"How Many Words Do I Need?"

I read a nice entry about reaching native fluency by Lang-8 user Lotokot, a Polish speaker studying English. Clicking on the text below will take you to the actual entry.

"This is the question asked by many language learners.When will I be able to talk fluently and to understand native speakers?  

Of, course the answer is uneasy.

There are two types of vocabulary: active and passive.Active vocabulary is a range of words you use in a conversation or in writing. 

Passive vocabulary is a range of words you can recognize reading a text or listening to the speaker. Average active vocabulary of English native speaker is about 20.000 words and there is about 40.000 words in his passive vocabulary. 

 I think that I reached the level of about 6.000-7.000 words knowing passively and about 3.000 words knowing actively.

I know it because I use “Learning with Texts” - program which is very helpful in reading texts.There are some statistics about number of words used in texts which I put into the program.Numbers looks frustratingly. 

Every thousand words to learn is a really hard work for me.Luckily 3.000 words provides coverage for around 95% of common English texts. 

Some of this few percent I don't know is possible to recognize from context, but these rare words very often are crucial in the texts I read or listen. 

I read somewhere that about 5.000 actively known words allow to speak the language quite fluently. 

When I reach this level (if this happens) I will be able to recognize probably about 10.000 words. 

However the way to be fluent as native speaker looks infinite.

I took some data to this post from the website http://www.lingholic.com"

Japanese Subtitles + Learning With Texts = Productive Drama Watching (?)

Hey fellow Japanese drama watchers who are also studying Japanese. Wouldn't you like to watch Japanese dramas and study at the same time? Sure, you can delude yourself into believing that simply enjoying what you can and glazing over what you can't understand is helpful, but we'll get nowhere like that! Then again, pausing every time an unknown word comes on so you can notate and decode it kills the fun of drama-watching. Kills it dead. Like, with a rock... or something. Like, with a stone...

Yeah! Kung Pow reference!

Well, if you get some Japanese subtitles (or better yet, the script) and put it into Learning With Texts, you can simply follow along as you go. With regular subtitles, you have to pause and look up kanji. Boring! With subtitles+LWT, you'll get minimal pausing time! The word is right there, and with a click you can get its definition and save it for later perusal. (Imagine the previous paragraph in an infomercial guy voice.)

Yeah! Learning!

You can get Japanese subs here. You can get Japanese dramas using something like Keyhole TV or whatever floats your boat.

"Learning with Texts" (or, another way to study that I will probably slack off on once again)

Looking up and flashcard-izing kanji in your Japanese reading passages just became loads easier, but probably not easy enough for me to spend time doing it. I need that time to stare pointlessly into space and the depths of the internet, damn it!

I jest, I jest. I've just started using this Learning with Texts thing and it looks pretty cool so far. Honestly, all the instructions for setting it up kind of had me grumbling, but despite all the unzipping and file renaming (we learn to do that in middle school anyway, right, my generation?) it actually wasn't that daunting. Here's the set up...

Yes, I'm watching a show called Rooftop Prince. Don't judge me!

And here's what it looks like when you use it to edit sentences:

As you can see I've just added one of those passages from Asymptote. When you see a word you don't know, you can click on it, tell the program where it ends, and get the definition in the next window. I set my dictionaries for Denshi Jisho and Yahoo Jisho. All I have to do is put the info I want into the top right hand box (the translation, etc). You can also set whether you know or are learning the word. All of this information can later be exported into Anki decks (Right? I haven't done it yet myself).

It's like what I strive to do over two days in two clicks!

Sweeeeeeeeeeeeet.

EDIT:

Here's how I set up my Japanese preferences...

And if you're using the EasyPHP method, you might have trouble if you use the link to 127.0.0.1:8887 that's on the site. I had to get to it through the EasyPHP program itself like so:

open it in your notification area (it's the little e down there)...

click on the icon on the left of the window and select 'Local Web' from the drop-down menu...

and voila! Your LWT home page should pop up in your browser!