Quote:
Originally Posted by Nyororin
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.
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Yeah, I think this is the kind of mindset of early JSLs. You strive to have a credential showing that you have some skill. By the time you get to an advanced level, you realize you don't have the skill you want, you know you have a good amount of skill, and you know a test won't help you in any way other than to show the Powers that Be (employer, university admissions) that you have the skill. For this reason and only this reason JLPT N1 is useful.
I used to be the same way. I think it's far more healthy to just cram kanji and vocab and do as much reading as possible. Translation is helpful, too, because it forces you to notice which words you don't know.
Like I said, I'm translating a short story for a competition. I can understand what's happening fairly easily, but there are so many words I am able to just gloss over because of context that I don't actually understand. A good example is the sentence 東京からこの年の四月に疎開してきた友人で、私は、こ の友人の細君と男女ふたりの子を村であずかっていた。
Now, the two words there I didn't know were 疎開 and 細君. 疎開 I recognized as dealing with a growing distance and an opening. That was enough to grasp the general meaning of the sentence and maintain a semblance of reading fluency. But when pressed for what it meant, I had to look it up (it means, with する, "to evacuate").
細君, on the other hand, I just ignored. I knew it was some sort of family member. I guess you can guess "spouse" judging by the fact that the people involved are a friend, his/her two kids, and someone else. Looking it up, I found it meant "wife" (and is used to refer to
another's wife) (１他人に対して、自分の妻をいう語;２転じて、他人の� ��をいう語).