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Is counting your vocabulary size useless? | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5430 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes  Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 1 of 210 15 August 2012 at 8:19pm | IP Logged | |||||
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The question of vocabulary size comes up often here at HTLAL, usually in the form of "How many words do you need to speak a language?" We read figures like 3,000 or 5,000 or 10,000 words are a minimum to achieve a certain level of active or passive ability in a language.
Regular readers of HTLAL know that I disagree strongly with most of these estimates and I am of the school of thought that believes that the minimum is very small, in the order of 300 words in languages like English, French or Spanish. There are two reasons for my position. First, the real question is how many words do you need to do what? There is no doubt that the wider the range of texts or speaking situations the more words you have to know. The vast majority of vocabulary size studies are skewed towards written texts and particularly to the requirements of university-level students because this is the large market for language tests. I would totally agree that if you want to undertake studies in an English-speaking institution you would need a large vocabulary. But if your needs are more limited, let's say to conversational language, in very many cases, the number of words used can be much less and the real issue is how the words are used. My position here is that you must learn the number of words you need, whether that is 200 or 20,000 and that it is basically irrelevant to count the number of words. Second, the other major issue here is the definition of a word for counting purposes. Here there are a number of thorny methodological issues. Typically, all vocabulary studies use some form of lemmatization where the various inflected forms (e.g. do, doing, does, done, did) of a part of speech are reduced to a base form, i.e. do (the verb). The noun "do" would be counted separately. The other issue is the existence of different uses or meanings of a given word. For example, in English, the verb "to do" has a number of very different uses: 1. As an interrogative auxiliary. Does your son like to play football? 2. As negative marker. I do not like football. 3. As a transitive verb He does yoga twice a week. 4. As an intransitive verb This will not do. 5. As a dummy auxiliary pro-verb that substitutes for a verb phrase Do you like Chinese food? Yes, I do. 6. As part of certain idioms and phrasal verbs, e.g. The financial crisis did him in. This will have to make do. For counting purposes, the solution is to speak of word families. "do" is one word family. So, when we are counting words, we are basically counting word families. This concept is extremely important for two reasons. Firstly, the most common words typically have the most uses; this is why they are so common. "to do" is probably one of the top five verbs in the English language. Secondly, to know these words means to at least recognize or speak them in the various contexts of use. This means that to put "to do" on a flashcard and then put "faire" on the other side, for the French speaker, or "hacer" on the other side, for a Spanish speaker, is nearly useless because this does not tell us anything about how "'to do" is used in English. In fact, it can be misleading because it tends to tell us that "to do" should be used like 'faire" or "hacer." This will inevitably lead to mistakes. The point of all of this is that a figure like 300 word families is misleading, especially for the verbs. Take some of the most common verbs in English like, "be, have, do, make, say, know, can, want, believe, think." They represent 10 word families, but the number of uses is very high. What does it mean to say that I know those 10 verbs? When I say that 300 word families is all you need to get by, what I'm really saying is that those 300 words are so rich that with the right command of the language, you can do a lot. This does not mean that you are confined to baby talk. It simply means that you can not talk in precise terms about certain topics. The more topics I want to talk about, the larger the vocabulary I need. These considerations lead me to believe that it is a rather useless exercise to worry about how many words to learn or how many words you already know. I see no point in trying to estimate the size of your vocabulary. You know what you have to know; if not, then learn it. At the same time, I believe that it is often more useful to concentrate on learning to use words correctly rather than learning many words. Edited by s_allard on 15 August 2012 at 8:32pm 11 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| frenkeld Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 6943 days ago 2042 posts - 2719 votes Speaks: Russian*, English Studies: German | Message 2 of 210 15 August 2012 at 8:46pm | IP Logged | |||||
I know that I have to know 15,000 words. I also know that this is not all I have to know, but I still need those words. 8 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Cavesa Triglot Senior Member Czech Republic Joined 5009 days ago 3277 posts - 6779 votes Speaks: Czech*, FrenchC2, EnglishC1 Studies: Spanish, German, Italian | Message 3 of 210 15 August 2012 at 9:15pm | IP Logged | |||||
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It is not necessary to count words but it gives more information than "I know some
vocabulary and need to learn some more". I wish I'd know better how many words (approximately) I know to 1.feel good about the number growing 2.easily give myself more specific goals on vocabulary learning. But of course, you can live and learn really well without anything of that. 4 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Bao Diglot Senior Member Germany tinyurl.com/pe4kqe5 Joined 5766 days ago 2256 posts - 4046 votes Speaks: German*, English Studies: French, Spanish, Japanese, Mandarin | Message 4 of 210 15 August 2012 at 10:30pm | IP Logged | |||||
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The only time I would really like to know my vocabulary size is when looking at graded readers.
But then again, I'm always annoyed that they translate words I can easily figure out or already know, and leave out words I have no clue of. Wouldn't a word family be root + affixes? Like, "to despise, despicable"? I would think that different, if related, usages of the same word could be seen as separate lexical entries, especially when you have them as an adult learner from a source language that uses entirely different ways of expressing each of the usages. Edited by Bao on 16 August 2012 at 12:16am 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| BaronBill Triglot Senior Member United States HowToLanguages.comRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4689 days ago 335 posts - 594 votes Speaks: English*, French, German Studies: Spanish, Mandarin, Persian | Message 5 of 210 16 August 2012 at 12:09am | IP Logged | |||||
I agree. I use my vocabulary count as a measure of my progress as I work toward specific language goals. I am very checkpoint oriented (I work as a Project Manager)and as such I need to set specific word count goals to monitor my progress or I won't feel like I'm moving in the right direction. Otherwise I would totally lose my motivation. OTOH, I do agree with the OP that only a small number of words are really needed to have a basic conversation in most languages and if your goal is really just survival/need to get by, then word counts DO become meaningless. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Peregrinus Senior Member United States Joined 4492 days ago 149 posts - 273 votes Speaks: English* | Message 6 of 210 16 August 2012 at 12:26am | IP Logged | |||||
As a long time lurker and avid reader of the archives, this seems like a good place for my first post. I agree with your statements above as regards oral conversation, but not reading. Someone who knows a limited vocabulary but virtually all the grammar (even if only intuitively and not always grammatically correct) and idiomatics/discourse markers/lexical chunks associated with that limited vocabulary, could perhaps seem much more "fluent"/proficient than someone with a much larger vocabulary, and be able to use less awkward circumlocutions. As a source of such conversational phrases for Spanish, I have been using WordReference.com's Spanish-English dictionary, and going in frequency order, extracting its example phrases/sentences into Anki. You can't even get much above the 30s in frequency order before you have a couple thousand sentences. And they are useful, highly conversational, phrases and sentences (to be expected with such high frequency words). Note that I am lumping prepositional phrases, phrasal verb phrases and lexical chunks into the same group, and am excluding any "bookish"/literary types of idioms, though the latter are few in higher frequency groups. The difficulty, as I seem to remember Iverson touching on a couple times, is that one needs a much larger vocabulary and experience of "usage", to be able to distinguish between set phrases and those that are patterns that can be changed to some smaller or greater degree. While the dictionary does indicate many such patterns, it is clear that there are others not so explicitly distinguished, but only clear to those with greater knowledge of the language. So again, take someone with only a knowledge of the 1000 most frequent words (disregarding for this purpose problems with such frequency lists), but who also has a complete oral mastery of that restricted vocabulary as regards to such phrases/lexical chunks/discourse markers, and I do believe he could talk circles around someone who has an active vocabulary of 5000+ words but lacks the ability to use same well in conversation. But the situation is much different, at least from my experience, as regards to reading. To be able to read a major daily newspaper with ease takes a much larger vocabulary, and by orders of magnitude. That reading however won't give one that oral conversational ability, as would watching telenovelas and such could. This is my case in Spanish where I can read newspaper articles with a pop-up dictionary and lookup between 5 and 10 words per article, but have great difficulty in every day conversations or "chit-chat", and hence why I am putting those phrases/sentences in Anki to study.
I disagree as far as the initial stages of language study, when one needs to learn 2500-5000 words to get to the point of being able to make full use of more advanced methods like extensive reading/comprehensible input (see former poster Linguamor's posts in older threads). After that point though, then I agree that one needs to simply concentrate on using such methods to learn what one needs to learn to be able to read and converse with ease. Nonetheless, it isn't really too time consuming to use Iverson's dictionary method of estimation where one samples a certain number of pages and extrapolates the percentage of known words. Naturally, one's vocabulary can be "unbalanced" though as far as frequency goes and perhaps not be as useful in determining the current state of one's vocabulary knowledge if it is overloaded with rarer words. At the end of the day it still remains from all that I have read and my own experience in drilling down a couple frequency lists, that one needs to know 8000+ word families/20000+ words, in order to read and write with ease on the variety of subjects one would need in order to reach C1 proficiency. But much less to understand telenovelas (once you have tuned your ears and can understand more rapid speech even for a restricted vocabulary). 9 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
 Mae Trilingual Octoglot Pro Member Germany Joined 4991 days ago 299 posts - 499 votes Speaks: German*, SpanishC2*, Swiss-German*, FrenchC2, EnglishC2, ItalianB2, Dutch, Portuguese Studies: Russian, Swedish Personal Language Map | Message 7 of 210 16 August 2012 at 12:41am | IP Logged | |||||
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I totally agree. There are two things that drive/drove me crazy: phrasal verbs (yes, in
English, because there are sooo many!) and lingqing verb forms on LingQ. These considerations you listed made me stop counting words, and finally delete my account on LingQ. Counting words may be important as a motivational aspect. But IMO it doesn't make much sense to count words. Here is a recommendation from Rob_Austria I would like to share in this context: Rob gave a great hint in one of his videos. He uses a dictionnary for German speakers who learn Russian. It is called "Deutsch-Russisches Satzlexikon" or "Немецко-русский фразеологический словарь" and it includes over 10'000 keywords and over 43'000 sentences! When looking up a word, one can read all the meanings in sample sentences. Unfortunately these books (3 volumes by VEB Verlag Enzyklopädie, Leipzig, 1970) are only available in second-hand bookshops. Request: If anyone knows about similar books for other languages, such as Swedish, Portuguese or Dutch, please drop a line (PM). Thanks! Edited by Mae on 16 August 2012 at 12:46am 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| frenkeld Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 6943 days ago 2042 posts - 2719 votes Speaks: Russian*, English Studies: German | Message 8 of 210 16 August 2012 at 1:31am | IP Logged | |||||
This theme has appeared in a number of your posts, and every time I see this statement I ask myself if you raise a false dichotomy. At some level, it is certainly not false. There definitely exist learners who take a very skewed approach to language study and accumulate a large vocabulary without much facility with it outside specific contexts (e.g., reading). The question is, do many such individuals really expect to be fluent without additional study geared towards production? Perhaps some do, but most probably don't, and for the latter it would be a conscious choice they make. As a result, the only circumstance where I myself would see your two options as being in meaningful juxtaposition is if there were some evidence that such skewed approach to language learning led to a difficult to get rid of fossilization of wrong usage. Edited by frenkeld on 16 August 2012 at 6:28am 5 persons have voted this message useful |
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