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Is counting your vocabulary size useless? | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| Peregrinus Senior Member United States Joined 4492 days ago 149 posts - 273 votes  Speaks: English* | Message 153 of 210 22 August 2012 at 5:30am | IP Logged | ||
frenkeld, I don't perceive you to be arguing for its own sake at all, and appreciate your contributions. They are focused, logical and substantial, and don't ramble on with superfluous anecdotal observations. Your point about usage understanding growing over time is a valid one I believe. But I am talking more about the ability to understand, rather than understanding discrete instances of usage. And I do believe that simply takes more vocabulary and grammar knowledge past the very most common vocabulary, at which point usage is more likely to be interpreted by such a beginner as set phrases only. However I do believe that 2500-5000 words is sufficient to understand such usage abstractly and concretely, so my own opinion/preference is indeed to stop there to study same instead of saving it for the long road to 10,000-20,000 words. Courses naturally have to choose priorities in the balance equation so I don't really fault the major better ones with being out of balance in one direction or another. But it does highlight the utility of the oft-repeated forum advice to use multiple sources for language learning. 1 person has 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 154 of 210 22 August 2012 at 6:13am | IP Logged | ||
I thought that this observation about the degree to which the writing is idiomatic was very interesting because it touches on a fundamental characteristic of native-like expression. Two pieces of writing or speaking can be grammatically and lexically correct, but one will sound native-like and the other will either sound foreign or just nondescript. When we say a form of expression is idiomatic, what do we mean? And how, as language learners, do we get there? It's not easy, to say the least. Although I hate to raise that hoary question of small versus large threshold vocabulary because I have no urge to trade insults here and be raked over coals, I'd like to point out that this issue of idiomatic language goes right to the heart of the debate. Throughout this at times noxious discussion, I've maintained that the number of words is fundamentally secondary to the manner in which they are put together. I have a horizontal or linear perspective; I look at how the words are connected. This is opposed to a vertical or additive perspective where we are more concerned with stacking the words on top of each other, as it were. I'm not very concerned about the number of words, not because it's not important, it's simply because I believe it will grow as needed. Idiomatic expression is obviously linked to the use of idioms, which, as we all know, are units of two or more words that have a meaning that is not easily derived from the component words. All languages have idioms, and spoken English is particularly rich in idioms. "To throw someone under the bus" is an idiom that is popular in the world of North American politics and means to sacrifice someone for one's own interest. I should also add that collocations, or words that often go together without being idioms necessarily are also the hallmark of idiomatic expression. For example, in English we "pay attention" whereas in French we say "faire attention." To add to all of this, English uses multi-word or phrasal verbs that act like single verbs. These are notoriously difficult for learners to master. And although English does not have things like grammatical gender, complex verb conjugations or noun cases that complicate other languages, it does have its own grammatical pitfalls with word order, determiners (articles) and verb tenses. I bring all this up because this is precisely why one can do a lot with relatively few words. A tiny word like "up" is used in so many ways and in so many combinations that it is hard to believe that it is the same word. That is precisely why we resort to the idea of word families for counting purposes. Most of the English prepositions like "over", "in", "down", "out", "under" and "by" have very rich semantic sets. And what about verbs like "go", "do", "make", "walk" or "have?" And I haven't mentioned the mother of all English verbs, "get." When I say you can do a lot with 300 word families, I mean that these words can be combined in so many ways that the expressive possibilities are enormous if only you learn how to use them. I know that some people here believe that with 300 words you can do little more than ask how to go the bathroom in the train station or talk about one or two things for a few minutes. I disagree but I won't argue over a few words. Even if one believes that you can't do anything with less than 2500 words, at some point you have to put the words into some order and open your mouth. That is where we meet. You have the same problem that I do with my 300 word families. How do you put those words together so that they sound idiomatic and natural? This is where the rubber meets the road. I think I can get a lot of bang out of my 300 word families, and if I need more I just take them. Edited by s_allard on 22 August 2012 at 1:26pm 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 155 of 210 22 August 2012 at 6:15am | IP Logged | ||
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@Peregrinus
Let's pursue the necessity of working with the available courses a bit further. Let's take someone who has gone through French with Ease. What is he or she to do next? One possibility would be to start addressing the imbalances in Assimil. Assimil a bit thin on grammar? Initiate a more complete study of grammar. It hasn't provided enough continuous reading? Get a few graded and annotated readers and later authentic sources. Listening? Go and listen. Writing? Go write. Speaking is great too if one can arrange it; if not, speak to yourself, do something. But where does developing a feel for the nuances in comprehension and production, including the ability to express oneself naturally, i.e., in an idiomatically correct way, come in at this stage? I would imagine the study of grammar and paying close attention to some of what one hears and reads would help, as would self-correction of what one writes and says. Perhaps some targeted usage guides may help too when available. Basically, using the four language skills, the study of grammar and vocabulary/usage, as well as just taking the trouble to observe the language, i.e., not just being "extensive", but intensive as well, are some of the ingredients of getting a grip on eventually expressing oneself idiomatically. If one were to do all that, as far as vocabulary goes, it accumulation would likely continue anyway, since one will keep running into new words. As a personal example, the second Spanish novel I read was "Entre Visillos" by Carmen Martín Gaite. That book struck me as offering plenty to learn from its dialogs as far as daily speech patterns, but to make use of it, I had to look up plenty of words and expressions. Years later I saw a few specific books by that writer mentioned as good at capturing popular speech in a review of her then new novel in a magazine for teachers of Spanish and Portuguese. (It may have been "Hispania", I don't know if it still exists.) I actually bought an English translation of "Entre Visillos" recently for when I get back to Spanish. For those not into books, there are TV shows, podcasts, etc. One runs into new vocabulary there as well. One runs into it when talking to people. So, I can see not placing prime emphasis on vocabulary acquisition at this stage so as not to miss out on grammar and other activities, but it would be something else to freeze vocabulary acquisition. Of course, I don't know exactly what you plan to do, so this is a bit hypothetical. Edited by frenkeld on 22 August 2012 at 6:34am 1 person has 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 156 of 210 22 August 2012 at 7:18am | IP Logged | ||
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Here at HTLAL by and large we are a tolerant crowd. If someone has a new perspective on language learning, most of us are open to at least consider it. Sure, we get our fair share of kooks with the hottest new idea on how to learn a language instantly. Some people will remember that chap a while back who was learning a language in his sleep. Didn't work. And then there was that character who was going to not sleep or eat for 72 hours and saturate his brain with Russian language recordings. Didn't work either. At the end of the day, it's all about results. We can argue all we want, but the proof of the pudding is what you can demonstrate. @iversen and I have sparred over the years, but I have the greatest respect for him because he has proven that what he talks about has has worked for him and other people. My own position is informed by my work as a teacher, researcher and student of languages. The examples I give come for the most part from my daily work in French, English and Spanish. Right now, in addition to my regular activities, I'm working 2 hours a day with a Spanish engineer who has a job interview in English in two weeks. I'm seeing first-hand what it's like to learn a language fast. And I get a chance to apply my ideas about the best way to learn a language. So far, everybody is happy. But I'll be the first to admit that I may not have God's honest truth. I may be wrong. I'm open to other approaches if the results are good. 4 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| etranger Pentaglot Newbie Australia Joined 4480 days ago 5 posts - 12 votes Speaks: English*, Mandarin, French, Italian, Spanish Studies: German, Danish, Irish | Message 157 of 210 22 August 2012 at 8:25am | IP Logged | ||
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My two cents worth: It can be a good way to encourage oneself that one has made progress, and also a good way of revising and making sure you haven't forgotten words :) But certainly not going to help you improve your language skills; there are more effective ways to use your study time, like using what you know to increase fluency and 'feel' for the language.
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| Peregrinus Senior Member United States Joined 4492 days ago 149 posts - 273 votes Speaks: English* | Message 158 of 210 22 August 2012 at 8:49am | IP Logged | ||
frenkeld, All of those other activities you mention after a first course are good ones, and specifically regarding grammar, is what Dr. Arguelles recommended in one of his videos. And you are right that most such grammatical or other activities usually include their own vocabulary lists so as to make their examples comprehensible, so they would indeed aid in continuing vocabulary acquisition. The problem though, at least from what I have (or rather haven't) been able to find, is a lack of good usage courses for intermediate levels. And in fact for Spanish, unless I have missed them, I don't even see a series of graded readers as I have for other languages, but instead just random individual readers. Of course by taking something like Harry Potter and studying it intensively at first, I guess the snowballing effect would make it more extensive by the end. I know this has become a long thread, but I mentioned in my first post and later what I have been doing myself for Spanish. I have been using Word Reference's website for its Spanish-English dictionary (which happens to be the same as for my ifinger pop-up), and extracting example sentences and phrases (almost everyone it gives), for words in frequency order. So far I am only up to the 30s but have over 2000 sentences. Likewise I am extracting sentences into Anki from 750 Spanish Verbs and Their Uses (which is great for phrasal verbs). While the keywords themselves are high frequency words, many of the others in the sentences are not, and so some additional vocabulary acquisition occurs there as well. And I feel my vocabulary is barely sufficient for ER of newspaper articles (5-10 lookups per average size article that cannot be intuited from context), so that along with some Spanish Anki decks I created from various sources like FSI I & II, are my main sources for maintenance. But I really want to focus on idiomatic usage from full knowledge of prepositional phrases which are not given in beginners' courses to phrasal verbs to discourse markers to compound verbal phrases, i.e. lexical chunks. So that sentence/phrase work, even if the component words are mostly lower frequency, is my focus over more intensive vocabulary study to boost my range for ER. While there is Assimil's Using Spanish course, and while I can get past its often noted shortcoming in bad English translations, it simply seems to have too many literary type of idioms that I am not interested in at this point, and to also give a lot of them via a footnote dump instead of using them in sentences (and then repeating them later). As I mentioned in my first post in this thread, the vast majority of these phrases and sentences are highly conversational unlike one large corpus of discourse marker (n-gram) files I found based on 1800s fiction and non-fiction which (after laboriously selecting them manually from raw data files), seem to be highly formal and writing based. So since I am doing ER even if less efficiently, and EL as well in trying to put in an hour a day listening to news broadcasts and a half-hour telenovela, I myself am not actually freezing further vocabulary acquisition. The only thing that is taking time with the phrase/sentence usage study is having to mine them myself and input them into Anki. And my standard practice with Anki is to use shorter interval options for more reps over time. I guess the bottom line to this is that my advocacy of "stopping" after a beginner course to study usage implicitly implies that such a course already exists, which it does not seem to for most languages, though perhaps I am not aware of what may be out there, and that it would not actually take too long, which I don't think it would if it already existed. Sorry for the long response. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| luke Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 7205 days ago 3133 posts - 4351 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Esperanto, French | Message 159 of 210 22 August 2012 at 10:15am | IP Logged | ||
It's interesting to hear everyone's perspective. We have the pragmatists and the theoreticians. A quote sometimes attributed to Einstein:
So it's always interesting to hear ones experience. Ones theorizing may be helpful if the theory has some validity. When I was a neophyte Spanish learner, I had great hope that the next 1000 words of additional vocabulary or practice with some additional grammar points would magically unlock the Spanish speaking and literary world to me. As experience grows, one becomes more aware of what is required to reach ones goals. I've seen the A1/A2/B1/B2/C1/C2 levels diagrammed as a cone. The early levels are easily filled as they have little volume. The later levels are more difficult as going from C1 to C2 may involve more effort that going from A1 to B1. Also note that C2 isn't "educated native", but rather, "professionally proficient". Even at C2, one may feel they aren't quite where they want to be yet. What do I make of all this with regards to me French studies? Well, after I have assimilated the Assimil French courses, I'm eyeing the FSI Basic course with the a more global approach. E.G., start with tape 1 (the dialogue) for units 1 - 24. Read the grammar points to support the dialog. This would be somewhat like an Assimil approach. After getting through tape 1 for all units (actually, the review units don't have dialogs, so I think we may be talking about 20 recorded dialogs. Then the second pass could be tape 2, which appears to introduce some vocabulary and it starts the lexical drilling. The vocab would be my main interest in the second pass. Later, one can go through the course in a more systematic way. For me it is helpful to get a large chunk of the language in a small chunk of time. I recognize though that even after finishing the Assimil courses and the "tape 1 plus grammar" FSI approach, in addition to other listening and reading, my journey into French will only have just begun, although hopefully at that point, other methods will become more effective. The challenge with extensive reading is finding something you are interested in that isn't too far over your head. That's doable in a variety of ways, but certainly requires effort. On the vocabulary side of the equation, I think people who were blessed with strong memory skills like Iverson are simply using their strengths to do something that the less fortunate will have to do at some later point anyway. For beginners, I don't think Anki is a good use of time, unless you have a powerful memory. People with a powerful memory though I don't think are drawn to such tools. Anki is helpful later once you have a framework for the language and you want to begin filling in the holes in your vocabulary for which kinder methods haven't as of yet done the job. Edited by luke on 22 August 2012 at 10:19am 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 160 of 210 22 August 2012 at 10:25am | IP Logged | ||
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I also have great respect for s_allard, and to some extent I can even acknowledge that his strategy may work. As an inveterate traveller I know that you sometimes have to make do with whatever words you know in a language, and you still manage to get your point across.
It may however be worth investigating for a moment not what we mean, but why we mean it. My position (between travels) is that I study a lot of languages which I may never have the chance to use at home. I could join the emerging skype communities, but for someone who doesn't even own a mobile phone and who never ever use the telephone for small talk that would be a fairly large step. So for me the written language is much more important, and being able to write is more important than being able to have a conversation. I do learn languages to the level where I can have those conversations, and I start thinking in my languages long before that, but my first success criterion is not being able to say "good day, sir, my name is Iversen" in twenty languages. It is being able to open a book or magazine and read a text written for native speakers. And that means that I have to deal with the large vocabulary used in genuine texts written by native authors. Spoken fluency comes later, and it comes through activating a large reservoir of passive words and constructions -which can happen fairly quickly under favorable conditions - for instance during the first days of a trip abroad. On the other hand s_allard is a teacher. His pupils start out knowing absolutely nothing, and he tells them words and teaches them simple phrases which they can use in class. Besides he may ask them to read things, but my guess is that he then uses easy reader texts in order not to scare them away. Even though s_allard is the teacher and not a pupil it is a reasonable assumption that the classrom situation has coloured his views on strategy. As I have written before I do think that you can have conversations with a small vocabulary, as long as you have interlocutors who are willing to adapt. One point where I seriously doubt the 'small vocabulary great communicator' theory is the assumption that you can learn to express yourself with few grammatical errors and excellent pronunciation without also learning a sufficient amount of words at the same time. And a "sufficient amount of words" means that you know both the 'grammar' words and a fair number of 'content' words within your chosen activity radius. Which for instance could be the food items in a restaurant. But the same servant who can tell a customer about any item on the menu will need a passive vocabulary of thousands of words to read even the most dumbed-down newspaper.
If my memory was really strong I wouldn't need to write wordlists. I use those methods because I don't have patience to wait for some 'later point' while things seep into my brain through passive osmosis. I need a large vocabulary now, not tomorrow or next year - otherwise I can't read my books and magazines, and I can't understand what they say on TV or in a video. Edited by Iversen on 22 August 2012 at 10:35am 1 person has voted this message useful |
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