I know about 1.2k words as of now, but the question of how many words is needed for one to consume media without a second thought or not even pay attention, My goal was 15k words, but i heard you need like 20-24k to be able to watch any anime, jdrama or music videos with like 99-98 percent understanding, not including any medical or industry-based words I know I shouldn’t even be thinking this and should revert my mind to other important topics, but I am curious now.
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How many words do you know in your language? I’m proficient in English, but I have no idea how many words I actually know. I can easily speak English with my colleagues in the US and watch TV series without subtitles, but that’s mostly a matter of context. If I put on an episode of The Wire, I might understand about 30% of the dialogue.
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I don’t believe there is a clear number.
It just depends a lot on what you are watching/reading and which 10k words, etc. you learn.
Let’s say you were to know 10k words.
If those are really obscure, barely ever used words, you’d understand less than someone who knows maybe the most common 2k or 5k words.
It’s probably also a bit subjective how many words you need to know because not everyone even defines the word ‘know’ the same.
Some will say that they know every word on a page you give them because they get the gist of what the words mean, even if they might not know a clear translation of them. Others will only say that they ‘know’ a word when they know every single translation and definition is has.
So I don’t believe that your question really has a clear answer.
You’ll probably only know the answer once you reach that point yourself (if you’ve managed to keep track of the words you know)
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Maybe shoot for 2.5k and see where that gets you. My advice is to keep going until it’s like English (or whatever your native language is). The amount of words is subjective and can vary per person, but see where 2.5k lands you. Google says 3-5k words gives you “basic fluency”, so you’re quite close!
Things to look for in fluency:
Can I read this sentence like it’s my native language?
Can I translate every spoken word as soon as I hear it?
I agree with all the above.
But for a rough reference, I might guess the average person passing N1 has a vocab size of around 10-15k.
Already that’s a pretty huge achievement, and I would expect most things to be happily watchable/listenable (excluding anything heavily technical e.g. medical, historic, strong slang etc.)
But equally, I would doubt they would have 99-98% comprehension of any drama, anime, music etc. There’s so much out there, and some many things which have different meanings depending on context.
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@sunnybot
I would encourage you to start reading some simple mangas, and NHK NEWS EASY. This way you can reinforce your Japanese really fast.
Try taking part in our forum game: Amazing Race Japan, if you get hooked, your vocab will improve immersely.
Cheers!
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Yeah, thats my plan once i hit 3k words but as of now my vocabulary is too small to really immerse myself meaningfully.
I’ll admit I’m critically bad at language outside of english, but… After 3 years of living in japan, studying practically every day, speaking with people on a day to day basis in japanese, watching over 10 different series in japanese no subtitles… I can’t say I’m anywhere close to this.
Now, that is not to discourage you at all. I mean it as “Without thinking about it at all” is a massively tall order. As for the 20-24k for anime, yeah it is heavily dependent on what you watch. Dr Stone would be significantly harder than say Doraemon for example. I would also say it depends on how the characters in the shows speak. I can understand One punch man and about 90% of the conversations, but I can’t understand much of anything in Dragon ball Z despite most of the conversations being very similar. I think the best bet is to not focus on numbers, though. They get discouraging fast.
Also a tidbit; Understanding 3k words is great and you will understand most things except verbs. In my experience, missing a verb is the worst feeling. especially if you fully understand everything except the verb. honestly they may be more important than learning nouns, at least to a point. probably a 60:40 verb to noun ratio is good.
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Ive lost track of how many words I know, probably 2-3k, I can watch some shows with jp subs with some pauses to look up some words or parse complicated sentences. I inefficiently studied for about 2 years before reaching the point where I was able to do that and actually enjoy watching the shows. Honestly, you could probably start watching shows for the purpose of studying (slice of life anime at least). Dont focus too hard on numbers, I did for a while and I think it held me back.
Also I want to add, I know a guy who has passed N1, he is absolutely amazing at Japanese and even has done interpretation at our work before, and he studied for like 8 years I think at this point, and even now he admits he sometimes pauses shows and rewatches scenes and looks up words.
You know how in English you don’t even have to think that’s what I want to achieve. i know its a big goal but i am ready for the long whole like 6-10 years
crazy n1 is 10k words i did some immersion and have like 8.3k deck out of it and i have like 85-90 percent total knowledge with songs up to 95-97 thats crazy and n1 is like 10k plus so maybe the shows are harder but thats my guess
i just checked mingaku when i hit 3k words and i was averaging like 60-50s so i think the whole 3k debate is a lie, imo
In my opinion you’re looking at it the wrong way. Studies show the fastest way to get fluent in a language is an acceptance of ambiguity. I know about 6000 words now but I can watch dragonball or one piece or something without thinking not because I understand every word but because as long as I get what’s happening overall it doesn’t matter.
The average native English speaker knows about 30,000 words but there are around 250,000 - 1,000,000 words in the English language. This doesn’t stop native English speakers from enjoying content in English because it is less about what words are used but rather how they are used. The same is true for Japanese native speakers with Japanese content.
Everyone is different in how much ambiguity they can tolerate but if you can understand around 70% of an anime or something. I’d say just power through it. I’m using an app called Migaku to keep track of it. There’s also a free site called www.jpdb.io that ranks anime by difficulty.
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While it’s true that not having a big enough vocabulary can prevent you from understanding native content, I don’t think you should just wait until you have learned X amount of words to start immersion. For one, even if you “know” 3,000 words, it’s likely that you’ll forget some and will have to look them up when encountering them in the wild (speaking from personal experience).
Another thing is that even if you don’t feel like you can watch anime or read manga, you should still practice reading and watching stuff aimed at learners. Yes, it will probably be boring but after a while you will reach a point where you’ll feel ready to tackle “easier” anime and manga. It just takes time and practice!
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I just wanna ask, do you understand characters like muten roshi or Kami? I for the life of me can’t understand what they are saying 95% of the time. lol
But yeah, overall context is more important than the specifics. That’s a good point. You don’t need to know there’s a “hand-made oak chair made by a master blacksmith from the kingdom that doesn’t actually have any metal or wood, sitting in the corner of the bedroom,” just know that there is a chair in the corner is more than good enough for context purposes, especially when reading. you can get the details later when your actual language knowledge is more detailed.
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You underestimate how numbers driven the japanese language community is. I mean, ive never really self studied a language other than japanese, but I studied French at school and we never focused on the number of words we knew, and I was pretty good at it (I did study a bit at home but not loads). But as soon as I started Japanese it was all like “learn at least x words a day”, “learn this many words in a year” etc etc. Not helped by popular figures in the community who push this
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I can more or less understand Roshi (most of his lines are like “heh heh heh b00bz” anyway 
) and can’t understand Kami. 
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I was fully in this numbers game. I studied like 15,000 words without any context and wasted a lot of time before realizing that what I was doing was futile. Even now I like to keep track of how many words I know but now I just like to see the number go up as a quick dopamine hit to keep me motivated rather than an end goal.
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did it help?
I did no context for a long time and then I got to Japan and started hearing words actually in their context and its changed everything for me.
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