What I’m doing with Anki, is that I only add a context sentence to the back of the card if it becomes a leech (or just outright just keep it suspended if it’s not sticking and not worth remembering). I put a pretty low leech count, 4, so that way I save some time not having to add a sentence for everything. And reviews are still fast having only the word on front. Only been doing Anki again for a few weeks (adding 30-40 words from the book I’m reading per day), so not sure how this will work out, though ATM retention is over 95% percent, so I’m hopeful.
I wonder what everyone does with new cards, since there is no “lesson-like preview”? Having to press “again” with every new card kills my again count, but just having a 1 minute interval and pressing “Good” without knowing the word feels cheating as well… Not that I can change it mid-deck, since it messes up the learning steps of current cards.
A little off topic from what this thread has become, but I took the vocab test linked on your article (http://testyourvocab.com) and I got 21,200 as a 22 year old English native university graduate. I find it hard to beleive most people know many of the words I missed (what on earth are pother, valetudinarian, deracinate, puckish etc). And this is surely a test of passive vocabulary. I wouldn’t be that surprised if my vocabulary was slightly below average, but to say it’s half the average is hard for me to believe. Perhaps the fact that there were no words from any of my fields of interest contributes to some degree too.
The test itself says that most native speakers who’ve taken that test fall in the 20,000 - 35,000 range, by their calculation. So for that test the average is definitely not 40,000.
I think the number varies hugely depending on whether people define different ‘versions’ of the same word as being distinct and so on. Like “helpful” vs “helpfully”.
I’ve got 11,800 as non-native and it’s usually enough for me - for book reading and such.
I do something check things in a dictionary, but usually I just guess from context. …Hmm, actually the dictionary I use most is urbandictionary, lol.
Ah, actually now you mention it the results page has a link to this page, which shows that my result is only a little below the median of 23,974 for my age. Given that I haven’t really read anything of substance in English since I started learning Japanese two years ago (and I haven’t been an avid reader for over 10 years) that makes a lot of sense to me. I’m really surprised, on the other hand, how much a native speaker’s vocabulary continues to rise through their life.
Below is a rant I ended up typing about possible reasons I don’t enjoy reading that much. I realized it’s off topic so I’ll put it in a details tag so as to not derail the thread too much.
サマリー
I wonder if this is a factor in my relative inability to get into adult fiction in Enlgish. As a child I loved Harry Potter, The Inheritance Cycle and a bunch of other fantasy books, but trying to read Lord of the Rings, The Wheel of Time or Game of Thrones as an adult I always loose patience with the books and don’t enjoy them at all. The main problem being that I don’t care in the slightest for long descriptive passages which these books are all full of. But perhaps if I had a larger vocabulary (or better understanding of the nuances of the words I already know I guess, since I rarely run into words I don’t know at all trying to read these books) I would be able to get more out of these passages.
Another theory I have is that maybe other people have more of a visual way of thinking than me so they can imagine what they are reading. To me visual information is not very important and I can’t really imagine a picture from a description, so it turns into a list of facts about the environment which aren’t relevant to the story or the characters or anything.
I wonder if anyone else has had similar experiences as I always see praise for these books but they are so dull compared to childrens books to me. Maybe I just have a short attention span and don’t get to the good bits?
Yes, I consider myself to have a pretty decent vocabulary (I read a lot, and loitered at university for far too long), but I’m always a bit humbled by how many words I don’t know in comparison to e.g. some of my older relatives. One aunt and uncle love doing crosswords and it really becomes obvious how poor my vocabulary is in comparison to theirs.
off-topic
Sounds to me more like you thought the natural progression of your reading preferences as a child was to move on to dense high fantasy as an adult. There’s a world of more, er, action-packed fantasy out there if that’s more aligned with your tastes.
I will try to come back later and edit in some suggestions
Oh that’s a really cool website!
I got 13k as a non-native speaker (considered above average?) and I really feel like I can go around well in English, rarely looking up words in a dictionary and can have conversations easily. Unless it’s on a very specific/niche topic (like a scientific paper, or historic/archaic words) I can read 99% with no problems. I feel like I lack nuance in my writing compared to native English speakers, but making myself understood is on the easy side.
However, I don’t mind. I can comfortably do what I need English for personally.
This gives me hope to be able to converse comfortably in japanese you’d come a long way with 10k vocab.
I’m sure I’ll have to slow down once the reviews start snowballing. At the beginning it’s always easy. And now I’m on vacation so too much time on my hands
I got 23300 words and I’m not even a native speaker. Hohoho I’m elite.
Just kidding I spent too much time on websites where people use lots of obstruse words. That way I have a high passive vocabulary. English literature classes in school also helped.
I’m too lazy to take the test now, but IIRC I took it a couple years ago and got somewhere in the ~32k range. I’m 28, but I barely read much nowadays. I did read a lot as a kid though.
I think I’m pretty similar in that I typically just mentally skip over descriptions when reading, especially of people. I remember being shocked when the first Harry Potter movie came out and Draco was blond, since I’d always imagined him as black haired. He is described as blond in the books, I just didn’t notice.
For what it’s worth, I found LOTR to be very dull, especially the later books. I also literally quit reading the second Eragon book halfway through out of boredom. But I did really enjoy A Song of Ice and Fire.
ATM retention is over 95% percent, so I’m hopeful.
Above average for a native of my age