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Is counting your vocabulary size useless? | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| frenkeld Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 6943 days ago 2042 posts - 2719 votes  Speaks: Russian*, English Studies: German | Message 193 of 210 25 August 2012 at 4:52pm | IP Logged | |||||
Serpent, how much much Polish grammar had you studied before that trip? Any textbooks, grammars or audiocourses? I am asking because I am curious if LR, reading, and shadowing alone were sufficient to get you this far - I haven't yet seen a clear case study of how well LR works by itself, i.e., without formal study. Edited by frenkeld on 26 August 2012 at 4:22am 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 194 of 210 26 August 2012 at 2:46am | IP Logged | |||||
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The mechanics of a conversation is also relevant so I can't follow Frenkeld's advice about dropping the word "smalltalk" and just speak about "speaking skills". In a typical "smalltalk" session you will have lots of half sentences, botched sentences, interruptions, interjections and - yes! - grunts. I referred to smalltalk and the ability to deal with interruptions because these things most clearly represent things you can't learn from reading and writing - whereas talking in the same kind of sentences you would use when writing is just one step further than writing.
It is part of a general quibble I have with those official scales, namely that they assume that the most central AND therefore the first activity you should learn is small talk, i.e. speaking in simple terms about personal matters and responding to your interlocutors. But for me it would be simpler to discuss science and history than baby care and personal relations, simply because that's the kind of language I'm used to from my work with the written language. Just as it is easier to understand news broadcasts and scientific lectures than 'realistic' films and informal discussions among other people - which makes the ability to eavesdrop in a bus the pinnacle of listening skills for people with my kind of learning sequence. 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 195 of 210 26 August 2012 at 5:14am | IP Logged | |||||
Different people can speak their native language quite differently too. Some speak smoothly in complete sentences in all situations, others speak their mother tongue using half-sentences, also in all situations. The point I am trying to get at is that one can speak in well-formed sentences to people who don't, so the desire to speak in complete sentences instead of grunts isn't in itself an impediment to ordinary conversation, which would be more a question of (a) understanding one's interlocutor and (b) knowing the relevant vocabulary to answer back.
I am a strong believer in at least knowing the right word for "toilet" if you ever plan to travel. I also agree that you don't have to learn it before other vocabulary of interest to you. But what if someone like you had a native tutor familiar with history and science and spoke to him from the very beginning? That person would probably still end up with well-developed conversation skills, it's just that he would focus on some of the vocabulary and idioms of more ordinary interactions later. I don't know if s_allard would approve of this approach - he just might. Edited by frenkeld on 26 August 2012 at 5:22am 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 196 of 210 26 August 2012 at 3:07pm | IP Logged | |||||
Frankly, with all due respect for @iversen, I think he doesn't not know what spoken language really is. It is true that there is written language that is spoken. Things like speeches, lectures and conferences. And some people like professors and lawyers can speak like a book. But when these same people, and everybody else, interact spontaneously with other speakers, we see all kinds of phenomena that have been studied extensively. I wouldn't used a derogatory term like botched sentences as a scientific term; I would prefer the term incomplete sentences. People change their mind in mid-sentence; they use fillers and all kinds of discourse markers. They make mistakes and backtrack to correct. And of course they make all kinds of sounds: interjections, grunts, guffaws and laughter. They use intonation extensively. They also make all kinds of gestures with parts of their body. This is spoken language, whether we like it or not. I'm sure Einstein spoke like this when chatting with colleagues and students. Everybody--well nearly everybody--speaks this way in informal conversation. A totally separate issue that @iversen raises is this idea that small talk is restricted to simple conversation "speaking in simple terms about personal matters and responding to your interlocutors." Small talk is more than that. I suggest that people look up the definition of small talk in Wikipedia. The fundamental characteristic of small talk is that there is no transactional component, i.e. no explicit purpose for talking other than talking and social interaction. I realize that the idea of talking just for talking and social interaction may be anathema for some people, however, we must admit that many people enjoy this in certain circumstances. Most people enjoy an evening of good company with plenty of witty and entertaining conversation full of of bons mots. But there are certainly the Ebenezer Scrooge types who say "Bah humbug, what a waste of time. We should be talking about serious things." I believe there is a place and time for everything. As one who has attended a fair share of scientific meetings around the world, I have seen eminent researchers give complex talks in long sentences in the morning and carry on in small talk in the discotheque in the evening with cute graduate students. Small talk is not simplified language at the A1 level. Small talk at C2 is still small talk; it's just more sophisticated. The key issue here is this idea that a form of expression is more valuable than another. And the subtext is that a limited vocabulary means that you can only indulge in very simple small talk. And perhaps the fundamental issue is really the question, "Is speaking with other people important?" If speaking is secondary to reading and writing, then anything that does not resemble the written word is spurious. 5 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Peregrinus Senior Member United States Joined 4492 days ago 149 posts - 273 votes Speaks: English* | Message 197 of 210 26 August 2012 at 9:26pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Despite my differences with s_allard in this thread regarding 300ish vs 2500-5000 words as a basis for being able to learn usage well, he makes some excellent points in his post above.
The point about the lack of a transactional component in small talk is particularly important, not just for defining small talk, but also for evaluating whether a particular course or method, beginner or intermediate, will accomplish one's primary goal in learning a language. Really each of us has a set of goals, though the order differs individually. If Iversen rated the ability to be able to engage in effortless extended "small talk" higher than he actually seems to do, then some other goal would then be at the pinnacle of his set of goals, the small talk one having been accomplished earlier. So this thread for me really comes down to: 1) What level of vocabulary knowledge + grammar is required for learning usage really well (knowledge of a very large number of lexical patterns and knowing which can be altered); 2) Where in one's language path does one place learning usage well, earlier or later. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| ZombieKing Bilingual Diglot Senior Member Canada Joined 4527 days ago 247 posts - 324 votes Speaks: English*, Mandarin* | Message 198 of 210 27 August 2012 at 12:14am | IP Logged | |||||
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All I know is that counting the number of words I know in Chinese, as well as the number of characters I know is motivating. So in that sense, it does have it's uses. It can make people feel like their improving and give them more motivation to continue studying :)
3 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 199 of 210 27 August 2012 at 12:21am | IP Logged | |||||
I should've added that before/during the trip I read only a fat book that used Ilya Frank's method - and I waited before I could do that without worrying about pronouncing things incorrectly to myself. 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 200 of 210 27 August 2012 at 3:06am | IP Logged | |||||
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With my interest piqued by this thread, I decided to start paying more attention to conversations around me. This morning I was sitting in the breakfast area of a hotel, listening in on an English-language conversation between three people. The subject was whether it was safe to visit Mexico with all the drug violence there, but the subject is not really relevant here.
This was a typical idle conversation one runs into while traveling. What struck me is that I didn't hear grunts, and that they were speaking in sentences, not half-sentences. They were not necessarily very long sentences, but they were sentences. There was no Demosthenes among them, it was definitely small talk in content as well as form. Which got me wondering just where one would look for that infamous truncated speech and how much that particular aspect is the real challenge facing a learner. One would certainly not need anything beyond standard English to follow this particular conversation. Edited by frenkeld on 27 August 2012 at 3:33am 1 person has voted this message useful |
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