I wanted to see how many words the average Japanese person knows vs the average American with English. The average American knows about 12,000-20,000 word families in English (invent, invention, reinvent, inventor would all be considered one word family). In Japan though there is rarely a class of word families but if you only count root words like invent in the English example the average Japanese Elementary school student knows 5,000 - 20,000 words with Junior high reaching 20,000 - 40,000 and High Schoolers knowing on average 40,000 - 45,000 words. This again increases to 45,000 - 50,000 when talking about somebody who has a college degree. That is when I decided to see how many words the average doctorate in America knew and even with all of those specialized words for their field doctors even only know around 30,000 English words on average. Another way to look at how different Japanese and English are is by looking at Shakespeare's vocabulary. It is estimated to have been around 66,000 words with only 30,000 of them being in his working vocabulary. I started to wonder why Japanese had so many more words than English and researched some more. The main reason is that they have many words for describing singular concepts like the word "I" in English. Also the main culprit for this inflation of vocabulary comes from 擬音 or words that describe sounds (onomatopoeia.) At this point I started to feel that I will never be able to understand Japanese and that is when I found that only 10,000 words are used for 80-90% of conversations in Japan. On a side note I found that the average Japanese person knows 3000 English words if they are given context. I hope you find this info as interesting as I did.
I agree with you. the fact of japanese use onomatopea as word and not as sound maybe make a great difference between one languege that comes from latim and the japanese. First of all you need to know 800 kanji for begin a read a newspaper, and the construction of expression with the verb in the end, and the preocupation with the people that you talk, there are 8 forms to say "I", but is a amazing language...
Congratulation for your text
Japanese has many more words for the same thing than English does, even before taking into effect keigo (the like of which is not really used in English, or not to the same extent).
despite the numbers, it's been feeling cumbersome since the beginning! however, throughout the years i have managed to reconcile the study of kanji and use it as a tool for vocabulary learning as well...
Getting over the fear of kanji is the best step you can take. For me, it lead to a love for kanji, which makes almost every aspect (go stuff yourself, grammar) of learning Japanese easier. :P
