[Nyororin]

Originally Posted by KyleGoetz

You can estimate your vocab size here: Estimating Japanese Vocabulary Size - Japan Forum There are three links to tests. They're put out by a Japanese university, IIRC, so they are not some weirdo Internet crap.

Those were actually kind of neat.

I`ve never given much thought to or tried to calculate the number of words I know. I passed the JLPT 1, but not due to any specific effort or study in it`s direction. I think the last time I tried to figure out how much Japanese I actually knew was back when I was sub-50 kanji type level.

Depending on the test, they drop me between 64500 on the high end and 38400 on the low end. I`d guess I`m probably in the middle. I think the top one was pushed up by my luck at knowing the medical and historical terms in that one.

I was kind of surprised to see the placement of some of the words, as they seemed more common than those listed earlier... For example - I didn`t know some of the "simpler" words like 針供養 (Do people still use this word regularly?) but you see 身体装検器 pretty regularly... (maybe this is just if you travel by air)

It was kind of a neat set of tests though.
Reading will really push your vocabulary up.