Hello all,
A while ago I read a published article by Paul Nation called “How much input do you need to learn the most frequent 9,000 words?” concluding you would need to read about 11 million words to reach a vocabulary of 9000 words. I’m not sure what language the article was about, probably English, but I can’t imagine it would make a huge difference in other languages.
Often people calculate 300 words per page of a book meaning just over 35.000 pages would give you the 11 million words. I was wondering if anybody has any idea how many words manga volumes have on average so I could use this to set goals for my reading. Of course it differs per manga but a rough estimate would be fine. Thanks in advance
6 comments
It’s not so much about the volume as time. 35k pages is roughly 100 books, and most of people need year+ to read it. Similarly if you use SRS with 25 words/day setup, you will learn 9k words in a year too.
Closer to your main question, it’s really individual and depends on author/genre. Sometimes it’s about the plot with a lot of text, sometimes about actions with few words. At average I would say 30-60 words on each page.
Looks like someone did the math on this: https://www.quora.com/How-many-pages-of-an-actual-book-does-one-chapter-of-a-manga-relate-to
I don’t think you can equate reading 11 million words worth of books with reading 11 million words worth of manga, though. Almost all of the text in manga is dialogue. Most of the things that would have to be described using words in a novel are conveyed via drawings. If you’re relying on manga exclusively, you’re largely limiting your exposure to just one aspect of the written language.
It varies widely on the type of manga you read. Compare detective conan to a slice of life manga. Huge difference.
Manga is a bit of a double edged sword. It’s generally easier to read than novels, but also quite low ‘bang for your buck’. I’m an ok reader and regularly get through an entire manga volume within a day or two. For the same money I could get a novel, which gives me weeks worth of reading and a richer set of vocabulary.
Novels can be quite mentally taxing to read, so there is definitely a place for manga, but if you’re looking to read 11 million words, novels should probably make up a big part of that. (Sorry this is not really an answer to your question.)
While the study title is “How much input do you need to learn the most frequent 9,000 words?” [https://eric.ed.gov/?id=EJ1044345](https://eric.ed.gov/?id=EJ1044345)
it did not actually study that.
It studied how much do you need to read to be exposed to 9,000 words at least 12 times. From its abstract “This study looks at how much input is needed to gain enough repetition of the 1st 9,000 words of English for learning to occur. […] Corpus sizes ofjust under 200,000 tokens and 3 million tokens provide an average of at least 12repetitions at the 2nd 1,000 word level and the 9th 1,000 word level respectively”.
So for English it is 3 million tokens (morphs, in morphman terms). Still a lot.
In Japanese I imagine the figure will be much higher, given the need to remember the Kanji. Given that a light novel is around 30k words, that is a lot of reading.
The paper is worth reading. There are significant threads to validity to the results. And there is a lot of discussion on what makes good reading materials to learn English (and hopefully some apply to Japanese).
This is not accounting, please stop this thinking as it won’t get you anywhere