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How many words do we actually need? | ||
Tags: Number of words | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5423 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes  Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 17 of 115 24 January 2013 at 11:14pm | IP Logged | ||
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Lots of good ideas; keep them coming. I do think that it should be clear that nobody is saying that using 1000 words is better than using 2000 or that there is an optimal size. In that sense, I strongly disagree with the idea that you need a minimum of 2000 to express oneself well.
The point of the whole challenge, it seems to me, is really how well can one learn to express oneself with a given number of words. Now, a thousand words in English, French and Spanish respectively seem like quite a bit to me. I tend to think that many native speakers probably don't use many more. Many people think that 1000 words means impoverished speech. It doesn't have to be. You do have to be creative and find ways of making do with what you have. We know that English is rich in phrasal verbs, so we can take a bunch of prepositions and combine them with very common verbs like come, take, give, talk, go and the infamous get to form many combinations. Just think of how "up" can work with many verbs. I find the idea intriguing. I may be able to understand a lot more words passively but I limit my active vocabulary to the 1000 most frequent period. I have 1000 flashcards and that's what I'll work with. This will require some serious work of course because you have to develop good coping mechanisms. But think of the possibilities. Instead of trying to learn to use 10000 words in 5 languages, you could concentrate on 1000 in each. Throw in some good pronunciation and most people wouldn't be able to tell that your vocabulary is that limited. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6590 days ago 9753 posts - 15779 votes 4 sounds Speaks: Russian*, English, FinnishC1, Latin, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Danish, Romanian, Polish, Belarusian, Ukrainian, Croatian, Slovenian, Catalan, Czech, Galician, Dutch, Swedish | Message 18 of 115 25 January 2013 at 1:15am | IP Logged | ||
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Do you actually know any learner that would prefer to learn 10 phrasal verbs to 10 "normal" verbs?
I don't think it's fair to consider phrasal verbs part of the core 1000 word vocab. they're far less predictable than affixes - and even affixes already make the word count as new unless we're talking of word families (or very basic derivations like -ly, -less, un-). Edited by Serpent on 25 January 2013 at 1:35am 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| aloysius Triglot Winner TAC 2010 & 2012 Senior Member SwedenRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6233 days ago 226 posts - 291 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English, German Studies: French, Greek, Italian, Russian | Message 19 of 115 25 January 2013 at 2:00am | IP Logged | ||
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I definitely agree with Serpent. Most of the time phrasal verbs take on (sic) a meaning totally unrelated to their
constituents and count among the most tricky part to command for someone learning English as a foreign language. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6590 days ago 9753 posts - 15779 votes 4 sounds Speaks: Russian*, English, FinnishC1, Latin, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Danish, Romanian, Polish, Belarusian, Ukrainian, Croatian, Slovenian, Catalan, Czech, Galician, Dutch, Swedish | Message 20 of 115 25 January 2013 at 2:23am | IP Logged | ||
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Also, I'd say phrasal verbs are one of the things that natives simply forget about when they try to simplify their speech.
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| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5423 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 21 of 115 25 January 2013 at 5:42am | IP Logged | ||
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Nearly all frequency lists - I don't know of any exceptions - count tokens, i.e. groups of letters separated by spaces and then lemmatize them into word families. Phrasal verbs, idioms, collocations and proverbs are not counted as separate words. Meaning is irrelevant for counting purposes. "get out" is two words not one word. "own up to it" is four words not one word.
All this is precisely why a set of 1000 words or tokens is so much richer than it would seem. These words can be recombined into many complex units. That's the whole point. Take a language like French that does not have phrasal verbs. Where English would use forms like "get by", "get along", "get in", "get out", "get over", French would have totally distinct verbs. We would expect French to tend to use more different verb forms than English which can derive verbs by adding prepositions. But one minute. French makes extensive use of the pronominal verb form that is often improperly called the reflexive form in English. These are forms like "se laver", "se coucher", "se lever", etc. In reality, the pronominal verb form in French has four distinct classes of usage that I won't go into here. What is important here to understand is that French can create complex verb meanings by use of the pronominal form. "demander" and "se demander" can have two very different meanings. For speakers of English, mastering the French pronominal verb system is difficult for the same reason that mastering the phrasal verb system in English is difficult for speakers of French (or other languages). It's hard to figure out how the system works. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| beano Diglot Senior Member United KingdomRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4615 days ago 1049 posts - 2152 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Russian, Serbian, Hungarian | Message 22 of 115 25 January 2013 at 8:44am | IP Logged | ||
And it is also possible for a phrasal verb itself to have two totally different meanings. For example, Put down - to criticise someone, to humanely destroy an animal Put up - to erect soething, to offer someone accomodation 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| aloysius Triglot Winner TAC 2010 & 2012 Senior Member SwedenRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6233 days ago 226 posts - 291 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English, German Studies: French, Greek, Italian, Russian | Message 23 of 115 25 January 2013 at 9:06am | IP Logged | ||
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Meaning must come into it sooner or later. What does knowing 1000 words mean? In a frequency dictionary a choice
must be made regarding meaning and construction for each entry. In my English-Swedish dictionary "get" takes up 6 1/2 columns (more than two pages) of small print and knowing every nuance would certainly get you very far indeed. But I've never seen a frequency dictionary list that much information. I have Langensheidt's Basic German Vocabulary ("the 4000 most frequently used words") which list the meaning of "teilnehmen (an)" as "take part in" or "participate in" but I don't have access to Basic English Vocabulary so I don't know how phrasal verbs are treated there. Compounds are also treated differently in German and English. For instance "edel", "Stein" and "Edelstein" are three words in German but "precious", "stone" and "precious stone" are two in English with regard to "groups of letters separated by spaces". Edited by aloysius on 25 January 2013 at 9:09am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| renaissancemedi Bilingual Triglot Senior Member Greece Joined 4351 days ago 941 posts - 1309 votes Speaks: Greek*, Ancient Greek*, EnglishC2 Studies: French, Russian, Turkish, Modern Hebrew | Message 24 of 115 25 January 2013 at 11:37am | IP Logged | ||
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Two books with lists in french
one two From this site Ok, these are old books, but I love the old french mood you get from them. Apparently these are not new ideas, starting with a basic vocabulary, etc. I think lists and specific vocabularies are very useful. You can focus on the themes you might use most, and build as you go. Plus you could remember words within a context, which helps memory even more. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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