another example of how passing a standardized test means that you can pass a standardized test?
Well, considering most university educated Japanese know around 60,000 words, and JLPT2 is around 6000, I'm not surprised you don't understand. I'm aiming for JLPT2 this year but I don't expect to be able to read stuff like that Final Fantasy game until well after JLPT1.
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Where did you get the 60,000 figure? It's the first time I've heard about that. It'd be nice if you can maybe post a link for us to read about. I think that's quite a bit, actually. But I wouldn't doubt that figure as Japanese have to learn obscure words like "γγΏγ γ" for "rain in may" (kanji: δΊζι¨). I saw this word in a middle school nihongo textbook.
The thing that I am surprised at is the very strong vocab base of native speakers regarding gitaigo and giongo. Those words are very easy to forget since one doesn't use them often. If you don't listen to Japanese everyday they just tend to slip away.
Sorry I should have posted a reference. I actually started a discussion on the number of words Japanese people know not long ago:
157,000 words? | Japan Forum
The source that I linked to stated two different figures. I think the 60,000 would be more like it. The hundred and something thousand word figure probably includes word inflections and such.
So 60,000 words would only be about a third of the words in common use today, and a far smaller fraction of the total number of words that are considered "English." I wouldn't doubt that my own vocabulary probably encapsulates a larger fraction of the entire lexicon.from askoxford.com
The Second Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary contains full entries for 171,476 words in current use, and 47,156 obsolete words. To this may be added around 9,500 derivative words included as subentries. Over half of these words are nouns, about a quarter adjectives, and about a seventh verbs; the rest is made up of interjections, conjunctions, prepositions, suffixes, etc. These figures take no account of entries with senses for different parts of speech (such as noun and adjective).
This suggests that there are, at the very least, a quarter of a million distinct English words, excluding inflections, and words from technical and regional vocabulary not covered by the OED, or words not yet added to the published dictionary, of which perhaps 20 per cent are no longer in current use. If distinct senses were counted, the total would probably approach three quarters of a million.
Anyhow, back to the topic at hand...
While I'm still a low-intermediate (passed 2kyuu this year), I fall into patterns of using the same words repetitively when a different, more applicable, or more intellectually-sounding word would better suit my mood or the nuance I am trying to convey. I hate this. Even when forcing myself to use the new word, I often fall back on the old ones, not so much out of laziness but more because I'm used to using it.