Aozora wrote:kraemder wrote:Looking at some web articles about learning foreign languages... and I'm sure everyone here has done this... you are supposed to be able to learn or guess from context the meaning of words if you know about 3000 words or so. I know more than that and yet I still struggle to guess the meanings of words.
Figures like that never worked for me either. As you said, even 6000 words isn't enough, at least for Japanese. I'm thinking there's a kind of breakthrough around 10,000 words, but there will still be plenty of unknown words. I haven't been to Japan, so unfortunately I have no advice on that front.
Yeah. I think people writing those articles about foreign languages in general have European languages in mind. A high context language like Japanese just cuts out unnecessary words from the sentence leaving you with a bare bones thought without real help. At least that's how it feels. Although reading, depending on the author, I'm starting to get it a bit. Or maybe, I'm getting more comfortable with kanji and just guessing what a word and its reading is based on what it usually is because I've seen the kanji in other words. Even if you've seen a kanji before, I think seeing it in another word in a text that you haven't seen before and being comfortable with that is still something that takes time. For me anyway.
According to the Luca Lampariello emails I get, there is a breakthrough at 10,000 words however. I think Japanese needs that 10,000 more than other languages do. But that's in respect to reading. Regarding conversation, I gotta say I think other social skills are more important.