It likely does because a lot of other languages have many words that resemble each other while Japanese has few linguistic relatives.
Gleick’s ‘The Information’ (reading it last night) has English with a million words – give or take.
Japanese weighs in with around half that number.
I’d say it is quite the opposite. There’s a million different ways to replace a word in English, like “very X” with some other word and with Japanese you can feel restricted and losing a bit of nuance IMO.
That said, learning vocab is pretty much the hardest part of any language in the long run. We still constantly encounter new words in our native tongue as it is, so the vocabulary could be harder if you were comparing it to a different language that shares a lot of words that English does.
>compared to other languages?
numerically, it doesn’t matter because culturally it is so different
so yes, Japanese is the most difficult to learn because of how different it is BUT Japanese also has a crazy amount of resources available and it has good motivation due to the entertainment stuff you have access to once learned
I find it most interesting to compare dictionaries.
Webster’s 11th: 225,000 definitions and 165,000 entries
大辞林 第四版：25万1千語
So basically they are very close especially for everyday usage. Also if you look up the number of words that people know for given age ranges and education levels they also compare very similarly.
My Japanese is very very beginner so take this with a massive grain of salt, but I feel like if anything, Japanese is a lot more constrained than say.. English.
So many words/phrases appear to just be combinations of other words rather than a new word entirely.
The amount of work that an English-speaker will have to put in to learn Japanese, as opposed to Spanish, French, or German (as a few examples) will be significant.
The *number of words in the language* is not the problem. Regardless of which new language you learn, you will learn roughly the same number of words. Exactly how many words you learn will simply depend on what you use the language for.
OP, you seem to be wondering how many *words you already know* can be recycled when you use Japanese. Good news! Japanese uses a huge amount of English words. Bad news! They often use that English word in a new way, so the “English” word has a Japanese meaning you must learn.
Mostly because of the writing system, learning Japanese is very hard for English speakers. In terms of your ability to communicate, learning Spanish will go a lot faster.
In terms of a newspaper, which can be a good litmus for general literacy, English requires, for something like the NYT or your own local newspaper (not tabloids) between 7k and 8k words to understand everything in it. Japanese requires with a few exceptions (odd words and terms) just the 常用(Jouyou) kanji of 2136 characters for functional literacy.
Granted that each kanji can be flexed into multiple vocab words but figuring an average of 2.5 to 3 words per kanji, you’re looking at 5340-6408 vocabulary words to know based on those kanji, so by that metric it’s close enough, just a different reading style. And if you learn your radicals well enough, you can reasonably “sound out” kanji you don’t know that lack furigana (mileage may vary as with English(see: though, through, thought, trough)).
That said, you’re looking at a difference of a few hundred to a thousand-ish words between them, assuming English is your native tongue.
Counting words is hard. “The history of English podcast” says that English has an abnormally large vocabulary, so Japanese isn’t bigger then English. There are different ways to count the number of words, once I saw a low-quality video, that stated Ukrainian having almost 3x the amount of words of Russian, which is obvious nonsense, so it’s hard to say anything actually
It’s hard to measure, especially when language allows a huge amount of conjugations or modifications. For example, 持っていく and 持ってくる are individual verbs in English (carry/bring). Amount of meanings one word has also varies. I think English might have higher amount of meanings on average. Like look at some simple word as square. It’s a figure, location (like market square), unit of measurement and math operation, and it’s even used in tools like a carpenter’s square, besides another like 5 or even more other rare usages of this word. It’s not something unique to English, many languages have words with multiple meanings, and this basically leads to a situation that instead of words, we kinda have to count meanings and because we use meanings to name something in real life, I suppose all languages would be roughly the same, because it’s universal.
There are interesting cases, tho. Like onomatopoeia. There are similar words in English, but I think it’s much more popular in Japanese. There are also loan words, and it’s why often people think that we need to learn more words in Japanese than other languages.
I don’t know, but my gut says probably, and English is probably just as bad. Full disclaimer: I don’t have experience with learning languages other than Japanese, and my Japanese vocabulary is abysmal, so I don’t really know… However, I’ve certainly noticed that Japanese REALLY LIKES compound nouns. Why use two words to say “both hands” when you can use one: 両手? Why use three words to say “parent and child” when you can use one: 親子? This creates lots more words to learn.
Maybe Japanese and English can both be bad with this: why use three words to say “sharing a ride” when you can just use one: “carpooling”/「相乗り」? I feel Japanese might be more prone to compound nouns overall though.
try to pass Kanken level 1 to learn how many words Japanese has
(yes, *kango* are as much Japanese as words from Latin and Greek are English)
12 comments
It likely does because a lot of other languages have many words that resemble each other while Japanese has few linguistic relatives.
Gleick’s ‘The Information’ (reading it last night) has English with a million words – give or take.
Japanese weighs in with around half that number.
I’d say it is quite the opposite. There’s a million different ways to replace a word in English, like “very X” with some other word and with Japanese you can feel restricted and losing a bit of nuance IMO.
That said, learning vocab is pretty much the hardest part of any language in the long run. We still constantly encounter new words in our native tongue as it is, so the vocabulary could be harder if you were comparing it to a different language that shares a lot of words that English does.
>compared to other languages?
numerically, it doesn’t matter because culturally it is so different
so yes, Japanese is the most difficult to learn because of how different it is BUT Japanese also has a crazy amount of resources available and it has good motivation due to the entertainment stuff you have access to once learned
I find it most interesting to compare dictionaries.
Webster’s 11th: 225,000 definitions and 165,000 entries
大辞林 第四版：25万1千語
So basically they are very close especially for everyday usage. Also if you look up the number of words that people know for given age ranges and education levels they also compare very similarly.
My Japanese is very very beginner so take this with a massive grain of salt, but I feel like if anything, Japanese is a lot more constrained than say.. English.
So many words/phrases appear to just be combinations of other words rather than a new word entirely.
The amount of work that an English-speaker will have to put in to learn Japanese, as opposed to Spanish, French, or German (as a few examples) will be significant.
The *number of words in the language* is not the problem. Regardless of which new language you learn, you will learn roughly the same number of words. Exactly how many words you learn will simply depend on what you use the language for.
OP, you seem to be wondering how many *words you already know* can be recycled when you use Japanese. Good news! Japanese uses a huge amount of English words. Bad news! They often use that English word in a new way, so the “English” word has a Japanese meaning you must learn.
Mostly because of the writing system, learning Japanese is very hard for English speakers. In terms of your ability to communicate, learning Spanish will go a lot faster.
In terms of a newspaper, which can be a good litmus for general literacy, English requires, for something like the NYT or your own local newspaper (not tabloids) between 7k and 8k words to understand everything in it. Japanese requires with a few exceptions (odd words and terms) just the 常用(Jouyou) kanji of 2136 characters for functional literacy.
Granted that each kanji can be flexed into multiple vocab words but figuring an average of 2.5 to 3 words per kanji, you’re looking at 5340-6408 vocabulary words to know based on those kanji, so by that metric it’s close enough, just a different reading style. And if you learn your radicals well enough, you can reasonably “sound out” kanji you don’t know that lack furigana (mileage may vary as with English(see: though, through, thought, trough)).
That said, you’re looking at a difference of a few hundred to a thousand-ish words between them, assuming English is your native tongue.
Counting words is hard. “The history of English podcast” says that English has an abnormally large vocabulary, so Japanese isn’t bigger then English. There are different ways to count the number of words, once I saw a low-quality video, that stated Ukrainian having almost 3x the amount of words of Russian, which is obvious nonsense, so it’s hard to say anything actually
It’s hard to measure, especially when language allows a huge amount of conjugations or modifications. For example, 持っていく and 持ってくる are individual verbs in English (carry/bring). Amount of meanings one word has also varies. I think English might have higher amount of meanings on average. Like look at some simple word as square. It’s a figure, location (like market square), unit of measurement and math operation, and it’s even used in tools like a carpenter’s square, besides another like 5 or even more other rare usages of this word. It’s not something unique to English, many languages have words with multiple meanings, and this basically leads to a situation that instead of words, we kinda have to count meanings and because we use meanings to name something in real life, I suppose all languages would be roughly the same, because it’s universal.
There are interesting cases, tho. Like onomatopoeia. There are similar words in English, but I think it’s much more popular in Japanese. There are also loan words, and it’s why often people think that we need to learn more words in Japanese than other languages.
I don’t know, but my gut says probably, and English is probably just as bad. Full disclaimer: I don’t have experience with learning languages other than Japanese, and my Japanese vocabulary is abysmal, so I don’t really know… However, I’ve certainly noticed that Japanese REALLY LIKES compound nouns. Why use two words to say “both hands” when you can use one: 両手? Why use three words to say “parent and child” when you can use one: 親子? This creates lots more words to learn.
Maybe Japanese and English can both be bad with this: why use three words to say “sharing a ride” when you can just use one: “carpooling”/「相乗り」? I feel Japanese might be more prone to compound nouns overall though.
try to pass Kanken level 1 to learn how many words Japanese has
(yes, *kango* are as much Japanese as words from Latin and Greek are English)