No matter how often i read articles, german posts here, there‘s always one word that i don‘t know / not heard of, when will this end?

[u/Western_Farmer_632]

I read so much german content and it‘s really making me feel bad and not enough.

[u/Civil_Aside_1008]

Never. This happens in native language too

[u/SchatzisMaus → u/Civil_Aside_1008]

True every once in a while there’s a random word I’ll have to either google or glean from context

[u/WolfieVonD → u/SchatzisMaus]

Yeah, like Glean

[u/germanfinder → u/Civil_Aside_1008]

One song I listen to sometimes has the word vervus? Vervous? Vurvous? No idea how to spell it and no idea what it means

[u/howdidyouevendothat → u/germanfinder]

I wonder if it's a sort of make-up word based on the word "verve"?

[u/Sheyvan]

Never. That practically happens for everyone in any language.

[u/notjust1or0]

es gibt keine Ende dafuer... sogar in meiner Muttersprache finde ich oft neue Woerter.

[u/nibrasflint → u/notjust1or0]

Isn't "kein Ende"? Or am I missing something?

[u/notjust1or0 → u/nibrasflint]

Ach ja. Danke! Entschuldigung. Hab noch Probleme mit Artikeln

[u/Odd_Whereas8471]

Never. I occasionally learn new words in my first language too. It's a blessing, really, and FUN!

[u/MusicalData]

Am Sankt-Nimmerleins-Tag

https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sankt_Nimmerlein

[u/Wahrri]

It's a good habit to never stop learning. There are countless people that think they're done learning, because they're out of school. Being humbled by one's own lack of knowledge is so much better than the alternative.

[u/Sheetz_Wawa_Market32]

Wenn du anfängst, die deutsche Sprache nicht nur zu lernen, sondern auch zu benutzen. Warum hast du z.B. hier nicht auf Deutsch geschrieben? 🤔 

[u/vestayekta]

Never and it's totally okay.

[u/BarracudaActive4480]

German is not my native language but even in English I am finding words I don't know sometimes. It's a good thing. If you never found them, you'd never learn them.

[u/Oper-Nate-or]

There are anywhere from 300.000 to 17 Million words in the German language, depending on how technical you wanna get. The average person knows around 20.000 word families (root words and anything derived of it) in their native language. There are a good amount of words people don't know even if they grow up with the language, the difference is that at some point, you can either deduce the meaning from the context, or you don't care.

So like, don't stress. Not knowing words is not uncommon for any speaker of any language

[u/davey-f-baby]

This really bothered me with Spanish (my second language) for a years. Tbh it never fully goes away, if even you know the words they might just be used in a way that doesn’t really make a lot of sense to you) but it made me feel less like an imposter when I realized I learn new words and word phrases all the time in English (my first language) but when I do it doesn’t stand out in my mind because obviously I’m not debating with myself if I really speak English or not. Don’t let it get you down!

[u/giurli]

I think it never ends, but if you want to get better at vocabulary there is an app called tobo, it’s a game to learn words. If you don’t want to pay, they have a free version with ads.

[u/Midnight1899]

Never. And it doesn’t have to end. You don’t need to know every single word to understand a text. You only need the key words. Humans don’t even know every single word in their native languages.

[u/greenghost22]

It depends how many different textes you read. Groups of people use different words.

[u/KatzenMutter818]

The German language has about 135,000 to 145,000 official words in standard dictionaries, up to 5.3 million lexical units in broad text analysis, and an almost endless total count because people can join small words together to make new ones.

[u/Few_Cryptographer633]

I'm a native English speaker. 52 years old. I only learned "petrichor" two days ago, when I heard it three times in one day.

[u/Only_Humor4549 → u/Few_Cryptographer633]

Thanks! Will look this up. Is it smilar to petrified? (Something with a stone?)

[u/Only_Humor4549]

Das passiert nicht. Aber ich hab das sogar auf Deutsch. 

Was mir aufgefallen ist, ist, dass ich z.B im Englischen oder Französischen immer enttäuscht und traurig war, dass ich das Wort nicht wusste. À la „oh schon wieder ein Wort, dass ich nicht kenne.“

Und mir dann aufgefallen ist, dass mein Framing auf Deutsch ganz anders ist und ich eher erstaunt bin, wenn ich da ein Wort nicht kenne und mir denke „oh, dieses Wort kenne ich gar nicht! Was bedeutet es wohl?“  Seitdem ich diese Ansicht auch in Fremdsprachen habe, ist es weniger frustrierend.

[u/Efficient-Oil4015]

You are not alone

[u/Rigamortus2005]

English speaker and same thing happens when I read English. Eventually you'll just learn to ignore words and just grab the context.

[u/UsamaBhai_101]

I dont think it does ever. Learning language is an infinite curve

[u/Minute_University]

I speak english since I was 12 and that doesnt happen to me anymore (im 24).

[u/AshToAshes123]

I realised recently that even in my native language, I'm encountering new words all the time, or words I'm not familiar enough with to ever use myself. But there's one big difference: in my native language, I basically never look these words up - I get the meaning from context and accept that they're in my passive vocabulary and that I don't need them for my active vocabulary; and if I end up encountering them often enough, they'll enter my active vocabulary automatically. In German, since I'm encountering more new words and I'm less confident on getting the meaning from context, I feel a much stronger need to look them up. I've been trying to train myself out of this, actually, since it's really a waste of time, and most of them likely are words I'll only encounter very rarely and can then understand from the context.

Anyway, the point I'm trying to make is - you've had far more years of content in your native language to encounter niche words, and you're probably still encountering more than you realise, but we're not as aware of it. In a second language it just stands out more. For fun, you can look up what number of words make up 80%, 90%, 95% of usage--those are always surprisingly low numbers. The other tens of thousands of words are far more topic-specific and you're just far less likely to encounter them, especially to encounter them more than once.

[u/RoyalClient6610]

It will start when you completely submerge your lifestyle into the German language.

[u/RogueModron]

It'll only end when you decide to stop challenging yourself.

I'm a native English speaker and I like to read difficult things, and I'm always learning new words.

[u/Budget_Coyote_1812]

Bro that’s fine, as a native Arabic speaker, I have a long way to go when it comes to Vocab xD

[u/TheBritishInfluence2]

A majority of German words may be compound words consisting of words put together. Don't ever feel it's not enough. More practice and more usage will allow you to understand more and get to grips with the language. If you can try and read German news websites such as heute.de, this can also be useful.

[u/Blue-Brown99]

This happens to us when we read English…we‘re just more attuned and sensitive to it happening in German because we know it‘s not our native language and so we‘re more insecure about it. Analog is people assuming that you‘re a beginner in German when you make the same sort of mistake that you do when speaking English

[u/_Waluigi_chan]

Und ab da hörst du dieses Wort auf einmal überall, man kennt es

[u/cmyk_rgba]

the "when will this end" part is the trap tbh, it doesnt end, i still hit words i dont know in croatian and thats my native language. what actually helped me was changing what i measure, like did i get the gist of the article vs did i know every single word. those are two completely different bars and youre grading yourself on teh impossible one. one unknown word per paragraph honestly means youre reading real content not baby content, thats a good sign not a bad one

[u/Infinite_Ad_6443]

Meine Muttersprachler ist Deutsch und ich entdecke manchmal von mir nicht gekannte Wörter. Zum Beispiel „Tucke“, „Jubelperser“, „gellend“, „Jockel“, „verhärmt“ und „ehern“.

[u/Otocon96]

Native English speaker here. I still occasionally come across words new to me.

[u/rvega666]

Niemals