[troydj]

Thank you for sharing your methodology.

A pointer to the study that you're probably thinking of is research done by Paul Nation and Robert Waring (vocabulary researchers). They cite their own 1985 study and a 1989 study with the following quote: "With a vocabulary size of 2,000 words, a learner knows 80% of the words in a text which means that 1 word in every 5 (approximately 2 words in every line) are unknown. Research by Liu Na and Nation (1985) has shown that this ratio of unknown to known words is not sufficient to allow reasonably successful guessing of the meaning of the unknown words. At least 95% coverage is needed for that. Research by Laufer (1989) suggests that 95% coverage is sufficient to allow reasonable comprehension of a text. A larger vocabulary size is clearly better." [1]

1. http://www.fltr.ucl.ac.be/fltr/germ/etan/bibs/vocab/cup.html

[mikekchar]

Interesting. I haven't actually seen that one. I was actually thinking about a paper from McGill university which I think it was discussing whether or not having annotations which translate certain words (the name of which escapes me at the moment) when free reading is helpful. If you can think of the name for those annotations (the ones that you can often find in English graded readers), then you can probably find the paper (search for that, "free reading" and "McGill").

However, I have no doubt that the paper I was reading, references this one. Great find. Thanks!

[groovy2shoes]

> annotations which translate certain words (the name of which escapes me at the moment)

Perhaps you're thinking of glosses? I'm not familiar with graded readers, but I am rather familiar with mediæval manuscripts, wherein it's common to see copies of Latin works with little annotations near certain (sometimes all) words. When the gloss has been added above (or below) the word(s) they annotate, they're said to be interlinear, but marginal glosses aren't unheard of.

The glosses were sometimes written by the same scribe that made the copy, but often they appear to have been added later, perhaps by the owner of the book—sometimes in a comically small hand so as to fit in narrow spaces :)

[mikekchar]

Yes. That's it. Thanks :-) Unfortunately I still can't find the paper. Oh well, the one provided above is quite good. Probably if one searched for papers that cite that one, it would uncover a lot of interesting new work.

[dwg]

I wonder how this applies to Chinese/Japanese? I can sometimes guess the meaning of words I don't know because I recognize the kanji. Sometimes even if I don't recognize the kanji, but recognize the radicals, I can still guess. I'm not advanced enough for this to happen often, but it does happen.

[mikekchar]

In Japanese, it is a useful strategy. Knowing the common meanings of all the jouyou kanji is very useful. My main problem when reading that way is that I often don't know all the readings. I still need to look up the word to find out how to pronounce it.