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A Hypothetical Question About Vocabulary | ||
Tags: Transparency | Vocabulary learning | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| crafedog Diglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 5820 days ago 166 posts - 337 votes  Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Korean, Tok Pisin, French | Message 1 of 18 18 March 2010 at 3:59pm | IP Logged | ||
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(Ok this is going to take some setting up so bare with me. In short, I'm wondering what it would be like to begin learning a language you haven't studied before but you already know a large amount of vocabulary for it)
Imagine if you were going to learn a language completely different from your own native one. This language is nothing like your native language (nor any you have studied) and there is very little to zero shared vocabulary, syntax, grammar, pronunciation or anything similar about it to your own (English to Japanese or English to Korean for example). But somehow you know a lot of the vocabulary of this language, let's say between 4000-6000 words in this new language. You don't know any grammar and nor can you construct a basic sentence but you know all these words, their basic pronunciation and their equivalent meanings in your own language. My main question is this: What kind of situation would that learner be in? How do you think this 'knowledge' would affect his rate of progress in learning this very different language? Is it possible that this 'knowledge' would hold back his learning or actually greatly advance it? *Note 1: Because of the differences in the syntax/grammar of these languages, the learner cannot merely hope to translate his way through the language and nor does he intend to do this. However, the learner does have a firm grasp of the workings of his own language and has some small experience studying a less exotic language so learning this language should be within his grasps as a language learner if he were to dedicate himself to the task. *Note 2: The words when spoken do not change considerably when spoken in a complete sentence. They may modify a bit but if the learner were to train his listening skills and get more experience with the language, they would more or less be recognizable. *Note 3: This is not meant to make the learner fluent. He will still need to train his listening, speaking and his grammar skills as well as learn idioms/slang etc. I've read the posts about grammar vs. vocabulary and they didn't cover this. And though this is hypothetical, it does have a real world implication for me (I'm not just wasting time by posting random things). I just want your honest opinion on what you think the implications of this would be. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6705 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map | Message 2 of 18 18 March 2010 at 4:15pm | IP Logged | ||
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It is difficult to imagine a situation where you know 4000-6000 words in a language and no grammar. With 400-600 words the idea is somewhat more realistic. For instance a zoologist or a doctor might know a lot of Latin words without ever having tried to learn the language. My guess would be that you would save some time learning Latin if you already knew the words for colors and bones and other things. But you would still have to start from scratch, because you wouldn't know the basic vocabulary (things like pronouns, "and", "not" etc.). And you might be frustrated with your learning speed if you thought that knowing those few words would make language learning a dance on roses.
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| crafedog Diglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 5820 days ago 166 posts - 337 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Korean, Tok Pisin, French | Message 3 of 18 18 March 2010 at 4:36pm | IP Logged | ||
Thanks for your response but I know this particular scenario is greatly unrealistic which is why I posted it as a hypothetical situation and not as a valid form of learning and like I mentioned it's not meant to make you fluent. I don't care about the validity of the learning/scenario, I'm just wondering merely about the implications this particualr scenario would have. I really can't get my head around it which is why I want people's opinions on it. I physically have difficulty imagining such a scenario and its implications but I can't get it out of my heard. Edited by crafedog on 18 March 2010 at 4:37pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Sprachprofi Nonaglot Senior Member Germany learnlangs.comRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6472 days ago 2608 posts - 4866 votes Speaks: German*, English, French, Esperanto, Greek, Mandarin, Latin, Dutch, Italian Studies: Spanish, Arabic (Written), Swahili, Indonesian, Japanese, Modern Hebrew, Portuguese | Message 4 of 18 18 March 2010 at 5:10pm | IP Logged | ||
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Would a Spanish speaker learning Filipino match the idea? I'm not sure if that gives you
4000 words though. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| crafedog Diglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 5820 days ago 166 posts - 337 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Korean, Tok Pisin, French | Message 5 of 18 18 March 2010 at 5:24pm | IP Logged | ||
That's intriguing. I'm afraid I don't know anything about the Filipino language. Could you elaborate? 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Raincrowlee Tetraglot Senior Member United States Joined 6704 days ago 621 posts - 808 votes Speaks: English*, Mandarin, Korean, French Studies: Indonesian, Japanese | Message 6 of 18 18 March 2010 at 6:48pm | IP Logged | ||
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Tagalog (the main Filipino language) has a lot of Spanish influence, and even uses uno dos tres to count.
Let me tell you something, though. I studied French in high school and had a fairly decent reading ability, but I actually think it hindered my attempts to learn how to speak the language because I always felt like I could understand what I was hearing. I wasn't as willing to sit down and do the repetition needed to get the language to come out of my mouth the same way. It took me a couple years to get over the mental block. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Arekkusu Hexaglot Senior Member Canada bit.ly/qc_10_lec Joined 5383 days ago 3971 posts - 7747 votes Speaks: English, French*, GermanC1, Spanish, Japanese, Esperanto Studies: Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Estonian | Message 7 of 18 18 March 2010 at 7:10pm | IP Logged | ||
*IF* you knew thousands of word in a language before you started studying it, learning it would of course be a lot faster. Learning vocabulary is what takes the longest. However, if one had to choose whether to go that route or not, they would be wasting their time learning vocabulary first, for a variety of reasons: -not learning vocabulary in context implies a lot of near-misses (not quite the right meaning of the word); -it's easier to learn vocab in a language you do know because you have become familiar with pronunciation and your brain is more tuned in; you can also study words in the proper context, with their proper function; -words have meanings that overlap a great deal and that are context-dependent or dependent on formality levels, etc, which you wouldn't yet know anything about; -words are often sorted into grammatical categories, which you wouldn't know the meaning of; -you'd be learning words outside of the grammatical "play pen" -- verbs would not be conjugated, words with equivalents in other genders would be unknown, words that take on different forms or uses while inflected would be unknown, etc. -you'd know nothing about collocations, eg. words that tend to be used in association with another specific word, like read and book, ride and bike, wind and clock, etc. ... just to name a few. BUT, hypothetically, if you were handed down a 4000-word vocabulary, even if half of it was yet unusable or was wrong, you'd still be at a huge advantage. My guess is that in the case of, say, Japanese, if your goal was to reach C1, it would be the difference between getting there in 2 years or in 1 year. 4 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| nescafe Senior Member Japan Joined 5411 days ago 137 posts - 227 votes | Message 8 of 18 18 March 2010 at 7:35pm | IP Logged | ||
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Let's have an experiment. Here is a text from English wikipedia but rearranged into Japanese word order.
Japanese ha Japan and Japanese emigrant communities in 130 millions over people by spoken a language des. Japanese ha the Japonic language family of member des. Propsed Japanese with other languages relations are there mas, but any of them ha accepted not.Japanese ha an agglutinative language des. It of distinguished ha Japanese scoiety of nature reflecting a complex honorific, that ha verb forms and particular vocaburaly by the speaker, the listener and cpnversation in mentioned person of the relative status indicate. The language ha a relatively small sound inventory and lexicaly pitch accent system has. Japanese ha a mora-timed language des. Do you undestand the above? The original version is here. Japanese (日本語?, [nihonɡo] ) is a language spoken by over 130 million[4] people in Japan and in Japanese emigrant communities. It is a member of the Japonic (or Japanese-Ryukyuan) language family. There are a number of proposed relationships with other languages, but none of them has gained unanimous acceptance.[5] Japanese is an agglutinative language. It is distinguished by a complex system of honorifics reflecting the nature of Japanese society, with verb forms and particular vocabulary to indicate the relative status of the speaker, the listener, and persons mentioned in conversation. The language has a relatively small sound inventory, and a lexically significant pitch-accent system. Japanese is a mora-timed language. edit: I think the above exapmple gives a picture of what a language learner has to work on with grammar. Compared with the original versiona and the modified version, English natives will understand the former one, but if one hears it from radio, it will impossible to understand "Japanese grammar" version. Edited by nescafe on 19 March 2010 at 2:40am 3 persons have voted this message useful |
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