LLearn Japanese

20,000 words to be ‘fluent’?

I’ve heard that \~20,000 vocabularly is the range of words needed to be ‘fluent’ (for full fluency, fast natural spech, puns) in Japanese. Has anyone here who has achieved \~20,000 words support this sentiment?

2 comments

  1. There’s passive recognition of these words, and then there’s active recall of these words. I could be comfortable recognizing 20,000 words in any given foreign language, but then, when it is time to put them to use, maybe I am only comfortable recalling 5,000 of those words at any given time? So I wouldn’t be able to call myself fully fluent at that point.

    After all, language acquisition is mostly about getting used to the language and comfortable with it, more than actually “learning” it.

  2. Even with 999999k words you want be fluent, why ? because you will forget 99% of them if you don’t live or speak Japanese everyday

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