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UK Teens: Active vocabularly of 800 words | ||
Tags: Teenagers | Vocabulary learning | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| Pyx Diglot Senior Member China Joined 5735 days ago 670 posts - 892 votes  Speaks: German*, English Studies: Mandarin | Message 73 of 94 23 March 2010 at 3:37pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
Hell yeah! Them goddam Esperantists ain't got nothin' on us g33ks! :D 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| robsolete Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5385 days ago 191 posts - 428 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: French, Russian, Arabic (Written), Mandarin | Message 74 of 94 23 March 2010 at 3:42pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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U 5P34K TH3 TR00TH. B3H0L|) TH3 n00b |NT3R|\|4T|0|\|4L L4NG004G3!!!!!111
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| Volte Tetraglot Senior Member Switzerland Joined 6439 days ago 4474 posts - 6726 votes Speaks: English*, Esperanto, German, Italian Studies: French, Finnish, Mandarin, Japanese | Message 75 of 94 23 March 2010 at 6:38pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
The point is somewhat blunted by the observation that a large percentage of Esperanto speakers fitting into that category. I've never met another community not aimed at programming with so many programmers, proportionately. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Pyx Diglot Senior Member China Joined 5735 days ago 670 posts - 892 votes Speaks: German*, English Studies: Mandarin | Message 76 of 94 24 March 2010 at 12:26am | IP Logged | ||||||||
I don't think you're right. There are no numbers instead of letters. No columns of exclamation marks ending with ones. Heck, I bet Esperantists don't even write green on black?! No, I'm sure you're mistaken! ;) 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Johntm Senior Member United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5422 days ago 616 posts - 725 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish | Message 77 of 94 24 March 2010 at 2:33am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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| Arekkusu Hexaglot Senior Member Canada bit.ly/qc_10_lec Joined 5381 days ago 3971 posts - 7747 votes Speaks: English, French*, GermanC1, Spanish, Japanese, Esperanto Studies: Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Estonian | Message 78 of 94 25 March 2010 at 4:52am | IP Logged | ||||||||
How do you know that the average teenager's 800 words are the same as the 800 words in Obama's speech? For all we know, maybe only 300 words overlap. What I mean is that the 800 words in Obama's speech were not the only 800 words in anyone's vocabulary. They are the chosen 800 words out of thousands of active words. Nobody who knows only 800 words happens to know those 800 words. After all, in terms of frequency, those words could turn out to have been picked out of the most common 15,000 words, and maybe you need a passive vocabulary of 10,000 to understand 90% of it. In other words, knowing the 800 most common words is not sufficient to produce such a speech, no matter how well you use them. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5430 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 79 of 94 25 March 2010 at 6:43am | IP Logged | ||||||||
Well, I'm not sure I understand the point here. I in no way intended to imply that President Obama has a vocabulary of 800 words. And I explicitly said that I didn't think that most teenagers have the oratorical skill of an Obama. I understand well enough that a person with a 25,000 word active vocabulary only uses a subset at any given moment. And of course a highly technical article that uses relatively few words may presuppose a vocabulary large enough to encompass very rare words. But let me get back to the main point. In simple everyday conversations and in political speeches meant to reach the maximum number of people, it is a well-known fact that a relatively small number of words account for a large number of usages. I don't have Obama's speech in front of me, but I do recall that he used plain words like "men, women, people, American, health, insurance, reform, etc." Maybe he used the word rescission to describe what insurance companies do. But the fact of the matter is that he only used about 800 words that all Americans can understand. Are they the most common 800 words of the English language? Maybe not, I never said they were, but you can be sure that many of the words in the speech are in fact among the most common. But I won't quibble about the number of words one should learn. You learn what you need to learn. That said, I firmly believe that a small vocabulary well used is better than a large vocabulary poorly used. But more importantly for us who are learning foreign languages, the strategy that I follow is to master the basics of grammar, vocabulary and phonetics. The reason I believe this is simply because I have observed time and time again, especially in French, that learners often end up with a bunch words that they don't really know how to use properly. Frankly, I don't admire someone who can use a lot of rare or literary words as much as someone who can use simple words with great effect. As I have said many times in this forum, something as important and common as the verbs forms in French are rarely mastered. The five most common verbs in French take up many pages in the dictionary because they are so rich in meaning. But most people are too busy trying to learn many words rather than concentrating on the foundations. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| doviende Diglot Senior Member Canada languagefixatio Joined 5986 days ago 533 posts - 1245 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Spanish, Dutch, Mandarin, Esperanto, Hindi, Swedish, Portuguese | Message 80 of 94 25 March 2010 at 8:38am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Just to bring some numbers into this, I've partially analyzed the texts of the first 3 Harry Potter books in German, and I found 21000 unique "words". More than half of these are what I would call duplicates, since they are the same word with a slightly different conjugation. My guess is that there are somewhere between 5000 and 10000 actually unique words once this is taken into account. Many of the remaining words are only used once or twice amongst all the books, so they can be effectively ignored in a practical sense.
I'd guess that with a vocabulary of 2000 or 3000 words of German, one could easily read through the Harry Potter books and understand everything that happens almost perfectly. This is not that much more than the 800 talked about here. The wondrous thing about reading massive amounts of text, is that you get exposed to the most frequent words the most often by definition. You probably mostly end up learning your words in roughly frequency order, with the first 1000 coming very rapidly. Even if you barely get 50% of the words on the page, you can actually still learn a lot because the common ones come so frequently. If you're waiting until you know 90% in order to start reading, you missed the early benefit and are now focusing on the rarer words. In effect, I think the "foundations" are learned most easily just by lots of reading, because novels tend to have them in the "right" frequency by default. You just have to learn not to waste your time looking up every word you don't know, because then you're spending more of your time on the less common words rather than getting them "in order". 1 person has voted this message useful |
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