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Is counting your vocabulary size useless? | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| iguanamon Pentaglot Senior Member Virgin Islands Speaks: Ladino Joined 5262 days ago 2241 posts - 6731 votes  Speaks: English*, Spanish, Portuguese, Haitian Creole, Creole (French) | Message 9 of 210 16 August 2012 at 2:23am | IP Logged | |||||
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I have never counted words. I would say that it's not the size of your vocabulary that matters as much as what you can do with the vocabulary you have. Interaction with the language in the real world will show you in short order whether your vocabulary is adequate or not. That's what works for me. Edited by iguanamon on 16 August 2012 at 2:51am 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Peregrinus Senior Member United States Joined 4492 days ago 149 posts - 273 votes Speaks: English* | Message 10 of 210 16 August 2012 at 5:09am | IP Logged | |||||
Perhaps, in line with my posting above, there would be more agreement here if s_allard were to rephrase and say that a complete mastery of the first 1000 (or whatever number) words in all idiomatic/lexical chunk type ways should be had before proceeding on to learn even more vocabulary. The point is that first level of vocabulary is so important conversationally (with a proper number level and not the Basic English type of number). While one can easily construct levels of vocabulary in whatever convenient units (like 500 word groups up to 25000), which represents the depth of vocabulary (for want of a better term), the usage of any level of vocabulary also has its own "width" if you will, primarily in the expanded usage having to do with lexical chunks/phrases/etc, and it is particularly "wide" at the bottom. Ignoring "width", one can reach a greater level of vocabulary knowledge perhaps, in the same time it takes to more thoroughly master the lower levels. Which is great for reading/writing, but not conversation in my opinion. 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 11 of 210 16 August 2012 at 6:08am | IP Logged | |||||
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I want to first thank everyone for the great responses so far. I don't have time to answer all the questions raised, but I would like to address a couple of major points. As I have stressed, the size of needed vocabulary really depends on your goals. If reading a wide range of texts is your goal, a large passive vocabulary is necessary. I totally agree.
I will admit that my primary focus is actually speaking the target language. My position probably originates in the common reaction of many people: "I can read it or understand it, but I can't speak it." And why can't they speak it if they know so many words? Why is a little basic conversation with a native speaker so challenging? To me the simple answer is that speaking skills are dependent on other elements besides (or in addition to) vocabulary. In many cases, the problem is not lack of vocabulary, it's rather not being able to spontaneously use the vocabulary one already has! The figure of 300 words is not cast in stone. It is simply a figure that a lot of French teachers use as a sort of minimum for one to be able to have a decent conversation. I don't care about the number 300. Maybe 500 is better or even 250. It's not really that important. If you feel need 8,000 words and that you like to measure your progress as a tool of motivation, go for it. I think I'm reacting to what I perceive is an exaggerated importance of vocabulary study. We know all about word frequencies, word lists and word coverage. But who has heard of the most common grammatical structures or the 100 most common grammar patterns in a language? Edited by s_allard on 17 August 2012 at 2:26pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| vermillon Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4678 days ago 602 posts - 1042 votes Speaks: French*, EnglishC2, Mandarin Studies: Japanese, German | Message 12 of 210 16 August 2012 at 9:48am | IP Logged | |||||
It depends what you count as affixes. Do the ver-, be-, ent- etc count as prefixes in German? "Somehow" they have their modification value, but I wouldn't consider I know verlassen and entlassen when I know lassen. And same would go for an easy suffix like un- with heimlich/unheimlich... I use Anki so my vocabulary size is automatically counted. It has the advantage of counting words the way I want to count them. In German, a noun may be similar to its verb, but I still need to know its gender, and the verb may have a slightly modified radical, so I prefer to have two cards (it also helps reinforcement). As someone said earlier, in the early stages, counting vocabulary can be useful to pick up the appropriate level of graded readers. It's of course also very useful for people who like numbers and want to set goal to themselves... It helps me deciding that I should learn 30 or 70 words per day for the next few weeks... Or to decide to stop focuing too much on vocabulary once reaching a few thousands, and perhaps to spend more time on different activities. 1 person has 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 13 of 210 16 August 2012 at 9:54am | IP Logged | |||||
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There are two issues here. The narrow one is: do you get any benefit out of knowing how any words you know? (side-issue: how do you define a word in this context?) The broader one is: how many words do you need?
The title of the thread suggests that we primarily should discuss issue no. 1, but as the second issue already has been brought up I'll give my bipartite opinion once again. Which is: 1) yes, you can survive a holiday or simple conversation on just 300 words and expresions, if they are chosen wisely and you know how to use them (and you speak to people who are able and willing to answer in sufficiently simple terms). 2) No, you can't even read a newspaper with just 300 words. Even if you use a dictionary with for instance 20.000 words you will still experience that you look words up from some book or magazine and discover that the word isn't there. And if 20.000 words aren't enough for a dictionary they aren't enough for you. Main issue: does it then benefit you in any way to know the size of your vocabulary? I would say yes, but that doesn't mean that you should go counting here and now. Actually I'm probably one of the few persons who have made serious attempts to count 'my' words in all of my languages, including my native Danish (where I ended up counting the words I didn't know in a standard dictionary). I made my first vocabulary assessments while I was relearning my rusty Romanian in 1986 - and I noticed that my vocabulary grew faster than the number of new words per lesson in my old Teach Yourself could explain. That made me think about the benefits of making wordlists in general, but the point of depart was the observation that just looking through words in a dictionary could bring words back from oblivion. When I made my 'big' count for all my language in March-April 2009 I spent a lot of time on the project because I wanted reliable results for all my languages across language borders (the details can be seen in my Guide part IV and the results can be seen on page 106 in my log). I still think that it was a useful exercise, but when I made a new assessment in May 2012 I didn't go through all my languages - I reasoned that taking just a few sample languages would make it possible to see any tendencies since 2009. However in this third round I also wanted to address some problems with the previous counting methods so this time I didn't just divide all the words on my sample pages into known and unknown, but I refined the characterization by dividing them into definitely known, unknown but guessable and definitely not known, and I separately counted 'expressions' (which lead to some problems with dictionaries who mixed truly idiomatic expressions and unproblematic examples). In short, it was a lot of hard work and you have to be somewhat nerdish to do it just to get some statistics. But now I have done it, and I'm glad I did it (something like having walked up an mountain and down again without losing any body parts). Can you then trust those figures? Yes, but you have to know what they cover. I counted headwords (i.e. the words which are written in boldface in most dictionaries), but for instance Lingq apparently counts individual wordforms and it also counts words you once have met, but which may not have settled into your longterm memory. Besides most word counts only deal with passive vocabulary - the active vocabulary will inevitably be much more limited, and as some already have pointed out you can have a large passive vocabulary and not be able to ask for a cup of coffee. Edited by Iversen on 16 August 2012 at 11:44am 6 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 14 of 210 16 August 2012 at 10:26am | IP Logged | |||||
Actually, I'm fairly sure most people who have trouble with grammar are aware of it. They may just have a bad experience with traditional textbooks/not want to use them/believe (too much?) in a method that doesn't involve them. As much as I love AJATT, I know it may give a false impression that if you can't speak, you need more vocabulary (rather than more input). This is even more true about LingQ where the vocab study is explicit. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| montmorency Diglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4828 days ago 2371 posts - 3676 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Danish, Welsh | Message 15 of 210 16 August 2012 at 12:14pm | IP Logged | |||||
I find that observation fascinating. Just so I am clear about what you mean here: You were actively re-learning Romanian from a TYS book, and theoretically learning so many words per lesson from that book. But at the same time you were doing a vocabulary counting exercise using a Romanian dictionary (bilingual, I am sure), and unconsciously adding words in from that, that you had known at some time in the past? That's interesting for several reasons, one of which is that it gives hope to people who despair about "using it or losing it" ... you may have "lost it", but maybe not forever. Edited by montmorency on 16 August 2012 at 12:19pm 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 16 of 210 16 August 2012 at 1:17pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Your summary is correct. I had discovered this forum a few months before and not thought much about methods, so when I wanted to revive my desiccated skills in Romanian I just grabbed an old TY and began studying from lesson 1 and up. And Romanian is not a language which pops up often on TV or on the internet, unless you look for it, so that TY text book and Alf Lombard's illegible grammar and my old dictionaries were the only sources I used. I checked my Romanian vocabulary regularly during the second half of 2006, and my results jumped during that time from a few hundred words to something like 5000 (if my memory doesn't deceive me). I'm not sure there even are 5000 different words in TY!
However this was a language which I long ago could speak fairly fluently, so the effect would not be as pronounced with a 'new' language. I discovered that when I went on to learn Portuguese, which I only knew from a brief 'reading course' offered thirty years earlier to student of French. However even for Portuguese I had the advantage of knowing Spanish, although my Spanish was fairly rusty at the time. Late in 2006 I become interested in Modern Greek, but here the automatic benefits didn't come as readily as I had hoped, and that's why I decided to systematize my use of wordlists around January 2007. Edited by Iversen on 16 August 2012 at 1:20pm 3 persons have voted this message useful |
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