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Must I Memorize A Billion Phrases? | ||
Tags: Idiom | Vocabulary learning | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| fsc Senior Member United States Joined 6331 days ago 100 posts - 117 votes  Studies: French | Message 25 of 43 29 January 2010 at 2:40pm | IP Logged | ||
This makes sense, but how many is "a lot more phrases"? I really thought that after learning a few thousand words, I'd be able to understand more things from context. There have been a couple of more complex phrases and sentences that I never head, but based on the vocabulary and context, I knew instantly what they meant the first time I heard them. I thought my listening comprehension would continue like that and happen more often as I learned. However, I am finding these were rare events and the exception to the rule. Another problem I find frustrating in learning phrases or sentences is that the lessons don't literally translate what the words mean first and then say what the idiom means. For example, lets take the idiom "He let the cat out of the bag." Rather than having the lesson first translated it word for word (so when I hear those words used elsewhere, I know they mean a "cat" or a "bag") and then telling me that this phrase means, such as "He told a secret", I am just given the phrase in French and then told it means "He told a secret". So now I am left thinking that the word "cat" means "told" and "bag" means "secret". Then when I hear the phrase "He put the groceries in the bag", I am thinking it means "He put the groceries in the secret". I realize many things can't be translated word for word. I also realize that if I was first told what the words translated too and then told the idiom, it would be a lot easier to learn and not have to memorize. If I know what all the words mean, it would be simple to know what they mean in a sentence, and then I just need to have the idiom explained to me. Then it all makes sense. Instead I am forced to memorize the phrase and what the idiom is, without knowing the true meaning. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| fsc Senior Member United States Joined 6331 days ago 100 posts - 117 votes Studies: French | Message 26 of 43 29 January 2010 at 2:43pm | IP Logged | ||
I think he meant hundreds of different ones in a short period of a day. If they used 500 idioms a day and they were different from day to day, in a week that is 3500 different idioms. I think that is where he was going with that. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Muz9 Diglot Groupie Netherlands Joined 5526 days ago 84 posts - 112 votes Speaks: Dutch*, English Studies: Spanish, Arabic (Written), Somali | Message 27 of 43 29 January 2010 at 2:50pm | IP Logged | ||
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As they say you need at least 10,000 hours of exposure to a language in as many different topics as possible to truly master it. So technically one must memorize a billion phrases.
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| fsc Senior Member United States Joined 6331 days ago 100 posts - 117 votes Studies: French | Message 28 of 43 29 January 2010 at 2:58pm | IP Logged | ||
You make some interesting points which contrast things I have heard, such as the following. I have heard that the number different words used in daily conversation is as little as 100-200. This is complete BS and often used by people selling language learning programs. I heard of a study where someone counted the number of words used in a newspaper and it was around 600. I don't believe that either but never counted them myself. I heard that with a 5000 word vocabulary, you will understand 80% and with 10,000 words you will understsnd 90% of a language. Then I heard that a person needs to learn about 20,000 base words to have a good grasp of a language. That seems a lot more realistic when compared to what I am experiencing. It was interesting that you said "a key stratedy in learning a new language is not so much learning massive vocabulary but more the many usages of the core vocabulary." Then you immediately went on to say how much trouble you had at the bank in communicating in Spanish something as simple and common (to a native speaker) as "there shouldn't be a 5 day hold". I guess the question is, what do you consider a massive amount of vocabulary? 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| fsc Senior Member United States Joined 6331 days ago 100 posts - 117 votes Studies: French | Message 29 of 43 29 January 2010 at 3:03pm | IP Logged | ||
I love how you put this. This is exactly what I though learning another language would be like. However, for me I have been driving around for years and can't even see the castle in the distance! Hahahaha. 1 person has 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 30 of 43 29 January 2010 at 3:32pm | IP Logged | ||
I made a complete word count of my own messages in this forum after something like 3 months membership, and after cleaning out different forms of the same words I ended up at something like 2400 lexemes. Of course you can survive in a country on a few hundred words (plus some improvised sign language), but those 2400 words must be a fairly accurate estimate of the words I would use if I stayed somewhere and wanted to participate on an equal footing in discussions with the local population. And to use 2500 words you need to have a much larger stock of active words, which again is fraction of the number of passive words... So a passive vocabulary of at least 20.000 lexemes for someone claiming advanced fluence should not come as a surprise to anybody. I actually counted my passive vocabulary in most of my languages last year based on samples from different dictionaries, and the numbers range from about 10.000 and up (but warning: such figures are irrelevant unless you specificy the size of the dictionary used). But they give an idea about the absolute minimum of words you need to learn. The claim that a small number of words cover most of the total number of words in ordinary texts is of course correct, - this is known as Zipf's law. But these very common words only give you a skeleton for the rarer and more precise words, so you can't just skip those. Edited by Iversen on 30 January 2010 at 9:02pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Cainntear Pentaglot Senior Member Scotland linguafrankly.blogsp Joined 6013 days ago 4399 posts - 7687 votes Speaks: Lowland Scots, English*, French, Spanish, Scottish Gaelic Studies: Catalan, Italian, German, Irish, Welsh | Message 31 of 43 29 January 2010 at 3:47pm | IP Logged | ||
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OK, I don't think I've explained myself clearly, so I'll start again.
I'm not saying that understanding grammar means you can understand phrases. What I am saying is that knowing the grammar makes the phrases easy to remember. You don't have to "memorise" them because the from sticks quite easily as combinations of things you already know, even if the meaning is quite different. Work too hard to memorise them, and you start to think of them as single, fixed things, making the whole process harder. Also, if you spend a lot of time "memorising" them, you spend less time using, reading or hearing them, so it's only building "conscious" or "declarative" knowledge, which is less useful in the long term than "unconscious" or "procedural" knowledge. Some conscious study is good, too much is bad. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| cathrynm Senior Member United States junglevision.co Joined 6127 days ago 910 posts - 1232 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Japanese, Finnish | Message 32 of 43 29 January 2010 at 8:50pm | IP Logged | ||
Alright, not billions, not hundreds, maybe 3500 or so? I'm still intrigued by the numbers game. Not for words but for phrases. If I learn, say, the 3,500 most common idiomatic expressions how far does that get me? Is it possible to go at this systematically, learning the most common idioms first from a list, rather than putting my faith in the power of osmosis. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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