More interesting John stats
I was wondering what would happen to our vocabulary as we read through John’s Gospel.
The following table shows the percentage of unknown lemmas one can expect to encounter in a given chapter after reading all preceding chapters. So after reading chapters 1-5, we can expect that 28.7% of the lemmas in chapter 6 will be unknown.
| Chapter | % |
|---|---|
| 1 | 100 |
| 2 | 56.9 |
| 3 | 37.4 |
| 4 | 43.5 |
| 5 | 27.5 |
| 6 | 28.7 |
| 7 | 21.0 |
| 8 | 11.5 |
| 9 | 17.7 |
| 10 | 19.8 |
| 11 | 24.7 |
| 12 | 16.1 |
| 13 | 17.1 |
| 14 | 6.9 |
| 15 | 8.4 |
| 16 | 8.8 |
| 17 | 2.0 |
| 18 | 24.5 |
| 19 | 27.1 |
| 20 | 11.6 |
| 21 | 15.0 |
John displays drop in unknown items after chapter 4 to around 20-25% per chapter. Keep in mind these numbers include names and hapaxlegomena.
To me this shows that reading through John as a way to teach students Koine Greek is a decent strategy. They will need much more support in the early chapters, but should begin to feel some success in chapters 8-9 and again in 14-17.
Of course this is based on lemmata. What about forms?
The following table shows the number of unknown forms encountered in a given chapter after reading app the preceding chapters. Again it tapers off as did the numbers for the lemmata, but the percentage of unknown items is 20-35% and drops below 40% after chapter 6 rather than chapter 4.
| Chapter | % |
|---|---|
| 2 | 68.9 |
| 3 | 53.0 |
| 4 | 58.4 |
| 5 | 47.9 |
| 6 | 42.3 |
| 7 | 35.9 |
| 8 | 29.2 |
| 9 | 31.7 |
| 10 | 35.4 |
| 11 | 38.2 |
| 12 | 32.8 |
| 13 | 30.3 |
| 14 | 22.3 |
| 15 | 25.2 |
| 16 | 20.4 |
| 17 | 24.7 |
| 18 | 32.2 |
| 19 | 36.7 |
| 20 | 24.5 |
| 21 | 28.0 |