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Is counting your vocabulary size useless? | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| atama warui Triglot Senior Member Japan Joined 4701 days ago 594 posts - 985 votes  Speaks: German*, English, Japanese | Message 89 of 210 20 August 2012 at 9:59pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||
See, this was what I was trying to say. You just demonstrated it instead of simply trying to get the point across with descriptions of an opinion. I don't say you need many words to do grammar studies. I said you'll need a heck of a lot words to get a response to your perfectly uttered sentence. You can then try to creatively fabricate circumlocutions. This is exactly how I've been learning Japanese, just that I use additional tools like ANKI to work on vocab separately. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||||||||
| atama warui Triglot Senior Member Japan Joined 4701 days ago 594 posts - 985 votes Speaks: German*, English, Japanese | Message 90 of 210 20 August 2012 at 10:02pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||
Now let's be a bit more specific here, to clarify what I've been talking about. Say you watch a soccer match in your target language. To really understand the commentary, 300 words are not enough. More likely 1000 words, and then there will still be gaps (but you might guess and know from watching the game yourself). After watching the game, you can talk about it with 300 words, but not in-depth. 500 will be better, but not much. At 1000, you can roughly express what was going on in a manner that doesn't make you look like an idiot. MAYBE Because it depends on the target language. Maybe 5000 words are needed in Japanese to formulate it in the same manner 2500 words would enable you to in English. Edited by atama warui on 20 August 2012 at 10:04pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||||||||
| atama warui Triglot Senior Member Japan Joined 4701 days ago 594 posts - 985 votes Speaks: German*, English, Japanese | Message 91 of 210 20 August 2012 at 10:22pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||
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s_allard
You don't seem to get what I was trying to say, managed to completely miss the analysis emk did and the comment Iverson added to the topic. To have a _conversation_ doesn't only mean to _speak_. It also means you _understand_. If what you understand is only a fraction of what's been uttered, and, worse yet, the words you did _not_ understand were those keys to the meanings that, uttered with less words in a worse sentence, would be perfectly understandable, you will not be able to have a decent conversation. 1) "We watched your wife having an accident today" <-- 8 words 2) "We watched your wife having __ _______ today" <-- 6 words known, 2 missed 3) "__ _______ your wife ______ __ accident today" <-- 4 words known, 4 missed. Although you understood more words in sentence 2 than 3, sentence 2 was incomprehensible. "Your wife accident today" is grammatically a disaster, but it's fully comprehensible. Hence my approach to first learn broad, then learn deep. Grammar is a byproduct and can actually be done in a short amount of time. A few months of intensive study should suffice, broken up in parts: 1) essential grammar (this is a car. i will go shopping tomorrow. the green tree stood in front of the shop) 2) useful grammar constructs (whether or not i need to go out today depends on what my wife planned for the day. compared to when he was 5 years old, his health has worsened dramatically) 3) advanced grammar (he's pretty sharp for a guy his age. needless to say i need more money. come to think of it, if you do it this way, there might be another problem coming up) Learning limited vocab, then trying to devour grammar to a point where you can get everything across if you just know the words, is, IMHO, counterproductive and will hold you back. 4 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||||||||
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6597 days ago 9753 posts - 15779 votes 4 sounds Speaks: Russian*, English, FinnishC1, Latin, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Danish, Romanian, Polish, Belarusian, Ukrainian, Croatian, Slovenian, Catalan, Czech, Galician, Dutch, Swedish | Message 92 of 210 20 August 2012 at 11:23pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||
Seriously speaking, this definitely depends on the language. I've not been able to do anything remotely similar to that in Danish :( BTW, you'll also learn some medical/emergency expressions, like "omfg, that guy had blood all over his face". So apart from having no interest in football I see no reasons not to start with it :-))) 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||||||||
| atama warui Triglot Senior Member Japan Joined 4701 days ago 594 posts - 985 votes Speaks: German*, English, Japanese | Message 93 of 210 20 August 2012 at 11:34pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||
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But we don't disagree, Serpent. We just phrase it differently, because we look at it from different POVs.
It's perfectly okay to pick a topic you like and go from there. You will have a sentence like "and then he pulled his gun and shot three times without hesitation", 12 words, 3 grammar points. You can go on and on with sentences like this and gradually get more of the content. "and then he took the syringe and gave him an injection" "and then she grabbed her child by the hand and crossed the street" What's the difference here? Right, vocab words. I think it's beneficial to pick a topic you are interested in for the simple reason that the trait you need MOST to make it far in your TL is diligence, which can ONLY be reached with enough need or motivation (or both, in an ideal setting). But your favourite topic will not carry you all the way to fluency. You may be able to advance to a point where you can understand "We watched your wife having an _______ today". 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||||||||
| Peregrinus Senior Member United States Joined 4492 days ago 149 posts - 273 votes Speaks: English* | Message 94 of 210 20 August 2012 at 11:44pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||
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I would like to thank emk and atama warui for providing excellent analyses and injecting some rigour into this discussion.
@s_allard: It is trivially true that the same number of words known by different individuals will differ to some degree. However I suspect that difference is FAR smaller with only 300 words learned from standard courses that self-learners in these forums like to use (as opposed to old grammar/translation books of old that having you learning "dwarf", "angel" and such from lesson 1). Also you did not answer my question unless I missed it in which case I apologize, of how you were able to ascertain the vocabulary knowledge of random individuals you encounter in your anecdotal assertions. You have adamantly stuck to that 300 word threshold throughout this discussion (but not saying it should be a stopping point for studying). So you still don't see any reason to bump it up to 400 or 500 at least? I would think that the smaller your vocabulary the more likely any one unknown word is to impede meaning to the point of not getting the gist of the conversation, nor perhaps even being able to ask an intelligent question for clarification. That a learner may be able to say very simple sentences on only the most basic of topics with "native like" ease, is really only saying that he mimics pronunciation well and can parrot some canned responses, as opposed to being able to truly understand usage and be able to know which phrases he has learned can be altered and which cannot. I.E., his knowledge is the lowest of survival skills (and Dr. Arguelles regards even completing an Assimil course as no more than survival with its 2000ish words). 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||||||||
| Peregrinus Senior Member United States Joined 4492 days ago 149 posts - 273 votes Speaks: English* | Message 95 of 210 20 August 2012 at 11:59pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||
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On a separate note, since we were discussing comprehensible input and extensive reading earlier in this thread, I would like to add that after reviewing earlier threads and the postings of Linguamor especially, and also listening to a couple more of Dr. Arguelles' excellent videos on the subject after frenkeld's mentioning that he now advocates 98% coverage for ER, I am now of the opinion that I have been placing the threshold for ER too low at around 2500 words. And atama warui's analysis seems to confirm this, in that it is probably more accurately placed at 5000 words for languages closely related to English, as in Romance and Germanic ones.
Thus the gap between a good beginning course like Assimil and that 5000 threshold is much larger, and in view of there not being as many good intermediate courses for many languages, probably makes it necessary to use brute force vocabulary learning to get there, after which ER can take over for most vocabulary acquisition. However since Dr. Arguelles also advocates returning to intensive grammar study and drilling after such introductory courses, many of which also try to teach a certain amount of vocabulary, such grammar study may help to bridge a lot of that gap. Since I don't have much problem with ER on non-fiction newspaper article type of readings where I look up 5-10 words per article with a pop-up dictionary, that means that I have been severely underestimating my Spanish vocabulary, a large part of which is probably attributable to cognates. This is in accord with past threads on the tendency of learners to underestimate their passive vocabulary to a great degree. Edited by Peregrinus on 21 August 2012 at 12:00am 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||||||||
| lingoleng Senior Member Germany Joined 5298 days ago 605 posts - 1290 votes | Message 96 of 210 21 August 2012 at 12:10am | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||
But come on, where on earth did s_allard say anything like what you insinuate? Nowhere. What he says is simply, that mastering (!, not having learned by heart or read in a phrasebook without understanding) a relatively small vocabulary can be more beneficial for a simple everyday conversation (and when we look around: That's exactly what most people want, and as quickly as possible) than a shaky knowledge of many many words you cannot use and don't really know in all their nuances. And this is just simply true. Don't we read it every day: I have been studying xxx for 3 years now and still cannot have a decent everyday conversation about the most simple of things. Well, there you have an idea how you can avoid this, if you don't want it. 300 is imo just a very low variable, replace it with something you can live with. And later you will need more. Yes, of course. The concept should really not be so difficult to grasp that there has to be any disagreement, all depends on one's personal goal, and many many people have as a main goal to be some kind of every day fluent as soon as possible, so for them this is probably an ideal approach. If your goal is different, reading e.g. or whatever, then this is still a reasonable and very useful approach, but not necessary. Edited by lingoleng on 21 August 2012 at 12:15am 3 persons have voted this message useful |
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