How many German words should one know to read fluently German newspapers?

[Eugene111]

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...

[Hardufyr]

Native-language vocabulary size "Native speakers' vocabularies vary widely within a language, and are especially dependent on the level of the speaker's education. A 1995 study shows that junior-high students would be able to recognize the meanings of about 10,000–12,000 words"

A junior high student can read a newspaper, so 15560 words should be plenty to be able to read a newspaper and understand many of the words you don't know simply from the context.

How many words do you read on average to get to 20-30 words you don't understand? And do you have a rudimentary understanding of the 20-30 words simply by context, or are most pretty cryptic?

[Eugene111]

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. 

[Hardufyr]

You have a rich vocabulary with over 15000 words, and many teenagers, born and raised in Germany, wouldn't understand all the words in a difficult newspaper article, so if you enjoy reading Der Spiegel, and can read at a fairly high speed, you can by all means call that fluency.

If you want to get an idea of how what the benefits of learning another thousand words would be, you can do this.

- Get a frequency word list for German. Add up the number of times the 15000 most common words are used, and divide by the total number of times every single word in the dictionary is used.

Do the same with the 16000 most common words.

This is by no means exact, of many reasons. What it can do though, is to give a vague idea of the benefits of learning another thousand words.

If you want to push your boundaries, you could read a book with a complex and rich language that you've already read in your mother tongue. The percentage of words you'll understand by context is very high, and the vocabulary will grow pretty fast.

[Eugene111]

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.

[Hardufyr]

Hmm, what's your reading speed in German, when reading articles in Der Speigel at a comfortable pace?

Although you speak English well, the distance between Russian/Ukrainian and German on the Indo-European language tree might play an important role.

I had French in junior high instead of German, but with an blink of eye I'll know that abschaum is scum, because it's called avskum in Norwegian, making contextual clues very easy to pick up.

[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.

[Hardufyr]

Interesting! What's your reading speed in your mother tongue, reading an article of the same kind?

[Eugene111]

Indeed interesting! I actually never knew my reading speed in any language!

I finished reading 3 sample articles in Ukrainian/Russian. In the 3 cases my reading speed varied: 120, 155, and 161 words per minute. Clearly, much better than 40 words per minute in German...

[Hardufyr]

In order to acquire new words faster, I would highly recommend downloading a speed reading app to your tablet or phone. It's pretty common to read 150-300 wpm, but after using a speed reading app, you can double that.

I read prose at 400 wpm, English prose a little faster than 300 wpm. That's prose with a moderate LIX score (not Shakespeare). http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/LIX

When I use the speed reading app, I read at 1500 wpm, but that's only for practise. If admiring the landscape and appreciating the beauty of language is alike, than reading at 1500 wpm is like appreciating the scenery from a rally car.

The purpose of reading at extreme speed is only practise, to go 'speed blind'. You should read at approximately 3x your target speed. My target is 500 wpm. It's very uncommon to read prose faster than that, at a comfortable pace. Comprehension begins to plummet when the speed goes higher than 500 wpm.

ReadingTrainer (an app) has a PowerReader mode, and there you can adjust the speed, and paste in the text you'd like to lread. If you google speed reading, you can also find websites that lets you paste in text.

If you paste your Excel sheet into an flashcard app, I guess speed typing would also be very valuable. Going from 30 to 60 to 90 wpm doesn't require that much practice. Let say that it takes 30 minutes to revise 100 flashcards, that can be then done in 10 minutes.

Writing faster than 100 wpm requires a lot of training, but doubling the speed from thirty to sixty wpm is done pretty fast.

[Eugene111]

Thanks a lot for the tips!!!

After providing my wpm speed numbers in Ukrainian/Russian, I looked up the average reading speed on Wikipedia: 250 to 300 words per minute. Turns out I'm a slow reader. But I'm comfortable with the pace.

As for revising the words: That's a separate long conversation. In a nutshell, I revise two times a day, for 3 days, 150 words at a time from the earlier batch of 500 words, plus, 7 times a day 20-30 words that I daily write out. My big wish is to audio-record all the 15600 words and listen to them (daily, daily, daily), or better yet, find an English-speaking German who'd record the German words and their English translations.

[Hardufyr]

You can paste your Excel vocabulary into Quizlet (it's free), and they also have German and English audio, and Russian also for that matter. If you click play, it will begin to read aloud what's in column a and column b (first and second side of the flashcard).

When you are in learning mode, you can also turn on audio, so that the words you revise are read aloud to you.

When you add a new word to the deck, you can also choose to auto define the word in Russian, so that you don't have to look up the definition, and the software will read aloud both the German term and the Russian definition.

You choose to either make it display only the term, and then you'll write the definition, or only the definition, and then you'll write the term. You can also make it display both the term and definition when looking over the list. Spelling exercise is also an option. If you download the app to your mobile phone, and use a headset, you can revise, with audio, on the subway or train.

I'd say the method that makes words stick best, is memorization techniques (the type of technique where you memorize pi with a thousand digits in a couple of days), but the method that is quickest and best for building a large vocabulary, is flashcards, like you make in Quizlet. Combining the two techniques is very effective if there is a word you constantly miss.

[Eugene111]

Hardufyr, thanks for the tips!!! I've just registered for Quizlet. Will give it a try in a while...

[Hardufyr]

Hey, no problem. Would you mind giving input on the question I raised in the thread I created?

[Eugene111]

BTW, yesterday I inadvertently came across a reference to a research that claimed that in order to (more or less) permanently embed a foreign word into one's long-term memory, it should be repeated no less than 30 times!!! From my experience in studying German words, I can't help but agree. In this light, having one's own personally-compiled list of foreign words comes in very handy: Once I come across an unknown word, I first look it up, through Excel Search Function, in my personally-compiled dictionary. If it's there--great! I then just got an inch closer to the 30-repetition mark. Otherwise, I go to dict.cc or the like.

[Eugene111]

Looks like an unscrupulous company representative is trying to sell its services...

[Eugene111]

Anyway, I think it's not appropriate to bombard about every forum thread from the first page with the same message!

[Eugene111]

No spammer will ever admit he/she is promoting a useless product/service.

I find your spamming harassing; and, I think, quite a few other people feel similar. And such people will hardly use the services of a company that touts its services in such an obtrusive manner. In other words, no referral money...

[jr123]

Man that cut deep. Especially the reporting. To be honest tho I wasted a lot of time with the wrong resources so if I could get the word out on top of make some $ of my own that'd be great. And maybe not yours so much, but all the threads I posted on were about tips, resources and tools for language learning. Private tutoring from a native speaker for an avg $10/hr is really a no brainer. So lighten up, its all in the spirit of learning

[Hardufyr]

BTW, yesterday I inadvertently came across a reference to a research that claimed that in order to (more or less) permanently embed a foreign word into one's long-term memory, it should be repeated no less than 30 times!!! From my experience in studying German words, I can't help but agree. In this light, having one's own personally-compiled list of foreign words comes in very handy: Once I come across an unknown word, I first look it up, through Excel Search Function, in my personally-compiled dictionary. If it's there--great! I then just got an inch closer to the 30-repetition mark. Otherwise, I go to dict.cc or the like.

About the repetition thirty times, have you looked at the forgetting curve.

The Leitner repetition system is in large part based on this curve.

[Eugene111]

That's very interesting! Thanks!

Yet, the above graph is not necessarily in contradiction with the claim that a word should be repeated about 30 times in order to be remembered. 30 times during a day might not be that productive. It would be much more useful to repeat a word 30 times over a month, or 6 months.

As for me, I repeat a word about 9 times on the day I learn it and the next day (thus, 9 times during 2 days). Then, in about 10 days or so (when I write out a new batch of about 500 words), I repeat it about 7 times over 4 days. And then--almost good-bye the word! I look it up in my self-made dictionary only if I don't remember the word when seeing it in a German newspaper. The plan is to have a major review of all words once I reach 20000 words milestone.

[lushlala]

I've never known my reading speed in any given language, although I do notice on my Kindle that it actually tells me. I just don't pay any attention to it LOL

You sound to me like you're near fluent anyway, if not fluent; if you can even consider reading a whole newspaper in German. I wouldn't have a clue how many words you'd need to read the paper. You must have made really strides here, especially for a language I consider very hard to learn LOL Kudos to you

[Eugene111]

Hi, Lushlala!

Thanks for your comments! I actually hadn't known my reading speed either until another forum participant (Hardufyr) asked me about it, at which point I calculated the speed. And it turned out I'm a slow reader, as you could have noticed in the earlier comments.

I began to read SPIEGEL in February 2014 only because of misleading information I found on the Web about the number of words one needs to know to be fluent in German. Back then, from the info I could garner, I thought 6000 words would more than suffice and that by August 2014 I would be pretty good at German. But the reality turned out to be very different. Since my first posts on the forum about a month ago (by then I had already been reading SPIEGEL for 13 months) my self-compiled German-English dictionary has grown to 16350 words, but I still keep on writing out 20-30 new words per day.

My current estimate is that I'd need to learn 25000 German words to feel comfortable with German. By "feel comfortable" I mean a level tantamount to Goethe-Institut's C2 level (highest level). Here's what is said about C2 level of fluency (from Goethe-Institut's website):

"Can effortlessly understand practically everything which he/she reads or hears. Can summarize information from various written and spoken sources, logically recounting the reasons and explanations. Can express him/herself spontaneously with high fluency and precision and also make finer nuances of meaning clear in more complex topics."

[lushlala]

Hi, Lushlala!

Thanks for your comments! I actually hadn't known my reading speed either until another forum participant (Hardufyr) asked me about it, at which point I calculated the speed. And it turned out I'm a slow reader, as you could have noticed in the earlier comments.

I began to read SPIEGEL in February 2014 only because of misleading information I found on the Web about the number of words one needs to know to be fluent in German. Back then, from the info I could garner, I thought 6000 words would more than suffice and that by August 2014 I would be pretty good at German. But the reality turned out to be very different. Since my first posts on the forum about a month ago (by then I had already been reading SPIEGEL for 13 months) my self-compiled German-English dictionary has grown to 16350 words, but I still keep on writing out 20-30 new words per day.

My current estimate is that I'd need to learn 25000 German words to feel comfortable with German. By "feel comfortable" I mean a level tantamount to Goethe-Institut's C2 level (highest level). Here's what is said about C2 level of fluency (from Goethe-Institut's website):

"Can effortlessly understand practically everything which he/she reads or hears. Can summarize information from various written and spoken sources, logically recounting the reasons and explanations. Can express him/herself spontaneously with high fluency and precision and also make finer nuances of meaning clear in more complex topics."

Wow, that's fantastic stuff, Eugene111 I'm actually feeling inadequate right now LOL. I mean, I don't claim to be fluent in anything but having just read about your "journey", i realise I need to up my game in my chosen languages. You spur me on, thanks for that. -and wish you the best of luck in achieving all you set out to achieve

[Eugene111]

Lushlala, I noticed in your other postings on this forum that you also speak French. How long did it take you to learn French? Do you read French newspapers? If so, do you have to use the dictionary--if so, how often?