So there is this cool vocab test online. I like it. I also realize that there are some of you that have a good idea of the number of word that you know via Anki.
[https://glenn-sun.github.io/japanese-vocab-test/](https://glenn-sun.github.io/japanese-vocab-test/)
If you take this test (it does take a while) how much does this match up with what you anticipate seeing? is it close, or wildly off?
Thanks!
13 comments
I got an estimate of 2300, I thought I was more in the 700 range. I think being able to figure out katana words may skew it if you’re not careful.
I have no clue how many words I know so this should be fun
I’ve seen “tests” like this (or more accurately, tools for estimating your vocab knowledge?) before, but in my humble opinion, anything that is based on identifying words/readings/definitions in a vacuum is kind of inherently flawed and isn’t really an accurate measure of one’s effective vocabulary.
I mean, sure, it can be interesting to get a rough self-assessed estimate of how many words you “know”, but at the end of the day you learn vocab to understand/communicate, so I believe that any truly meaningful or effective vocabulary “test” has to necessarily involve reading and understanding words in the context of full sentences, reading passages, etc.
Also, I’m not sure if these words are being randomly selected from some database or something, but there was some weird stuff in the first page generated for me. いしゃ in hiragana (as opposed to 医者)? エントリ instead of エントリー? ピカ (as in ピカピカ? as in ピカチュウ?)
In the end, I’m not sure what my estimate would be, because it hangs when I try to progress to page 2.
Tried it, got 5100. That seems a little high. I am around N3 level.
It’s better than other estimators I’ve done which usually give me a number double my learnt cards. I have around 18800 learnt and this one gave me 25600, pretty close.
If I had to guess this is probably only slightly more accurate than anki, though using anki stats to count your known vocab is also really bad. At the end of the day, a word known in anki is not necessarily a word known, and a word not known on a test in isolation is not necessarily a word not known either.
As for stats, I took this test once right after I quit anki and scored ~8000-9000, can’t really remember exactly what. I took it again 3 or 4 months after and scored ~14000. Neither of these matched up with my anki stats of ~12000 total anki’d words.
Yeah no way it’s accurate for me, my vocabulary is all over the place. Due to how I largely learn things which is highly irregular and I often have a lot of random high level words and a bunch of permutations of words in hiragana and katakana. It’s mostly because I’m chatting online all the time in Discords, comment sections, streams, blogs, pixiv, 2ch, reading/writing comments all the time and looking at blogs which people just irregularly use stuff constantly. So it’s vastly over estimating my abilities.
I got 34100 which is WAY more that I think I have. I think being french and fluent english makes all katakana words transparent and boosted my numbers quite a bit.
I got 11400 which I think is pretty accurate because I’m like 1/3 fluent so far…
The bad news is I only got 100, which even my Anki is larger than that (currently 460+, and yes I study it daily for months), and that’s not including Rocket Japanese Course 1 or other studying resources.
Should’ve been about 1000, but the good news is there’s a lot of new words for me to add to my Anki deck.
Very strange. I have 1900 Anki cards, but this test gave me 11700 words. There were some words like 同業 which I didn’t know but I concluded them on the fly. Or some Katakana words I technically didn’t know before, but I understood them after reading them.
Thanks for sharing this cool test!
I got 3500 and it humbled me real quick haha.
So many kanji words I did not know