157,000 words?

How Many Words Do Japanese Know? on JSTOR

If JLPT level one is suppose to be near fluent/university level Japanese, and the total word count is around 12,000, then how is it that the average Japanese university student knows 157,000 words? Different method of counting? See the above link for details.

Well there are two things going on here. Firstly, the more relevant figure for comparision is that "61,000 basic words" figure in the paper, or a number somewhere in between. Secondly, this:

JLPT level one is suppose to be near fluent/university level Japanese

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isn't true. Some people reach JLPT level one in 4-6 years. How could someone who has been studying the language for 4-6 years possibly have the same vocabulary as someone who has been immersed in it for 20 years since birth? That's not logical. True, JLPT test-takers generally know a lot of college-level Japanese that a child would not know, but the reverse is true as well.

JimmySeal said:

Pretty much the truth

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Having just got the JLPT-1, I can honestly say there's a LOT of room for improvement. While I could handle some University courses in Japanese, I would likely have to spend two to three times the time studying the same material. There are still nuances that are missed on a daily.

Be thankful you're not learning English as your second language, where you will never know the true nuance of phrases such as "yonder", "rigamarole", and "skidaddle".

JimmySeal said:

Well there are two things going on here. Firstly, the more relevant figure for comparision is that "61,000 basic words" figure in the paper, or a number somewhere in between. Secondly, this:


isn't true. Some people reach JLPT level one in 4-6 years. How could someone who has been studying the language for 4-6 years possibly have the same vocabulary as someone who has been immersed in it for 20 years since birth? That's not logical. True, JLPT test-takers generally know a lot of college-level Japanese that a child would not know, but the reverse is true as well.

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The way that I see it is that adults have a more logical, systematic way of learning languages than a child. Native speakers have the advantage of an immersion environment. If you were to put an adult in a similar immersion situation, I wouldn't be surprised to see the adult speak just as well as any native who was born in that country.

As for the JLPT 1, I don't think you even need to learn close to the 10000 stated figure. If you buy the proper books, I think knowledge of 6000-7000 would suffice. But in order to survive for real and have an meaningful existence in Japan, you would probably need to learn a lot more. Japanese like to use idioms so you will need to know at least the most common ones. Knowledge of various ways of saying the same word is also quite important in this language (ie. Kiss = kisu/seppun/kuchiduke)