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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 17 of 210 16 August 2012 at 4:30pm | IP Logged | ||
I don't know if it's a false impression of mine, but I've always thought that most of the people who are into vocabulary study are also into grammar books. There are a few who use vocabulary study to avoid grammar, but are they the majority? In fact, some people study both vocabulary and grammar and still don't speak comfortably, so presumably there's something else that goes into speaking with ease. Just practice, perhaps? Edited by frenkeld on 16 August 2012 at 4:44pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| atama warui Triglot Senior Member Japan Joined 4701 days ago 594 posts - 985 votes Speaks: German*, English, Japanese | Message 18 of 210 16 August 2012 at 4:39pm | IP Logged | ||
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See I know 8000+ words in Japanese (word families), but I constantly come across shows on TV I struggle with. I watch documentaries, soaps, news. I chat (text, skype).. and I feel I need a lot more. Listening to a normal, themed podcast made for natives, makes me encounter quite the number of unknown words.
When I actually don't understand something, idiomatic usage or unknown grammar is rarely the problem - maybe 1-2%. It's vocab. 300 words? Sure, you can talk. But will you understand the answers? I doubt that. Edited by atama warui on 16 August 2012 at 4:40pm 6 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Jappy58 Bilingual Super Polyglot Senior Member United States Joined 4638 days ago 200 posts - 413 votes Speaks: Spanish*, Guarani*, Arabic (Levantine), Arabic (Egyptian), Arabic (Maghribi), Arabic (Written), French, English, Persian, Quechua, Portuguese Studies: Modern Hebrew | Message 19 of 210 16 August 2012 at 4:51pm | IP Logged | ||
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When I was studying Arabic, I didn't count vocabulary until after I had studied MSA for about 3-4 years, and at that point, I knew about 7,000+ terms, and could understand most informative media (news, several documentaries). By the time I concluded by Arabic studies (with Egyptian, Moroccan, and Levantine), 2 years later, I had about 16,000 words - at the time, I put myself at a C2 in MSA and a C1 in each of the dialects I had studied. Most of these words were still from Classical Arabic, though some were also loan words from other languages. Since then, I've read a lot of Arabic literature and have had more experience with dialects, thus my vocabulary has increased greatly. I still learn new words and expressions, however, despite it stopped being my target language eight years ago.
In all, I'm sure 300 words would be sufficient - for limited purposes. It's not just about being understood, but understanding as well, as someone earlier pointed out. Sure, if you were asking simple questions, perhaps the answers would be simple, but there could still be some struggling involved. I generally, however, don't count my vocabulary, at least not frequently. 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 20 of 210 16 August 2012 at 5:42pm | IP Logged | ||
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As @Iversen has cogently pointed out, there are possible reasons for wanting to assess the size of one'e vocabulary. As an intellectual pursuit, it can be interesting. Similarly, counting the number of cards in your Anki deck can be motivating. I will not dispute that.
Neither will I dispute the fact that you need a huge passive vocabulary to read newspapers from cover to cover in your target language. And if you want to score highly on those standardized language tests for university admission, a large vocabulary is better than a small one. I hope that I don't come across as being against having a large vocabulary. That would be silly. That's not what we are talking about. First of all, I'm talking about actually speaking the language, that what comes out of your mouth when you say you can speak a language. Hopefully what comes out is well formed, sounds good and resembles something a native speaker would say. The second issue is how many word families do you need to do this. I say a low figure, or to be more precise, whatever it takes. In fact, I wouldn't even worry about it because it is difficult to calculate and it will grow spontaneously with exposure to the language. The third issue, and in my mind the really important one, is how you use the vocabulary that you have or are acquiring. I would think that most people here at HTLAL don't believe that learning a language consists of learning a bunch of words and having the biggest Anki stack around. Does your 5,000 Anki deck of Spanish mean that you speak better Spanish than the person with a 500 deck? I believe not. In fact, I think they are two separate and, indeed, unrelated questions. My contention is that the real challenge in learning a language is how to spontaneously put the words together properly. Other than for some form of personal satisfaction, I don't see the point of pouring through a dictionary to see how many words I recognize. Does recognizing the words ser and estar in a Spanish dictionary mean that I can use them properly? Sure I can read them and understand them when spoken. But when I open my mouth, why do I, like many people, hesitate or stutter? The answer is that I have not yet mastered the respective uses of ser and estar. Similarly, para and por still give me trouble after all these years. Not much as before, mind you, but I still have my moments of doubt. Why do many French speakers have a problem with the verbs let and leave? Why do some Spanish speakers say things like, "I go for there."? All of these problems are related to difficulties of mastering the subtle distinctions in the use of words. It's amazing the amount of grief associated with just those two words para and por. Perhaps I can summarize the whole thing by saying that I believe in quality over quantity. It's not the best comparison, but I think readers get the idea. It's how you use the words rather than the sheer number. This brings me to last point where I have to pick a bone with @Iversen. A relatively small vocabulary size does not mean speaking in a simplistic or unsophisticated master. Quite the contrary, I think one can be very sophisticated and subtle with few words if you truly master the fine distinctions that can be made with a few words. And of course, one can use other resources, like intonation, to convey subtle distinctions. A small vocabulary limits the range of things you can talk about easily. For certain topics I never acquired the vocabulary, so I am uncomfortable talking about them. And this applies to my native language. I'm always learning new words or new uses as my exposure to new areas of activity progresses. Edited by s_allard on 16 August 2012 at 5:46pm 4 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| outcast Bilingual Heptaglot Senior Member China Joined 4949 days ago 869 posts - 1364 votes Speaks: Spanish*, English*, German, Italian, French, Portuguese, Mandarin Studies: Korean | Message 21 of 210 16 August 2012 at 6:19pm | IP Logged | ||
I have never done a vocabulary count, neither for serious nor for fun purposes. Mostly I'm too lazy, but also because I think in part like you. I absolutely agree that it is crucial to know how, for example "s'embrasser" is used in French. For example today I learned it can be a figure of speech for describing a situation getting more tense, or escalated. "La situation s'est embrasée lundi soir quand les policiers, confrontés à une centaine de jeunes émeutiers, ont essuyé des tirs de chevrotine et des jets de projectiles." What I would say is that if I had to choose between bulk and quality, I would choose quality, fewer words but knowing how to use them correctly. However, because of my personal goals, a large vocabulary (large for a foreign speaker), is not an option. So I choose both. Big challenge, no doubt. 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 22 of 210 16 August 2012 at 7:19pm | IP Logged | ||
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For those who agree that grammar and usage are very important, but also want a large vocabulary, I'd like to post the links to A. Arguelles' two-part lecture on vocabulary acquisition through extensive reading: part 1, part 2.
I posted these recently in another thread, but that post got wiped out in the forum crash, and this seems like a suitable place to repost, since he does address the question of the requisite vocabulary size. Edited by frenkeld on 16 August 2012 at 7:24pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Peregrinus Senior Member United States Joined 4492 days ago 149 posts - 273 votes Speaks: English* | Message 23 of 210 16 August 2012 at 10:06pm | IP Logged | ||
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These types of conversations lend themselves to false dichotomies and talking at cross purposes. The bottom line is that to reach a good level, however one defines that, of conversational proficiency, one is going to have to learn several things and put them together seamlessly for oral production:
1) pronunciation/accent 2) vocabulary 3) grammar 4) usage, including idiomatics/lexical chunks/etc. And then there is the question of what is the most efficient manner/method/order to learn them. All this has been mentioned in the past in other threads. What it seems to me that Iverson has consistently argued in this and previous discussions, is that one needs to learn the individual words first and then at least the basic grammar, before one can really learn usage. Because idiomatic/phrasal meaning is at least partially dependent on the individual words contained therein, and otherwise one cannot distinguish between set phrases and patterns. I personally agree with this, and would rather first learn just 500 words and all the grammar, before proceeding to more vocabulary and usage. s_allard however, in previous threads going back a couple years or so, as well as here, has argued for learning phrases/usage/sentences ab inicio, without worrying as much about grammar or learning a large vocabulary. But as he notes, he does not advocate just stopping there and not continuing to learn even more vocabulary. But s_allard seems to be insisting on a very low vocabulary threshold before learning usage, as in 300+ instead of 1000-2000+. There is no magical number, but it would seem there has to be a critical mass of vocabulary and grammar that has to be reached before one can really learn usage. And for that purpose, the difference between the first 300 and 2000 words is far greater than between 2000 and 10000 to my mind, simply because 300 does not get you very far out of function words, the most common verbs, and more common nouns. Now those 300 words constitute the majority of words in the sentences/phrases I mentioned mining from a Spanish dictionary, but by themselves they don't allow much conversation beyond pleasantries and simple answers. Learning 10000 words without stopping to learn and practice usage along the way will lead to poor conversational ability. But the threshold for starting to properly learn that usage is higher than a few hundred words. The main point here to me, is the importance of gaining enough vocabulary to really be able to learn usage well, say 2000+ words, and then concentrating on usage for a long time before continuing on. And by concentrate I mean practice speaking, even if only to oneself. When I look at an Anki card with a phrase, I try to conjure up a conversation fragment with it, and with some changes, before plowing on to the next card. Otherwise all I am doing is passively learning set phrases. The reason people advocate figures of 2000+ words is that it seems to be the minimal threshold for comprehensible input, both aurally and for reading. Extensive reading, mentioned by frenkeld above, and extensive listening both depend on comprehensible input. What the pattern/variation/substitution drills of FSI type courses lack is including idiomatic and prepositional phrases as units to be changed, instead of just individual verbs and nouns. The key to learning to use por/para, estar/ser, etc. well, is simply practice in speaking with them. And interior and spoken dialogues with an imaginary person are great for that. Take a phrase/chunk and use it several ways in such imagined conversations. One could also just take a course's dialogues and practice giving different responses on a sentence by sentence basis using those phrases/chunks/prepositions, instead of just parroting the dialogue's responses. A huge difficulty for aural comprehensible input is the lack of sources for same, graded or not. I have looked in vain for large repositories of things like telenovela scripts or other such sources for Spanish. What I find to be great sources, though sparse, are recorded oral interviews, and written interviews in magazines, as they are both conversational and on topics other than the melodramatic trivialities of telenovelas. Extensive reading of popular rather than literary novels, especially those on "slice of life" topics that women especially like (not romance novels per se), might also be good sources too, though I have not tried them. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| socs Newbie United States Joined 4598 days ago 1 posts - 2 votes Studies: Japanese, Mandarin | Message 24 of 210 16 August 2012 at 10:25pm | IP Logged | ||
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I'm probably a case study for this topic.
My chinese I learned around the house with my wife and never studied it for even 1 minute. I can speak about easy simple things around the house using my set phrases smoothly. Probably only know around 100 words and phrases but can use them very well. Of course can't really read or talk about much outside of house oriented stuff. My japanese on the other hand I studied using just reading and listening with limited interaction with a lot of effort. I would say I know some where between 5k-8k words passively and can read books with a dictionary. My speaking is ok and I can say what I want to say about most things with lots of mistakes and not very smoothly in some cases. So it's definitely an interesting topic but if I had a choice I would prefer to lose the fluency I have with the 100 words if I could have the deeper ability I have with the larger vocabulary. I've noticed with listening and shadowing and interaction you can quickly get the fluency back if needed on a narrow set of phrases fairly easy. On second thought the 100 fluent words and phrases does give another great benefit: Great confidence and Pronunciation knowledge Edited by socs on 16 August 2012 at 10:37pm 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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