How many Words did i study? (Items Studied)

Bunpro
#1

Lets say i want to know my current Japanese vocabulary

Is there a way to see it?

There are the JLPT progress bars but many words i Mine arent in N5-1 (羊、鮭、ラマ)

Also there are often duplicates or „word combinations“ (約束を守る、風邪を引く、酒、お酒)

Is there maybe a way to roughly caculate my vocab?

F.e. i could subtract the learned grammar points and then say „okay 5% is just fixed phrases rather then unique words“ but i dont know the percentage

Sorry if thats the wrong place to ask :pleading_face:

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#2

The only thing that comes to my mind is to take a large list (dictionary) with all the words in Japanese, and go through it putting some kind of symbol in front of each word you know (I used google sheets for a similar thing).

You’ll have to read 600 000 words (like 12 novels, but with a lot of words you don’t know). Good thing they are sorted by kanji, so maybe you’ll get a chance to practice reading them

Anyhow it’s more like :skull:

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#3

If we are talking about Bunpro, I believe you could flip the toggle to Vocab in the Progress section

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#4

oh, I like your colors,

#5

I generally look at the platform I have that has the largest amount of tracked vocab and say, it’s some amount above this number. Unfortunately, it’s probably not worth your time to try and get even reasonably close to an accurate number, since you’ll have the issues you pointed out for duplicates, but there’s just so many words many of us end up learning that we haven’t added to anything. Granted, some methods of study give you better numbers than others.

#6

For the purposes of estimation, just use the total number of items you’ve learned (minus the grammar points.) You’ll have “forgotten” some, and know some not on the list.

As others have mentioned, the key issue is two questions:

  1. What is a word? Do conjugations count? Do compound words count? Do particles or counters count? Do interjections count?
  2. What is knowing a word? Is knowing being able to use it in a sentence? Is it being able to recall the full dictionary definition? Is it being able to read it from the kanji? Is it being able to know it’s meaning from the context a sentence? Is it being able to use it correctly in a sentence, maybe as part of a phrase, but not actually know it’s true meaning? Is it being able to use it in a game of Scrabble?

These questions are entirely subjective, and it’s easy to inflate or deflated perceived word counts based on your definitions.

The more you progress in a language the harder it will be to precisely state how many words you know. You can estimate, but only estimate. You’ll know a lot of words just based on the context they are used in.

Additionally, it’ll become apparent that words are not isolated units of information, but pull along with them context, patterns and nuance. So it’s fine to count phrases too as words.

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#7

I would just look at my vocab count and not think to deeply about the quality of the vocab, thinking to deeply about what is a word and how many “true” words you know is time not spent studying Japanese :speak_no_evil:

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