How many words does an average native speaker know?

[abcdefg]

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 spent time this year with some foreign medical students during their clinical rotations in Kunming. They all felt as though they had to try to establish a level of “credibility” with patients through speaking Chinese fluently. They did this more through conversing about current events and news (like the Shanghai World Expo) and common concerns (like the Yunnan drought) than talking about classical literature or philosophy.

Lots of the advice above was given by people who know more about learning Chinese than I do and it looks quite valuable. But I know about the stresses of medical education and would caution about setting unrealistic goals. There is a lot on your plate already; namely mastering the material in your medical studies.

Though I understand and admire your desire to achieve proficiency in the Chinese language, I’m not sure you should press to master a specific number of words in a specific amount of time. You sound diligent, and as time goes along I’ll bet your medical vocabulary will integrate naturally with your daily-life vocabulary. I’m suggesting you give the process time and not be too harsh with yourself.

[rezaf]

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

To some extent you are right. Reading is not my strongpoint. Apart from my textbooks, I have only read three teenage novels in Chinese and I find reading very difficult because no matter how many words I know, in Chinese they always find a way to make it difficult to understand but memorising the dictionary is not my priority as I have to do a lot of reading in medical books and 醫古文 like 黃帝內經 and 傷寒論(which is why I only have time to memorise 100 words every week). I have already finished about 3000 words and I feel it somehow connects all the areas of my Chinese. Anyway thanks for the book suggestions, I just downloaded 中國哲學簡史 by 馮友蘭。 I find it manageable in my Chinese level.

[rezaf]

I spent time this year with some foreign medical students during their clinical rotations in Kunming. They all felt as though they had to try to establish a level of “credibility” with patients through speaking Chinese fluently. They did this more through conversing about current events and news (like the Shanghai World Expo) and common concerns (like the Yunnan drought) than talking about classical literature or philosophy.

Lots of the advice above was given by people who know more about learning Chinese than I do and it looks quite valuable. But I know about the stresses of medical education and would caution about setting unrealistic goals. There is a lot on your plate already; namely mastering the material in your medical studies.

Though I understand and admire your desire to achieve proficiency in the Chinese language, I’m not sure you should press to master a specific number of words in a specific amount of time. You sound diligent, and as time goes along I’ll bet your medical vocabulary will integrate naturally with your daily-life vocabulary. I’m suggesting you give the process time and not be too harsh with yourself.

You are right but we also have to impress the doctors who teach us. As foreign students, they really won't let us do anything serious unless we can impress them and impressing a 老中醫 is not that easy. I really need to get to a reasonable level in all areas in just a few years so that I can function at hospital but of course the emphasis is on my modern Mandarin and my daily communication skills.

[jbradfor]

Anyway, can you give me a link of those 9000 hsk words?

Please see this thread.

FWIW, and I'm not sure it's worth much because I think your Chinese is better than mine, I've found these lists useful up to a certain level -- for me, about 3000 words. Then I got too bored, and also wanted to focus more on speaking / listening. However, since you seem to be willing to put in more effort, they might be more useful to you.

[rezaf]

I had totally forgotten about that 8000 words of Taiwan's test but it's also very incomplete. from ai to dai it has about 500 words but in my list there are 3055 words. However I think I should use it for making my list in case I miss something.

When I think about it if my list is 5 or 6 times bigger than that list it might mean that at the end it will be around 40000 words :blink: which is scary! I might be able to finish it in 7 or 8 years!!!(It proves Renzhe's first post that a Chinese college student knows around 46000 words)

[Guest realmayo]

jbradfor's link is to the vocab for the "new" HSK exam; it is shorter than the word list of the old one. See here for the old one.

[hwangmic]

Knowing how many characters you know in Chinese is a good way to judge how far you have come in your learning. I am so impressed that native Chinese speakers know anywhere from 3,000 to 10,000 characters. Those numbers are mind-blowing in itself. My parents are native speakers and obviously fall in the category of people knowing that many characters. I, on the other hand, grew up in America and only the the characters I learned from my mom and through Chinese school. I would be surprised if I knew even 1,000 characters. I found this tool online that actually estimates how many characters you know. It's called the Chinese Character Test (http://www.clavisinica.com/character-test-applet.html). The test was more challenging than I thought, so I had to take myself a level down. The result was pretty surprising though. After I took a semester of Chinese in college, I took the test again, and sure enough, I knew more characters.

[xaze]

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

I doubt this is accurate. To give you an idea, using a 400,000,000 (that's right, nearly half a billion... Probably more words than a person hears in a life) word corpus covering everything from medicine to regional slang the word-form at 60,000 has a frequency of merely 21.

Not only that, but that is word-forms and not words (lemmas). In order to get lemmas you would essentially divide that list by 3, so there is 20,000 words. That would mean an educated college person would have managed to learn 55,000 more words that have a rate of useage of less than 5.25 × 10^-8. Highly improbable.

To give you an idea of how many words are in that corpus, it would take a person listening to one word per second for 24 hours a day over 4000 days to get enough exposure to hear every word once.

So, honestly, there is no way those numbers are anywhere close to accurate. An educated person probably has a vocabulary around 20-30000 words tops. Even that is probably stretching it. A good percentage of those are probably not even words known, but words they are able to figure out in context. Which the ability to figure out words in context is greater in Chinese than English because the meaning of Chinese bi-grams can oftentimes be deduced by knowledge of the character / word components. At least this is according to my understanding of the language and has been verified by native speakers.

[rezaf]

Knowing the number of characters won't help because modern Mandarin is based on words(usually two characters). I was actually obsessed with my number of characters once and i learned lots of characters without learning the words they can make in order to chuiniu about the characters I know but when I think about it, it was useless and stupid. BTW there are many lists of the most common 6000 or something characters and you can exactly count the number of characters you know.

Edit: Actually that website is good. I did the test and it's estimation was quite close.

Edited September 14, 2010 at 01:28 PM by rezaf

[gato]

I was actually obsessed with my number of characters once and i learned lots of characters without learning the words they can make in order to chuiniu about the characters I know but when I think about it, it was useless and stupid.

Memorizing the dictionary is almost just as useless, you know. ;)

[Guest realmayo]

Actually that website is good. I did the test and it's estimation was quite close

Ha, I just tried that website and it's excellent. It says I know approx 3500, which is almost 500 more than I've actually studied! (Actually, given that it's multiple-choice it's fairly easy to guess some of the answers...)

[Guest realmayo]

An educated person probably has a vocabulary around 20-30000 words tops

I'm not clear about this -- you mean in English? And are you counting words or "word families" (I don't follow the jargon)? I mean, would sharp, sharper, sharpest, sharpen, sharpening, sharpener, sharply, resharpen, sharps etc count once or nine times in your 30,000 list?

[gato]

This question has come up from time to time. Here are some estimates by researchers of vocabulary sizes of college-level native speakers. They use "word families" as a measurement, instead of "words".

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vocabulary#Reading_vocabulary

Native-language vocabulary

Native speakers' vocabularies vary widely within a language, and are especially dependent on the level of the speaker's education. A 1995 study estimated the vocabulary size of college-educated speakers at about 17,000 word families, and that of first-year college students (high-school educated) at about 12,000.[10]

It is estimated that one needs a vocabulary of about 10,000 word families to read a general college-level text:

http://books.google.com.hk/books?id=ugT6ImoQO-8C&pg=PA143&lpg=PA143&dq=Schmitt+15000+words&source=bl&ots=DwKDixqKi1&sig=spSb-2PEZ_7B4QWB1yxf55lWfk4&hl=en&ei=rtZLTIPfAsmwcffwrasM&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=2&ved=0CBcQ6AEwAQ#v=onepage&q&f=false

Vocabulary in language teaching By Norbert Schmitt

[deathtrap]

for the non-linguists in here, what's the difference between a word and a word family?

[gato]

I think realmayo explained it with her/his example.

sharp, sharper, sharpest, sharpen, sharpening, sharpener, sharply, resharpen, sharps are all words, but they might be considered to belong one family. There's a little bit of a judgment call as to what is a family, like what kind of prefixes and suffixes you allow to be added to the root word.

[xaze]

A word family (lemma) is the base form of a word without conjugations and declinations. For example, the previous quoted number of words definitely included all word forms (ran, run, runs), which makes comparing it to Chinese extremely inaccurate because Chinese does not have the same number of conjugations / declinations (it does not have any because it is almost a purely a analytical language).

I believe that knowing 10,000 lemmas in just about any language will be enough to do just about anything. Knowing 20,000 would put you in the top most able readers in that language.

[anonymoose]

A 1995 study estimated the vocabulary size of college-educated speakers at about 17,000 word families, and that of first-year college students (high-school educated) at about 12,000.

I'm rather sceptical about this, because I don't believe these figures.

An avergae college-educated speaker knows about 17000 word families, yet a first-year college student only knows 12000? So in the (three?) years of college, the size of their vocabulary expands by 42%?

I know what going to college means experiencing a new educational environment, and therefore it may give a boost to the acquisition of new vocabulary, but I simply do not believe that one's vocabulary expands by such a vast quantity in such a short time.

[Guest realmayo]

So in the (three?) years of college, the size of their vocabulary expands by 42%?

I don't think that's what they're saying. I don't think they tested "college-educated" people on the day they graduated from university; the people they tested might have been any age, as long as they have a degree.

Also: we're just talking about word families, I imagine the rarer word families have fewer (or fewer actually useful) derivatives, so while the word families may increase from 12,000 to 17,000, I'd doubt the actual overall words (ie non-families) increase at an equivalent 42% rate.

[gato]

Yes, I think realmayo is right. "College-educated" probably refers to all adults who have graduated from college rather than fresh graduates, so words learned after college (e.g. from more schooling / job / life) get counted as well.

Here is the 1995 article that's cited in the wikipedia article.

http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/content~db=all~content=a917745079

Growth of a functionally important lexicon

Journal of Literacy Research, Volume 27, Issue 2 June 1995 , pages 201 - 212

Using a dictionary-sampling method and multiple-choice testing of word knowledge, we estimated the lexicon size of junior-high students, college students, and older adults. The results lead us to suggest that there may yet be a role for direct instruction in affecting lexicon size of functionally important words.

And an article that discusses the issue in the context of ESL learners.

http://iteslj.org/Articles/Cervatiuc-VocabularyAcquisition.html

The Receptive Vocabulary Size of Adult Native English Speakers

[Guest realmayo]

However, is any of this relevant to Chinese? Is there any reason to think that "word families" exist in Chinese and, if they do, that they correspond usefully with the amount and scope of word families in English? It seems to me that in Chinese you either descibe these "families" very loosely, eg anything with 友 in it belongs to the same family (which isn't so helpful because knowing 友 won't help you much with 朋 or 谊); or very tightly, limited to I guess certain suffixes such as 们、性、化 etc (朋友们、多样性、城市化).