Eugene111

My comfortable reading speed of Spiegel articles is about 40 words per minute. Writing out just one word, I finished reading the below-mentioned article of 522 words in 13 minutes. (calculation based on today’s article in Der Spiegel “Entschädigung für Naziverbrechen: Tsipras wirft Deutschland Trickserei in Reparationsfrage vor” (http://www.spiegel.de/politik/ausland/griechenland-tsipras-macht-reparationen-wieder-zum-thema-a-1022876.html)). In English, the speed is about 118 words per minute. But usually I tend to choose tougher articles. And there’re plenty of these in Der Spiegel. When my vocabulary reached 10400 German words (from what I could read in the Internet at the time, that number of words should have been sufficient for most purposes), I decided to check how well my German reading comprehension fares against sample texts in Goethe-Zertifikat C2. The experience was eye-opening and convinced me 10400 German words are very far from being sufficient (text “Ich bin Lehrerin” on page 4 (http://www.goethe.de/lrn/pro/c2-neu/C2_Modellsatz.pdf)). Some articles in Der Spiegel are at least as difficult as “Ich bin Lehrerin”. Now, with 15590 words I still feel I need to know more words. Of course, for some people that may be more than enough. But, in my opinion, it’s not enough to read German press fluently. Speaking Ukrainian/Russian does help in guesstimating some German words, albeit probably not as much as Norwegian, as you suggest.

Well, with a vocabulary of 15000+ German words, I don't feel fluent in reading German newspapers. Especially considering that 20-30 new words do pop up every day, of which only about half can be reasonably guessed. My mother tongues are Ukrainian/Russian. Yet, I'm pretty fluent in English. Over the past 6 months I was also writing out unfamiliar English words from CNN, The Telegraph and other English-language newspapers. So far the tally stands at about 250 new words. I would call this fluency--in most cases it's like reading in my mother tongues. But with a vocabulary of 15000+ German words, I feel quite a bit of work still needs to be done.

I have almost finished reading (without the last paragraph) a Spiegel article "Bürgermeister-Rücktritt wegen NPD-Demo: Er ist nicht allein" (http://www.spiegel.de/politik/deutschland/npd-und-buergermeister-rechtsextreme-bedraengten-diese-politiker-a-1022734.html). From the article I wrote out 16 new words (see attachment screenshots for the words). About half of them I could have guessed from the context. However, at this stage i tend to write out ALL words that are yet not in my Excel dictionary. Kind of along the lines of "The more you sweat in training, the less you bleed in war". The article (without the last paragraph), as it turns out, contains 926 words. But, of course, not every article of the same length produces 16 new words. Some may produce none. Such are fast to read and I usually jump on to something more sophisticated. I would rate this particular article as rather difficult. So, it's hard to correlate the length of an article with the number of unfamiliar words; what I know is that during the 4+ hours that I dedicate to reading in German I get 20 to 30 new words on average.

15560 words are not enough!! I can tell with confidence, because that's the number of german words I've written out over the past 13 months. I read in German 4+ hours daily. On average, I write out between 20 and 30 new words daily. Most of them come from German Spiegel. German version of Euronews as a rule produces no new words. One page of my German military humor book may produce 5-10 new words (but there may also be none). I have read somewhere that knowing 20000 foreign words should allow one to enjoy a piece of literature in the foreign language. I'm eager to reach the milestone, but now I have some suspicions about the validity of the above claim. Hopefully, I'll find out in a while...