing the sentence? Whenever you don’t understand or its the whole book? I’m currently aiming for just understanding what the grammar meanes in the context and somtimes the defintions of words. I’m not really looking for the English transation but more like what one part of the sentence is equal to English. I will also look into getting the A dictionary book but I don’t think I’m going to get it now. Thanks for explaining how you learn from the text you read and how you break it down!
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I don’t find anything that was translated for entertainment is a good translation. They’ll usually changed it to fit English. You could take こんにちは and translate it to hello or good afternoon but how Japanese use it is they are saying todayは like hows your day or how’s the day. Like in dialog when they ask about someone like たけしさんは？
I’m looking more for the translation of the part of the sentence and not how it would look like in English.
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For me it varies scene-by-scene. If it’s lighthearted I don’t bother with getting a perfect understanding, I just read what I can and move along. But if it’s a serious scene or important conversation then I add everything I have trouble with since I don’t want to miss anything important. I only do this for grammar though. If it’s just vocab that’s stopping me from understanding something then I just look it up quickly, re-read the sentence, and move on. Nothing to break down there, just a missing puzzle piece.
If you decide to do something like this, you could also use those sentences in flashcards to quiz yourself on the vocab or grammar. It might stick better that way since it’s taken directly from something you’re interested in.
And no problem! I hope it was useful to you.
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It is very useful to me! And I like the fact that you read it for the fun unlike some people who just read of it mainly just cause they just wanna learn the grammar. I have things that I don’t understand in the manga that I’m reading but I see the qualities in it and from what I have seen from many people here is that if it doesnt make sense now, it will make sense later. Thank again!
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Yes, that method won’t help you get a detailed breakdown of how every part of the sentence works, but knowing what would be the equivalent to that compound can take away a lot of the guesswork. In your example, seeing konnichiwa translated as hello you’d go like “oh so this is an expression used as a greeting! no point in trying to dig deeper”, but of course with stuff that’s a lot less obvious XD
Regardless of the specific grammar/syntactic structure, the information that’s being transmitted will usually be the same as we would transmit, since people anywhere in the world are more or less the same. So a competent translator will be able to keep the gist of it. Otherwise anime wouldn’t be so relatable hehe
But then again, this has been showing good results for me who’s really in beginner 101, maybe at the level you’re at this won’t work so well 
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To be honest, I might use this method later on but for now I’ll just work off sources that others have listed. I have never thought of it because it could really be a direct translation or it could be equivalent to what is said in english. I still appricate the suggestion!
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