Curve for words known and percentage known?

[speedyturtle345]

What's the curve for words known and percentage known? For example, I know 100 of the most common words can give you 50% understanding, 1000 words gives you 70% understanding, and 10000 words gives you 92% understanding. What's the curve that describes this progression?

[宇崎ちゃん]

  On 10/1/2020 at 10:38 PM, speedyturtle345 said:

What's the curve for words known and percentage known? For example, I know 100 of the most common words can give you 50% understanding, 1000 words gives you 70% understanding, and 10000 words gives you 92% understanding.

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For which language?
Not all languages have the same amount of words.

For example, you can have 1 Japanese word for which you need at least a 6 word sentence to translate to English and vice versa.
You can have 1 Japanese word to describe 20 completely distinct concepts in English and vice versa.
In some languages you need to make clear using subjects and in some languages it's so clear that you should drop them.
And so on.

  On 10/1/2020 at 10:38 PM, speedyturtle345 said:

What's the curve that describes this progression?

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Honestly, it's the first time I hear about this.
Maybe because I just don't bother counting the amount of words I know, because chances are high you know way more than you think.
For example:
"The only 2 Japanese words I know are 'konnichiwa' and 'sayonara'".
"But you know the words 'tsunami', 'sushi', 'karaoke', 'anime', 'manga', etc. too right"?
"Oh yeah"!!
Even more so for the other way around.

Maybe you mean something like a 80:20 rule, but that's not really a means of measuring progression, it's rather to make you realise that you don't need to learn a lot in order to know a lot.