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Is counting your vocabulary size useless? | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| Mooby Senior Member Scotland Joined 6105 days ago 707 posts - 1220 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: Polish | Message 121 of 210 21 August 2012 at 9:59am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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I think some of us are missing s_allard's point.
If I read him correctly: The 300 words are only the number of words you need in order start developing grammatical constructs (in active use). He is not saying that 300 words is all you need, or that 300 words will make for scintillating conversation. Neither is he saying that you get to 300 and immediately stop. For active use the brain needs to know words AND the syntatic constructions in which to meaningfully use these words. That means knowing the correct word order, prepostion, conjugate, declension, gender and plurality etc. With an INITIAL 300 words to start building SIMPLE constructs the task is manageable and creates the basic templates for future words to hang on. House 1: Tall, elegant, grand. But cracks under pressure (= extensive vocabulary, very limited practical knowledge of constructs). House 2: Short, squat, simple. Remains functional under all conditions (= limited vocabulary, extensive practical knowledge of constructs). I'm living in House 1 at the moment, I can read extensively but speak virtual gibberish. I want to now focus on active skills, so that means moving address for a bit. I realise that I've proposed a somewhat extreme two state scenario, of course there will be people who oscillate between any number of states, and those who learn all skills evenly. Edited by Mooby on 21 August 2012 at 4:49pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6703 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 122 of 210 21 August 2012 at 10:08am | IP Logged | ||||||||
I have a fair number of comments to make, mostly to s_allard's messages. But let me first repeat one thing I have written long ago in this thread, namely that I do believe that you can survive as a tourist with just 300 words (plus gestures and a bit of luck). "Please give me that one" = 5 words, and you can buy a lot of stuff with those 5 words - provided the seller can write the price down for you or show it on a calculator. So basically I agree with s_allard on the first of the two following claims:
Claim no. 2 leads into muddy waters:
Actually it is a simple fact that the first 300 words on a frequency list are topheavy with grammar words, and if you are going to speak a language then you will need to know at least a fair amount of those words - so at that level most individual vocabularies will be more or less identical. Else you simply can't speak in grammatically correct sentences. The interesting thing is what happens after that. I agree that we can scrap the idea that you learn words strictly in the order of a frequency dictionary (and I must say that I didn't see emk claim that). The determining factor is what you have to talk about in your conversations. If you only have to speak about the items on a menu card and their prices then a limited vocabulary may be enough. And yes, if you can speak fluently and with few errors in your target language about hamburgers and soft drinks then you do speak that language - but at a low level because of the severe restrictions on your choice of topics. And you will not be able to understand any answer that veers outside your limitations. But this is a question about passive vocabulary, and 300 active words may be enough for a servant or a tourist who refuses to enter discussions about topics outside his/her competence. Is the ability to speak fluently about Big Macs or Whopppers enough to claim fluency in a language? Well, maybe, but the official scales demand a somewhat wider repertoire, and I still doubt any person with only 300 active words would be able to express him/herself in fluent Targetish with no errors and a beautiful pronunciation. This would at least represent a curiously biased and fairly unlikely set of skills. However emk's demonstration in message 75 didn't deal with the learners' part of the conversation, but with the part supplied by the natives you speak to - and the conclusion was that if we go down to a vocabulary of just the 300 most common words then you basically can't understand what they say. And if we use any other combination of 300 words, but this time mostly content words, then you may understand the content of the answers, but only within very narrow limits. My contribution to that discussion was to show that the tendencies in the short conversation between native speakers as quoted by s_allard pointed to an active vocabulary (or´rather a 'demonstrably active' vocabulary) of thousands of words - potentially up to 20.000 words or more over a life time. And the active vocabulary of those you communicate with sets the limit of what your passive vocabulary at least should be - and in practice it must be larger because it is quite unlikely that they will be using exactly the words you know and nothing else. Edited by Iversen on 21 August 2012 at 11:10am 5 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6703 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 123 of 210 21 August 2012 at 10:49am | IP Logged | ||||||||
A few comments to other contributors than s_allard:
This may be true from a methodological point of view because it is almost impossible to count shades of meanings of possible homonyms - it is hard enough to decide on a limit between derivations and inflected forms. But my assumption would be that a large vocabulary is highly correlated with solid knowledge about varying uses of the words you know - at least for those who also se that vocabulary to read books and magazines, listen to TV and films and speak to native speakers whereever you can find them. The only people where that correlation might break down would be memory artists or people who only read dictionaries - and I don't know any such person.
I almost got a shock when I saw this- until I realized that Peregrinus' intent was to show that person #1 fairly quickly could activate his/her dormant and largely passive target language (with a reference to Splog who within a couple of hours 'cured' one such person). In contrast it would be a long and hard process to teach #2 the vocabulary of a wide array of topics. But I still got away from that argument with the feeling that it unwillingly cemented one of the more stupid prejudices, namely that those persons who work hard with intensive methods to get a large vocabulary can't be expected to speak fluently, while those who just hang out with native speakers automatically learn to speak .. and on top of that they also get the necessary vocabulary for free. The first problem with this is that you use small talk as a criterium, and that favours the social types. It's like comparing a sprinter and a billiard player, but you judge both on the ability to run fast. A less biased comparison would at least include a round of snooker (which in our context could be equated by the ability to write an essay on a wellknown subject). The second problem is the assumption that everybody is either in the one or the other camp. And of course there will be learners who can't get sufficient amounts of exposure because of their choice of target language and/or their surroundings - just as there are learners who never open a book (and even less a grammar or dictionary). But to get an allround competence you should include both intensive and extensive activities and train both your active and passive skills. I do think that the proportions of your time which you dedicate to each activity can vary within fairly wide bounds, but a person with just a thousand passive and 300 active words will be just as crippled as the one who knows ten times as much, but never ever tried to speak to a native speaker.
You are almost there - I counted the number of unique words I had used in a three months period here at HTLAL (and landed at around 2400 'headwords'). Edited by Iversen on 21 August 2012 at 11:08am 2 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 124 of 210 21 August 2012 at 10:50am | IP Logged | ||||||||
But 5000 words? pfffft. atama warui did say it's probably 5000 for Japanese and 2500 for a European language! And in most languages you get a significant fraction of these 2500 words for free, with the notable exceptions of Finnish, Icelandic etc. If the language is even more closely related to one you speak/understand, you get even more at a discount, and you totally should either use a course aimed at speakers of this language or dive straight in and get tons of input - among other things, in order to add the theoretically known words to your real passive vocab. To state it more explicitly: the importance of a "proper language course" depends on how similar the language is to your native one and other languages you speak. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Peregrinus Senior Member United States Joined 4492 days ago 149 posts - 273 votes Speaks: English* | Message 125 of 210 21 August 2012 at 1:26pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
Iversen, I would like to point out that the focus of my postings in this thread, as is s_allard's, is precisely conversational chit-chat/smalltalk and ease with same, though I mean for it to be over a much wider range and depth of topics that necessarily includes greater vocabulary knowledge and a consequent far greater ability to learn usage. And I totally agree that it is only one component of a well-rounded ability in a language. However I don't think that experiences like the woman in Sprog's Czech example, nor my own in Spanish where I read on a much higher level than I can converse with ease, are all that rare, especially for those in school based courses. And a large part of that in my opinion is lack of good resources for lexical chunk type of learning past prepositional phrases and phrasal verbs (though those alone seem to get you a long way there). But as the best resource I can find, as I have mentioned, I have been extracting example sentences and phrases from an online Spanish dictionary which mostly seem very conversational. But it is only one component of my current studies which also involve conventional courses and extensive reading. The one area that I have chosen to eschew for now is reading serious literature, simply because of lack of interest in same. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| daegga Tetraglot Senior Member Austria lang-8.com/553301 Joined 4521 days ago 1076 posts - 1792 votes Speaks: German*, EnglishC2, Swedish, Norwegian Studies: Danish, French, Finnish, Icelandic | Message 126 of 210 21 August 2012 at 1:38pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Serpent,
I'm not sure if you based your "get words for free" assessment on the POV of an English speaker, but I want to add that you get quite some words for free or almost for free even in Icelandic if you have a knowledge of Scandinavian languages and/or German. These can be as close as "að heita - hete" or "öl - øl", but there are also a lot of words you might have to look up once but don't have to learn because you immediately see the relation to a word you already know, eg. "bjór - beer/Bier" or "að bresta - bersten". 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Peregrinus Senior Member United States Joined 4492 days ago 149 posts - 273 votes Speaks: English* | Message 127 of 210 21 August 2012 at 1:40pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
Serpent, I am basing that figure, for the reasons I gave, on the level one needs for 95%+ coverage for extensive reading (though of course one can still use ER with less but just not have the process be as fast with more lookups required). And that 5000ish figure *includes* cognates, even those that have to be reasoned out a little, and is for closely related languages to English. And regarding Japanese, I seem to remember atama warui and others positing an even higher figure like 8000+. Since courses most often recommended here like Assimil and FSI seem only to take one to the 2000+ mark, the question is then whether intensive vocabulary study is faster and more efficient to get to a higher 5000 or whatever mark than a slower process via extensive methods where one is not getting above 90% coverage maybe, again including cognates, i.e which is better to bridge the gap. This issue of vocabulary coverage levels needed for a certain percentage coverage for extensive methods is an interesting one that has been discussed previously in threads as well as here, but not really the point of this particular thread though I was the one who started talking about ER. Perhaps it would be of benefit to discuss it in a separate thread and try to nail down both general requirements estimated by experts like Dr. Arguelles, and those specific to various languages. 1 person has 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 128 of 210 21 August 2012 at 2:32pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
1 person has voted this message useful |
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