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How fast can you learn 2500 words? | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
 jeff_lindqvist Diglot Moderator SwedenRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6703 days ago 4250 posts - 5710 votes  Speaks: Swedish*, English Studies: German, Spanish, Russian, Dutch, Mandarin, Esperanto, Irish, French Personal Language Map | Message 17 of 66 29 August 2012 at 12:12am | IP Logged | |||||
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Another music analogy:
In Irish traditional music, it's not that unusual to have a working repertoire of more than 1000 tunes (where a "tune" typically means a melody with two or more parts, and eight bars per part - it takes about half a minute to play through once). After the first couple of hundred tunes, almost everything is obvious. "You will be exposed to all sorts of different ways that your fingers and bow must be contorted". (Thanks to Larry Sanger for that quote). Anybody with decent skills (i.e. anybody who has had the patience to learn hundreds of tunes by ear) should be able to hear patterns all over the place - not that far a cry from recognizing stems, prefixes, endings... As long as the 2500 words aren't totally random, patterns like these should pop up sooner than you'd expect. Whether it's best to speed up the process by exposing oneself to a large vocabulary right away, or prefer to wait until "one's ready" - I don't know. But for tunes, I'm totally convinced that it takes shorter to learn "a lot of tunes" than half that amount in the same time, because of the pattern recognition and "aiming high"/"quickly but poorly" (as our own Fanatic calls it). 4 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| montmorency Diglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4622 days ago 2371 posts - 3676 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Danish, Welsh | Message 18 of 66 29 August 2012 at 12:14am | IP Logged | |||||
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@Frankeld's approach (2) could be further divided into:
(2a): Look up, don't record, but do make some mental effort to learn, e.g. visualisation, saying out-loud, creating some sort of association. (2b): Look-up and quickly carry on reading. (2b) has the advantage that it doesn't interrupt the flow of reading quite as much, but might mean you are looking it up every time you meet it, or almost every time. That seemed to be my experience when that was what I mostly did. What I tend to do now (which could be classified as a (4) I suppose - record, don't look-up, i.e. write down the TL word, or underline it in the text, and come back to it, and in either case, put it into a word-list (this could also be a flashcard/SRS), as a separate exercise. I tend to agree with you though that at some point a more proactive approach to vocabulary-learning/reinforcing is called for, although this does not have to include any form of counting of words in my view. I usually know when I am slacking off (unfortunately). 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| frenkeld Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 6737 days ago 2042 posts - 2719 votes Speaks: Russian*, English Studies: German | Message 19 of 66 29 August 2012 at 12:47am | IP Logged | |||||
I may have sounded "determined" because the originator of this tread did; otherwise, I don't claim that everyone has to go through cramming 50 words a day. My own prejudice is that the first couple of thousand words or so are best absorbed organically, as part of the foundational course, graded readers, etc., but getting from 2,000 to something like 5,000 is not a bad phase for recording and memorizing the new words one meets while reading or listening. By then one has had enough exposure to the language not to lose sight of its structure and idiomatics behind all the new words, but it's still not that easy to read or listen to the original sources because of a lot of unknown vocabulary, so there is a strong incentive to grow it quickly. Edited by frenkeld on 29 August 2012 at 2:08am 4 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Volte Tetraglot Senior Member Switzerland Joined 6233 days ago 4474 posts - 6726 votes Speaks: English*, Esperanto, German, Italian Studies: French, Finnish, Mandarin, Japanese | Message 20 of 66 29 August 2012 at 2:06am | IP Logged | |||||
Which 2500, and to what level and use? Using memory techniques, one can learn isolated words quite quickly. A few days ago, I studied 300 kanji (Japanese characters) in one day, using Heisig's method. With a little help from anki, most of them are sticking. I'm pretty sure I couldn't pull this off 10 days in a row, though; it's tiring. If what you want is to passively recognize words, there are two techniques that are even faster: Listening-Reading, and looking at cognates. Cognates won't show you all the high-frequency words, but if all you care about is the number, most languages have a fair number of words with shared roots from English, or borrowed into or from it. That said, I don't generally bother studying vocabulary in isolation. Others have pointed out in this thread why it doesn't make much sense to for your first 2500 words - you'll lack the grammar and feel for the language to do much with them, even if you can pronounce them, and you're unlikely to catch them in rapid speech at first. 5 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| petteri Triglot Senior Member Finland Joined 4726 days ago 117 posts - 208 votes Speaks: Finnish*, English, Swedish Studies: German, Spanish | Message 21 of 66 29 August 2012 at 9:47am | IP Logged | |||||
Anki or other SRS system is not designed to learn new words, but it can be very effective in not forgetting the learnt material. Anki is a brutal and merciless way to grind the words until they stick and keep a track of number of words learnt. Edited by petteri on 29 August 2012 at 9:49am 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| smallwhite Pentaglot Senior Member Australia Joined 5102 days ago 537 posts - 1045 votes Speaks: Cantonese*, English, Mandarin, French, Spanish | Message 22 of 66 29 August 2012 at 3:01pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I used to study several hours a day and average 50 to 180 words a day.
50 was Japanese. And I forgot 30% of them in 3 weeks. Most weren't cognates. 180 was German and included cognates (Anki counted that, not me). So my answer is 14 to 50 days. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| maydayayday Pentaglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 5013 days ago 564 posts - 839 votes Speaks: English*, German, Italian, SpanishB2, FrenchB2 Studies: Arabic (Egyptian), Russian, Swedish, Turkish, Polish, Persian, Vietnamese Studies: Urdu | Message 23 of 66 29 August 2012 at 3:24pm | IP Logged | |||||
By headword I mean a word and all its inflected/declined forms - including augmented and diminished forms. big<bigger<biggest = all one headword child, childer, children = all one headword 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5224 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 24 of 66 29 August 2012 at 3:44pm | IP Logged | |||||
@maydayayday is essentially right in his definition. Most people use the idea of a dictionary word as head word. For word counting purposes this is fine. There are a few complications that make the science of counting words a bit fuzzy. First, is the fact that words can have many different meanings. For example, I see in a little book of English verbal phrases that the word "go" by itself has around 16 different uses as a simple verb, 7 uses a a noun, 3 uses of go + infinitive and 3 uses of go + verbal -ing. The second complication that applies especially to English and possibly to other languages is the fact that there are multi-word verbs. For example, with "go" we have verbs like: "go over", "go by", "go easy", "go far", "go on", etc. In the grand scheme of things, it probably doesn't change much in terms of calculations; one can just say that the head word is "go." 4 persons have voted this message useful |
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