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Feeling overwhelmed by vocab! | ||
Tags: Vocabulary learning | French | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Advice Center |  | |
| chloem14 Newbie United Kingdom Joined 5679 days ago 21 posts - 23 votes Speaks: English* Studies: French, Latin | Message 1 of 10 07 February 2015 at 4:09am | IP Logged | ||
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Having a bit of a crisis of confidence, or perhaps just enthusiasm - I'd appreciate
any encouragement or advice that anyone has to offer! I've been learning French since 11, slowly in school for the first 6 years, then on and off self-studying for the last 5 with some long gaps. Now 21, I'm also a medical student, and have self-taught Latin, German and Japanese to varying degrees, so I'm reasonably well versed in autodidactic approaches to languages whilst being pretty busy. French being my longest-standing and most advanced language, I'm bumping into a new problem - the seemingly never-ending array of vocabulary in front of me! To give you an idea of my level, I don't know numbers or CEFR but I ran a few experiments over some different texts recently and found, being pretty strict defining "known": - Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince - >99% known words, missing a word every two pages and many of these I could guess. - Ubik by Philip K Dick - 99%, word or two a page - Rien ne s'oppose a la nuit, Daphne de Vigan - 98% - La femme rompue, Simone de Beauvoir - 97%, largely descriptive vocab missing that didn't interfere with understanding. I don't know what this translates to numbers-wise, but I have no idea how to approach the amount of vocab I need to bring up that last few %. French is probably the only language I'd like to learn to C2 passively, and there's no urgency. In terms of method, I worry with extensive reading that these words are too rare for me to be seeing often enough to "pick up". Anki I find beyond boring and can only bear for brute forcing where it's really necessary, and wordlists I enjoy, but worry that my retention rate is too low and reviewing too unstructured. I also have no idea *how much* I'm going to need to add - 10,000 words, 20,000?!? The other area that this is having an impact is listening - those comprehension rates do not apply *at all* to my understanding of spoken French. I seem to be fine in person; I tutored French children for their CNED programmes, attend regular talks and lectures in french at about 95%, and I'm okay with most podcasts for the general sense with some missed phrases. TV and movies however are a mess, and seem to be mostly because of this vocab issue - where I know the words, I understand regardless of accent or speed, but often I just don't. I watched a dubbed episode of the West Wing and got about 65% - an episode of Engrenages and I'm lucky to get 40%. I'm not sure why there's such a disparity, as I have had a reasonable amount of exposure to aural sources over the years. Given that sutitles and transcripts are so poor in the francosphere, I'm not really sure where to mine this colloquial spoken vocab. Apologies for length, I'm just feeling very daunted by the scale of the task - and none of my real life friends/family seem to appreciate the gravity of the dilemma! :P 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| tarvos Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member China likeapolyglot.wordpr Joined 4696 days ago 5310 posts - 9399 votes  Speaks: Dutch*, English, Swedish, French, Russian, German, Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Afrikaans Studies: Greek, Modern Hebrew, Spanish, Portuguese, Czech, Korean, Esperanto, Finnish | Message 2 of 10 07 February 2015 at 4:52am | IP Logged | ||
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This happens to everyone. The trick is to get into a flow and do more of it.
As for where to mine colloquial vocabulary - go out with French people a lot and that type of problem will solve itself soon enough :) 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| tastyonions Triglot Senior Member United States goo.gl/UIdChYRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4654 days ago 1044 posts - 1823 votes Speaks: English*, French, Spanish Studies: Italian | Message 3 of 10 07 February 2015 at 8:06am | IP Logged | ||
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The way people talk on well-structured radio shows or while lecturing is pretty different than the way they talk in ordinary life, in French as in any other language. To bridge the gap you can try favoring radio shows with larger casts (which tend to be more casual and spontaneous) and also checking out French YouTubers. Most of the vocabulary you hear on TV shows and movies will come up at some point on YouTube channels, which tend toward younger and slangier speakers with a much less formal style than most media.
I am kind of the opposite of you in that I get most films and TV shows fine, probably because a large part of my French learning has happened through YouTube, but the less common and more "literary" vocabulary used in a lot of novels really does me in sometimes. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Ari Heptaglot Senior Member Norway Joined 6571 days ago 2314 posts - 5695 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Mandarin, Cantonese Studies: Czech, Latin, German | Message 4 of 10 07 February 2015 at 9:54am | IP Logged | ||
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I know of no other method for improving one's listening comprehension than doing lots of listening. I recommend you avoid native French TV series and movies. Watch dubbed ones, and clear-spoken radio shows and podcasts. I find it easier when I can get the contextual clues from the screen, so I prefer movies and TV series in the beginning. French is notoriously difficult to parse, but suddenly it just clicks. You'll have to put in the hours, is all.
As for written vocabulary, well, read a lot of books. You can speed up the process with SRSing, but if you don't enjoy that, just spend the time reading, instead. One trick is to reread books or read several books by the same author, in order to increase your exposure to that author's favorite low-frequency words. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| robarb Nonaglot Senior Member United States languagenpluson Joined 5048 days ago 361 posts - 921 votes Speaks: Portuguese, English*, German, Italian, Spanish, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, French Studies: Mandarin, Danish, Russian, Norwegian, Cantonese, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Greek, Latin, Nepali, Modern Hebrew | Message 5 of 10 07 February 2015 at 10:40pm | IP Logged | ||
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If you're 21 and already a medical student with advanced knowledge of French and some Latin, German, and
Japanese, then I'm 100% positive your verbal intelligence and memory are good enough to learn lots of words from more extensive reading. Of course, you won't retain most of the new words you encounter. But if you read a book at 99% coverage, you'll encounter hundreds of unknown words. Even if you only retain a few percent of them, your vocabulary will grow at a nice rate. Plus, 99% coverage is enough to understand and appreciate a book. So even if it takes many years, all that reading will just be reading, not laborious study. As for listening, that is a more interesting problem. I doubt it is purely a vocabulary problem. Why would your comprehension drop so sharply if the only problem were vocabulary? Unless you managed to avoid learning even the most basic colloquial French words, your book vocabulary should cover most of what people say in TV shows. After all, some of those books have plenty of dialogue, and you've heard plenty of spoken French. I suspect you're losing something on the uptake, as Ari says, French is notoriously difficult to parse. You need to listen a ton more. If you have subtitles/transcripts, that will help a lot with the type of TV shows that you currently get <50%. Without subtitles, concentrate your listening on something moderately informal, but which you can understand somewhere in the 75-95% range, since you'll need to get the gist to learn from context. Once you can understand dubbed shows, talk shows, and dialogue from films where the characters speak in mostly standard/formal French at 90% or better, you'll probably find that the native colloquial shows that are currently too hard will be more manageable, and you'll start to hit that threshold where you can figure out what's going on and can figure out new words/phrases from context. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| tristano Tetraglot Senior Member Netherlands Joined 4036 days ago 905 posts - 1262 votes Speaks: Italian*, Spanish, French, English Studies: Dutch | Message 6 of 10 08 February 2015 at 10:46am | IP Logged | ||
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@chloem14, I think that nobody has 100% known words in a non-trivial book even in his own native language.
Also you don't need to know everything, really. I'm not saying you should not try to improve your vocabulary, at the opposite - I'm saying that you should not worry about it. Just continue learning something new everyday. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| patrickwilken Senior Member Germany radiant-flux.net Joined 4522 days ago 1546 posts - 3200 votes Studies: German | Message 7 of 10 08 February 2015 at 2:24pm | IP Logged | ||
According to Nation (2006) you need a vocabulary of about 8500 for 98% comprehension of English texts (less for TV/movies) and 13500 for 99% comprehension. I posted this late last year on my blog:
Edited by patrickwilken on 10 February 2015 at 12:11am 4 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Cavesa Triglot Senior Member Czech Republic Joined 4998 days ago 3277 posts - 6779 votes Speaks: Czech*, FrenchC2, EnglishC1 Studies: Spanish, German, Italian | Message 8 of 10 09 February 2015 at 11:20pm | IP Logged | ||
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I used to be approximately where you are now in some ways (- the Japanese etc.) and
what helped immensely were tv series. I started from dubbed ones (for exemple Eureka was great, or Grimm, Lost Girl and so on. All of them contain the usual, colloquial speach. And Eureka taught me lots of science vocabulary, yay!) and progressed first to native ones, like Profilage,to the difficult native ones, like Engrenages. The key was to persist and just devour large amounts. The vocabulary improved, and not only the passive one. Really, the largest jump in my overall French skills, including speaking, happened while I was watching tv series. I am taking DALF C2 on Friday and while I'm freaking out, I am not worried about my passive vocabulary at all. Extensive reading and listening took care of that and most unknown words (which are usually pretty rare) are clear from context or from Latin or other languages. There is no reason why you shouldn't get such passive vocabulary as well. About books. You might profit from switching to original francophone authors and leaving your comfort zone, especially when it comes to genres. You are very likely to find medical literature easy, thanks to your Latin knowledge and most of the terminology being more or less the same, some French medical websites are awesome study resources (I used the presentations with audio on wikinu.fr to study physiology and anatomy while ironing or washing the dishes, there are a few more and even better sites for most medical topics and subjects which I would however need to dig out of my memory (or computer history)). Original French fantasy/scifi or other books aimed at younger readers may be a good step forward, I can recommend for exemple Maxime Chattam and his series Autre Monde, those books are a bit Steven King style and awesome. There are many thrillers ad policiers to choose from, Fred Vargas is just one of many great authors, I liked as well Jean Christophe Grangé. Their books were very enriching for me. And there are the classics, like you read S. Beauvoir, I read A. Dumas and there are many others. Some translated authors are fine as well, I found the translation of CH. Harris (The True Blood books) to be full of everyday vocabulary and useful expressions you hear both in tv series and in real life, it may be a good thing as you are looking for colloquial language sources. The key to extensive reading is the amount and variety. Your question about the amount of vocabulary. This is a very common subject of heated discussions on htlal. I am more and more leaning toward the notion that the number is irrelevant. The more, the better. If you see a word at least a few times, it may be worth learning. If it is relevant to your usual topics, learn it. And so on. Other methods of learning vocab. Well, anki works but you don't like it, ok. Word lists are fine but I usually have trouble keeping to them. What often helps me with troublesome words is memorising an exemple, preferably a funny one. The best is a moment in a book or tv series where the word is used and which made you laugh. Or make your own funny exemple. Edited by Cavesa on 09 February 2015 at 11:23pm 3 persons have voted this message useful |
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