How many words does an average native speaker know?

[rezaf]

In the last few months I have focused on memorising the useful words of my dictionary chosen by my Chinese friends.

My dictionary has 120000 words and 2000 pages. I have noticed that on average they choose between 10 to 11 words per page which might mean 21000 words when I finish this project in 3 or 4 years. Do you think that 21000 is the right number?

(What I mean by word includes chengyu and other stuff as you can see in the attachment.)

[James Johnston]

I think the definition of a word is problematic in Chinese because you can combine characters in a huge number of ways to make more words. It is difficult to distinguish a word from a collocation in Chinese, which means that any list of words or estimate of the size of a person's vocabulary is going to be very subjective.

Still, that font of knowledge and guesswork that is Baidu Zhidao has a few answers for the vocabulary expected for a senior-middle school student. I think these are far too low (for the reasons given above), but the figures quoted in the top answers are: 4000 or 5000 to do well in exams, 4000, and 4000 but the more the better.

Edit: Thinking about it, it's more than likely these people are talking about English vocabulary, which is embarrassing for me.

[skylee]

Forgive me for being ignorant, but do learners really have to memorise each and every expression like those in the list in the picture? Based on my own experience I would think that when one has achieved a certain level it would not be necessary to remember / recite / learn expressions from lists like that. I would think that in most cases one would be able to understand from the words used and the contexts what expressions such as "百口莫辯" or ”百聞不如一見" etc mean. Is this not the case? (I have used Chinese for decades and am not sure what it is like being a learner.)

[anonymoose]

Forgive me for being ignorant, but do learners really have to memorise each and every expression like those in the list in the picture?

For the purposes of understanding only, then it's probably not necessary, but if one wants to be able to use those expressions oneself, then it helps to have a more solid recollection of them.

[Guest realmayo]

Well, if one can work out the expression, or pretty much work it out, then it shouldn't take much time to "learn it". That is, assuming you're only talking about going from Chinese to English. But if you wanted to be able to produce such phrases, I think a some effort is certainly needed. For instance, I used 由此可看 a few times before realising the phrase is 由此可见.

Also the example you give of 百口莫辯: perhaps I'm just being slow here, but I don't know what it means despite looking it up in a couple of dictionaries: I have these definitions:

unable to prove innocence

unable to to make things clear.

If I didn't have any dictionaries, I might assume it means: lots of voices no dispute => a very obvious thing which no one would argue about.

Admittedly, you mentioned the context being important too, but I can imagine plenty of contexts which wouldn't provide enough help for that phrase.

[skylee]

百口莫辯 means even with a hundred mouths there is no way to defend / explain (oneself).

Re solid recollection (or rather solid foundation), I think that can be built up by reading and writing a lot. But I have not learnt a new language for a long time so perhaps I should just keep my mouth shut here.

[anonymoose]

剥猫皮不止一种方法。 :rolleyes:

[rezaf]

Skylee Chinese is your mother tongue. The natural way of learning these twenty something thausand words is to read a lot of books and use the language. After many years some will become your passive vocabulary and some will become your active vocabulary. For a native speaker this process might take about twenty years but I figured that I might be able to do it in about 4 years if I learn about 5000 words per year. This way I can manage all the words I know and at the end all of them will become my active vocabulary. I memorise 100 new words every week and review the words I have learnt before. for example reciting all the words of ca, cai, can, cang, cao and ce in one day. The good thing about having this list is that my active vocabulary will be very strong and I can instantly use them if ncessary. I'm sure after 4 years my active vocabulary can become even more stronger than a native speaker but of course it won't mean that I can use the language as fluently as a native speaker because that part will take many years of reading and writing. Right now what I don't know is exactly how many words it will be at the end. I'm really not sure if my estimation of 21000 words is right or not. It seems like there isn't any study about the number of words an average educated Chinese knows whereas there is lots of stuff about the number of characters.

[skylee]

剥猫皮不止一种方法。 :rolleyes:

True. Besides memorisation, there are other ways to learn the language. :rolleyes: (Oh, see, I can roll my eyes too, haha)

But of course the OP must use a learning method that is most suitable for him. I will shut up now.

[renzhe]

The size of somebody's vocabulary is very difficult to measure. DeFrancis mentions the following numbers (citing Jespersen, Seashore, Eckerson and Oldfield):

500-1100 for a 2-year old child

2,700 for a 6-year old

26,000 for Swedish peasants

70,000 for English-speaking college students

75,000 for English undergraduates

For Chinese, Chao, Chao and Chang came up with around 46,000 词 for Chinese students doing graduate work in the United States.

In any case, you're looking at anything from 20,000 vocabulary items (at the lower level) to over 50,000 if you want to compare to university graduates. I'd say that around 15,000 or more is what you're expected to know for doing well on the old HSK advanced (the vocab lists covered about 9,000, but were not complete by any means).

Personally, I think that cramming can be beneficial in the early stages of learning a language as an adult, in order to jump-start the learning and get you to a level where you can communicate more quickly than taking the "toddler route". But, you'll have to get lots of meaning, context and feeling from reading lots of native-level materials, and through lots of conversation. You're not only catching up with 50k words when trying to learn a language, you are also catching up with 20 years of reading and conversation -- THIS is the hard part.

Memorising 10,000 words in a couple of years is a bit of a pain in the back, but it's not a huge deal. It's getting the natural feel for how and when to use them, and all the nuances that takes time. So for me, cramming is simply a tool for getting to the real stuff (books, films, conversation) quickly, and that's where the real, interesting language learning starts.

[rezaf]

Thanks Renzhe, so it means that it might take me more than 4 years to complete this but somehow I think the area above 20000 is more about 专业词汇 not words that you normally see in the newspaper, novels, normal life or even in a normal dictionary. What do you think?

[Guest realmayo]

In that sense it might be worth thinking about words like 城市化 or 系统性： I think it's fair to say they constitute separate "words" from 城市 or 系统, given that their meanings are more nuanced than simply "change into a city" or "like a system"; 城市 & 系统 will fall in the first, say, 3000 words (?) but 城市化 & 系统性 will be less common. However, assuming one knows what these words mean in one's native tongue, it's very easy to remember these supposedly "rarer" and "more difficult" words. Then again, I'd have no idea if this kind of thing applies to a large enough amount of vocabulary to have much significance.

[renzhe]

I think that everyday vocabulary which concerns the most common relationship stuff, shopping, restaurants, doing the everyday stuff, is not much higher than a few thousand. Kids can handle that just fine.

The question is what you want from Chinese. If you want to discuss history, philosophy, or conduct business, or discuss some specialised topic (something you studied, for example), you will need considerably more.

But I'd say that it's probably more important to get a really good grip on all the nuances of the most common 5,000 - 10,000 than to learn randomly after that. If you can actually use all those 10,000 at an advanced and near-native level, then acquiring additional vocabulary should not be a huge problem. That's why I think that learning the most relevant 5,000 words first, and using them all the time, is very important. The HSK lists are the closest we can really get to such a list.

Realmayo, the problem with all these studies is that they can't even agree what a "word" is. You can add +/- 20% to any of them depending on the methodology. Those are just rought estimates, not more.

[rezaf]

Well my objective is to get as close as possible to a -normal- educated native speaker in discussing serious topics like politics and philosophy because now in China I feel like a 脑残 because I can just talk about simple everyday life topics. I have also memorised a lot of medical words but they are useless without a strong everyday-life vocabulary when I talk to patients at the hospital for my 见习. I don't look Chinese and the only way I can gain the trust of the patients is by talking very fluently to them otherwise our teachers won't let us do anything serious at the hospital. Anyway, can you give me a link of those 9000 hsk words?

[gato]

To take your Chinese to the collge level and beyond, instead of memorizing the dictionary, why not

- work on your classical Chinese and make reading through 《古文观止》 your goal

- read the four classic novels, starting with 《红楼梦》 and 《三国演义》, as those two are most popular and most often discussed

- read top 10 modern Chinese from 《亚洲周刊》 list that you can find elsewhere

- read a few books on ancient and modern Chinese history in Chinese that have been recommended in this forum, by authors like 黄仁宇, 杨继绳, and 杨奎松

- read a few books on history of Chinese philosophy and culture by 韦政通，费孝通 or 冯友兰

[anonymoose]

Because learning classical chinese is not very useful when one is trying to improve one's command of modern mandarin.

[skylee]

When gato talked about consolidating through reading, it had so much more weight than what I said in my #6.

[renzhe]

Well my objective is to get as close as possible to a -normal- educated native speaker in discussing serious topics like politics and philosophy

I think that this is what most of us want to achieve, eventually.

But, the more in-depth you get with philosophy, history, politics and society, the more you will need to understand the words (and ideas, concepts) in context. It's very easy to learn how to say "cup" in Chinese, because a cup is just a cup, and it means the same thing to everyone in the world. But if you're translating a cultural or historical term, it will often be used differently by Chinese people, and have different connotations -- and it's very important to know this. A word I've learned recently is 愤青. It's tricky. If used in some contexts, it refers to young nationalists. If used in other contexts, it does not mean nationalist. Huge difference! Like gato and skylee said, the best way to get both the context and the vocabulary is to work through Chinese books discussing it. Especially if your language is sufficient for everyday usage.

I'm not an expert in any of those fields (not in Chinese), but I found, for example, that reading Ba Jin and Lu Xun has given me a much better understanding of many older Chinese customs, and how the society used to be during feudal times. I also picked up loads of historical vocabulary in the process. It made it far easier to follow all sorts of conversations which had to do with family, traditional customs, or anything before the revolution. That's just a small example. Similarly, reading Jin Yong helped me pick up all the (rather unnecessary, to be honest) wuxia jargon, and gave me plenty of conversation stuff. Native speakers go crazy when they find out that they can discuss Guo Jing with a foreigner, it's loads of fun. One of the results was that I can follow "My Own Swordsman" -- which is not terribly important either, but loads of fun. I picked up some computer terms when I was scouring the internet looking for tips on getting PPStream running under Linux -- all of which were in Chinese.

If I were trying to expand my vocabulary in terms of history, politics, philosophy, etc, it would definitely include reading about these things. Actually, at least one of the four classics is on my schedule for next year.

[Guest realmayo]

Renzhe, I suppose what I was saying above was that a chunk of more "advanced-level" vocabularly might be actually pretty easy to learn. In English I think that's the case: "insect" might count as a common word, but "insecticide" a rarer one -- however, if you know "insect" and also how the "-icide" ending works, "insecticide" is actually easy to learn, and you can add fratri/matri/patri/infanti-cides as well as genocide to the mix easily enough too. I'm just speculating (and hoping!) that the same might be true of Chinese too.

The HSK lists I found useful as a list of words up to intermediate level which I absolutely needed to learn ASAP, though I'm finding so many useful and common words that aren't even in the advanced list that I'm not really using that advanced list as a base for vocab-building any more. I see what you mean about the need to thoroughly understand the first, say, 5,000 to 10,000; here, I guess, extensive reading of not-too-difficult books is the answer.

[gato]

Classical Chinese is a necessity for getting into any depth in Chinese philosophy. Most books on Chinese philosophy written for Chinese will quote quite a bit from classical texts. They will be difficult to read without some basic grasp of classical Chinese.