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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 145 of 210 22 August 2012 at 12:25am | IP Logged | |||||
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@montmorency. Good try. I'm not sure I follow all the reasoning. I think that there a few points to keep in mind. For starters, it's not as if we are dealing with a list of words, 4% of which are missing. We are dealing with texts with in which four different words are missing. So, you would see something like, "I see you've bought a new set of xxxx for your iPod to listen to music in the bus." The context will be very useful.
The other thing to keep in mind, if I understand how these things work is that the missing words will be the rare words, i.e. the words from the 4% set. None of your 96% words are missing. So all of your key words will be there. This will also help in identifying the missing words, as in, "Many economists think that Europe is headed for a xxx this year because of the financial xxx in Greece and Spain." Finally, we should also keep in mind that the goal of the CEFR exams is not to assess vocabulary. The goal is to assess your overall ability. Yes, you have to be able to understand everything, within reasonable limits. You will not be asked to decipher a highly technical document. Similarly, with speaking, you will be expected to speak well about various topics, but the emphasis is on speaking well not on demonstrating a huge vocabulary. Personally, I would think that impeccable grammar and good use of idioms within the 96% range would really impress the examiner. 3 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 146 of 210 22 August 2012 at 1:28am | IP Logged | |||||
The answer may depend on the activity, possibly for psychological reasons. I once took “El Juego del Ángel” audiobook by Carlos Ruiz Zafón on a long road trip. I had not read the book before. I listened to all of it on that trip, and I had the impression of following the story just about word for word, only occasionally getting thrown off by something I didn’t quite get. As good as that sounds, I know my level of Spanish well enough to be certain that if I were to read that book, I would run into unknown words with greater frequency. Somehow, while listening, my brain must have filtered out some of the unknown words that it would have picked up on while reading. So, it is quite possible that listening comprehension is more “fault-tolerant” than reading and can be more comfortably handled with a smaller vocabulary. However, I also noticed that when I turn on a 24-hour streaming news channel from Spain, things generally go well, but sometimes stumble on more technical discussions, say, on some specific aspect of the current economic problems. And the impression I often get in such cases is that it’s not necessarily a greater percentage of unknown words as such that hinders full comprehension, but the fact that one unknown word can throw you off more readily in a more targeted and technical discussion. Basically, as soon as the precision requirements go up, the requirements on your vocabulary knowledge do as well. For reading, the 92 percent coverage means 16 unknown words on a 200-word page. That’s quite a lot. You may be able to follow the story, but you will certainly notice the difference with having 4 unknown words per page that comes with the 98 percent coverage. Edited by frenkeld on 22 August 2012 at 2:44am 3 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 147 of 210 22 August 2012 at 2:11am | IP Logged | |||||
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@Peregrinus
A language teacher once told me, brooking about as much disagreement as has been tolerated in this thread, that the best and most efficient way to learn a language is to develop all four language skills in parallel in a balanced manner. Right or not, a balanced approach seems at variance with your idea of accumulating 2,500 words (or is it 5,000 words now?) and only then turning one’s focus towards becoming fluent with them. Now, unless it can be shown that your approach leads to fossilization of wrong usage, who is to stop anyone from using it. On the other hand, can one claim that it is somehow superior or even necessary? I find that to be unlikely. Is there really anything wrong with going through a thorough foundational course that develops all four skills in parallel? Is there a problem with just focusing on speaking using a small vocabulary at first, like s_allard suggests? It may not be everyone’s cup of tea, but it’s hard to see how that could be damaging in any way. If anything, one thing we do know can and will fossilize is the wrong pronunciation, so at least that part may be worth tackling early, if one can stand it. Edited by frenkeld on 22 August 2012 at 2:42am 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 148 of 210 22 August 2012 at 2:12am | IP Logged | |||||
Excellent observations. I certainly agree that in any kind of technical discussions a single word can really throw you off because it may be a particularly important word in that context. Literary spoken texts are probably more fault-tolerant because of the nature of the material. It's not so much guessing the meaning as simply glossing over it. I hope nobody believes that I'm suggesting that 92% is as good as 98%. I was simply thinking that for exam purposes or for something like subtitles the difference might not be all that great, especially relative to the extra effort required to learn the new vocabulary 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 149 of 210 22 August 2012 at 2:27am | IP Logged | |||||
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With tests it just depends on the test. I took TOEFL back in 1980, soon after coming to the US. I got something like 620 out of the maximum of 660 (the latter number has likely changed since), which was pretty decent, and I would very roughly guess the size of my vocabulary being around 5,000 at the time. They also placed me out of English remedial classes for foreign students when I entered college about a year later, based on the composition they had me write. I see these two events as being supportive of the idea that having a comfortable command of 5,000 words is a solid foundation. It was certainly enough for me to be comfortably speaking to people from the day I landed in the US. On the other hand, I didn't do well at all on the English part of the SAT, but it is supposed to be challenging for native speakers, so this was hardly a surprise. My accent was horrible then and still is. I should also add that I don't know what today's TOEFL would require - the test has surely changed since I took it.
I don't know what C2 entails, since I never took that test. It is interesting to examine the writing of various posters here who have the C2 designation on their English and who are not native speakers of it. The degree to which their writing is idiomatic varies considerably. Edited by frenkeld on 24 August 2012 at 6:57am 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Medulin Tetraglot Senior Member Croatia Joined 4668 days ago 1199 posts - 2192 votes Speaks: Croatian*, English, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Norwegian, Hindi, Nepali | Message 150 of 210 22 August 2012 at 2:35am | IP Logged | |||||
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These are the last words from the Mark Davies 20k US English frequency dictionary:
20187 old-style j 20188 naysayer n 20189 telescopic j 20190 technologist n 20191 banister n 20192 consul n 20193 acrobat n 20194 oscillate v 20195 glade n 20196 doings [PL] n 20197 naturalism n 20198 recyclable j 20199 laudable j 20200 centralization n I understand all of them, since most of them are international words. That's the problem of frequency dictionaries. Many times the obvious words are included (which can many , if not most, non-native speakers understand because they're internationalisms or technical words) while some 100% English language only words are not included. For practical learning of English, it would be better to learn the word POKEY (not in 20k most frequent words) [because you won't understand it when you hear it] than CENTRALIZATION (a word you''ll understand if you're a speaker of a Germanic/Slavic/Romance language). Selected words from the 60k frequency dictionary of English: http://www.wordfrequency.info/files/entriesWithoutCollocates .txt This list contains a sample (every seventh entry) of the the top 60,000 lemmas from the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) (http://corpus.byu.edu/coca/). The last 15 words of the sample: 59920 deafened 59927 anti-Tami 59934 three-tone 59941 anhydride 59948 debilitative 59955 holloware 59962 anorectal 59969 accentual 59976 picador 59983 pig-iron 59990 agentry 59997 berried 60004 demonstrability 60011 broadtail 60018 jackscrew Read this as well (written by the author of the soon to be released frequency dictionary of Russian0: http://www.artint.ru/projects/frqlist/frqlist-en.php Edited by Medulin on 22 August 2012 at 4:06am 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Peregrinus Senior Member United States Joined 4492 days ago 149 posts - 273 votes Speaks: English* | Message 151 of 210 22 August 2012 at 4:37am | IP Logged | |||||
frenkeld, The reasons for "only then" turning to usage to be fluent with 2500-5000 words is twofold: 1) Having a greater vocabulary and grammar knowledge facilitates understanding usage much more than a very small vocabulary, as in being able to intuit what are patterns that can be changed in lexical chunks, and which are truly set phrases. 2) The seeming fact that standard courses, i.e. the most readily available of comprehensible input type of ones like Assimil, themselves do not teach much of that usage in the early courses, instead saving same for a followup ones (if even available in one's native language) where they dribble it in very slowly. Whereas with stopping to study usage after the initial course, one could utilize even only 2500 words much better for conversational purposes. I would also suspect that for many learners, the psychological boost that increased conversational ability would give at that point would be what enables them to persevere on the road to greater proficiency. 2 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 152 of 210 22 August 2012 at 5:14am | IP Logged | |||||
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Peregrinus,
I have no quarrel whatsoever with your reasoning. I just don't necessarily see it as being much more than an expression of personal preferences, and I do respect personal preferences, including some of my own. :) However, one point you bring up does transcend mere preferences, that of what the popular courses have to offer. Indeed, many courses for self-study are quite skewed and don't pursue a balanced approach to nurturing all four language skills. Perhaps they reflect the inclinations of self-learners, perhaps there are other reasons. You are more likely to find balance among good college courses, or among the courses for learning X as a Foreign Language prepared in the target country for use by the non-natives who come to live or study there. These types of courses tend to be more expensive and perhaps harder to track down as well. However, they do exist for some of the popular languages, so there are at least in principle alternatives to the often more lopsided self-study courses. About usage being intrinsically more understandable when you already have a large vocabulary, sure, whatever makes it easier for you to make input comprehensible should in principle help. At the same time, the precision of usage can also be expanded in parallel with acquiring other language ingredients and skills. In fact, one can learn many idioms, which to me are just compound vocabulary items, and still not sound natural when expressing oneself. The latter requires fine discrimination between synonyms in different situations, and that just takes time and a lot of exposure as well as practice. Some of it is best acquired from interacting with people. So, I don't know about this whole separate undertaking of mastering usage. It's something that grows and is grown over time, along with other components of language proficiency. Just to be clear, I am not arguing this point for the sake of arguing, I am just not sure this approach would make much sense for me, for example, so I question its universal applicability to all learners. Edited by frenkeld on 23 August 2012 at 2:32am 1 person has voted this message useful |
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