To be clear, I’m referring to passive vocabulary, as it pertains to reading comprehension rather than active vocabulary.
While I’m at a point where I am able to understand “everyday Japanese”, such as NHK news articles, business websites and know all of the words most of the time provided they are intended for a layman audience . However when it comes to reading novels, Light novels, VNs, etc. I find that without a doubt, there are are always words that I don’t know like 反駁 、 軋轢、虱潰し 、投擲 etc. While I enjoy reading and will continue to do so, I feel like it may take me years to get to a point where I can read novels without having to search up words ( assuming I’m even able to get to that point). This is especially the case given that I’m bad at memorising. It normally takes me quite a while to remember each word.
I aspire to become a Japanese teacher at some point in my life, but I worry that my limited vocabulary may make me appear incompetent. Of course passive vocabulary is just one facet of learning Japanese and there are many other arguably more important aspects to being a Language teacher, including skills not related to language learning, so I’d imagine overly devoting your time to memorising vocabulary would be detrimental.
My questions are as follows:
How many words would you expect a teacher to know? Is it possible to become a Japanese teacher without being able to read a novel without using a dictionary? (I understand that there isn’t really isn’t a good way to ‘count’ something like the number of words a teacher should know without overly broad estimates)
Are there any resources, anki decks, courses, etc. that bridge the gap between N1, and the vocabulary that a native speaker possesses? I understand that the general advice is just to read native material to find words to memorise, but I personally find it time consuming.
3 comments
At that point I can’t just say “alot” but if I were to be taught japanese. I might as well be taught by a native but overall I’d want them to have a great understanding of N1-N5 grammar points with also of course know “alot” of vocabulary
It’s going to depend on your country/state policies and the level you’re teaching.
In the United States you need either an ACTFL OPI score of Intermediate-High or Advanced-Low or an acceptable Praxis exam as decided by your state. That’s about an N2-level of Japanese.
A university might want JLPT scores or another certification of a high level of Japanese proficiency (N2-N1). Expertise in a niche area of Japanese studies would also be a boon.
For most high schools (in my experience), they tend to pull from Adventures in Japanese (about N4); universities have the potential to go to N1, depending on how well the program has been developed.
Edit: I’m a Japanese teacher so if you have questions, PM me.
It’s indeed hard to say. Moreover we often have completely different attitude towards unknown words in native language and foreign languages. At average natives learn 300-500 new words in a year and if you think about that, it’s actually quite big number. Like it’s 7-10 new words every week. When was the last time when we actually focused on that?
We are constantly surrounded by something unknown, I don’t know all names for grass where I live, or I can pick any food and 2/3 of it’s nutrients are going to be something unknown for me. Maybe some elements of furniture with it’s own names. I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s hundreds of unknown words in my home alone.
Speaking about some numbers, I suppose for Japanese natives at average it’s somewhere around 40k or maybe even slightly more, but a huge part of it are loan words or words with small variation like intransitive/transitive verbs. Such number is based on 2 things. When I read, I constantly see words with 30-40k frequency. Another fact is that if you open something like [jpdb.io](https://jpdb.io) , then some novels have 30k+ individual words by itself and it’s not likely for all rare words to be in a single work.
Another point is that even natives have different knowledge. For example, some people know 20k lemmas in English, but people who like to read or who put a lot of efforts into education quite often know 40k lemmas. That’s a double difference even between natives, so assuming you learn average Japanese amount of vocabulary, you will be able to teach not only foreigners, but quite a lot of natives too. In my opinion vocabulary doesn’t even matter so much, rather if you actually have something to teach and can do it properly.
UPD. Btw, speaking about learning new words, usually it’s good to change genres and generally to focus on different areas of the language. Such way you will see more unknown words. For example, history books and romance will use 2 completely different sets of words.