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How many words do we actually need? | ||
Tags: Number of words | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| Medulin Tetraglot Senior Member Croatia Joined 4670 days ago 1199 posts - 2192 votes  Speaks: Croatian*, English, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Norwegian, Hindi, Nepali | Message 73 of 115 31 January 2013 at 12:38am | IP Logged | |||||
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From
http://testyourvocab.com/blog.php Adult native speakers of English have a vocabulary of 32K word( familie)s. Edited by Medulin on 31 January 2013 at 12:42am 4 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5432 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 74 of 115 31 January 2013 at 5:10am | IP Logged | |||||
This sort of stuff is a perfect example of how vocabulary size can mean different things. I urge people to have a look at the test and see how it works. It takes less than 5 minutes to complete and estimates your so-called vocabulary size based on a small samples of words for which you know at least one definition. This so-called vocabulary size DOES NOT MEASURE HOW MANY WORDS YOU ACTUALLY USE. It measures at best how many words you recognize. How many of these words could you actually use and how many have you used in the last six months is another story. What does it mean that people from France have an average English vocabulary of 12528 words? Does that mean the the average French person can speak English at the C2 level? This has to be one the most useless measurements around. I stand by my statement that most native speakers regularly USE a vocabulary of around 2000 words regardless of the number of words that they may recognize. Edited by s_allard on 31 January 2013 at 6:48am 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5432 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 75 of 115 31 January 2013 at 8:02am | IP Logged | |||||
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As @emk pointed out, at the C1 level you must have a vast lexical repertoire and not make any significant errors. What about the C2 level? Does the lexical repertoire have to be more vast? Not so simple. Let's start by looking at how the test works. Here is a description of the test for the Spanish DELE C2:
"Test 3: Integrated skills: reading comprehension, and oral expression and interaction (20 minutes with 30 minutes for preparation). This test is made up of 3 tasks in which the candidate will have to first create a monologue (6-8 min.) based on various texts (800 words) and images or graphs about a specific topic: in the second task the candidate will maintain a formal dialogue with an interviewer expanding on and discussing previously presented information. Finally, in the third task, the candidate will carry an informal conversation about a topic given based on 3 or 4 news headlines." What are the examiners looking for in the 3 tasks? Keep in mind that the candidate is given a text of 800 words to work with. Right away there is some given working vocabulary. The first task is a monologue based on the material given. Here the examiner is looking at the ability of the candidate to organize, synthesize and present the material in a coherent and presumably fluent and elegant manner. Is the examiner looking for proof of a huge vocabulary? No. He or she is far more interested in the use of idiomatic speech and the ability to produce accurate flowing discourse. The second task is a formal debate where the candidate has to answer questions and debate points with an examiner. Is a vast lexical repertoire important? Yes but in the sense of being useful for a formal debate which requires the use of more formal language register. Again, the examiner is looking for how well the student is able to accurately engage the dialogue with all the associated discourse markers and rhetorical effects that indicate mastery of the language. As for the third task, it's pretty much the same idea but on a more informal register. Is vocabulary size the most important success factor here? Will you get the opportunity to show off your 5000 words of Spanish? The answer to both questions is no. I believe that at this rarefied level of language proficiency, the most important factor at the lexical level is the use of idioms and the ability to use the logical constructs in the language with things like prepositions and conjunctions that may require sophisticated verb forms. In my opinion the key word here is sophistication. Sophisticated language, whether it's English, French or Spanish, does not mean verbose. It's elegant, fluent, accurate and varied. This does not require a huge vocabulary. What turns the examiner on? What makes the examiner sit up and say to herself after two minutes, "This guy really knows his stuff"? It's the candidate who comes out of the gate with clear idiomatic discourse that approximates what a native speaker would sound like. And maybe throw in a conditional phrase construction that shows that the candidate can master a complex structure. Or maybe an allusion to a proverb. All of that would blow the examiner away. What turns the examiner off? All kinds of fancy vocabulary that is cobbled together in a stuttering discourse that hurts the ears of the examiner. Again, the basic strategy is to play to your strengths. You know certain verb forms really well. You use those. You know a bunch of good idiomatic expressions. You figure out a way to throw throw those in. The same thing with technical vocabulary. Use what you know. Don't wander off into unknown territory where you'll be guessing and inevitably setting yourself up for major mistakes. 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Steffen Newbie Germany Joined 4973 days ago 27 posts - 63 votes Studies: German* | Message 76 of 115 31 January 2013 at 8:44am | IP Logged | |||||
So someone who says "Some spokes of my bike are cracked" instead of "You know, the metal things between the middle part of the round things under my bike and the, er, part with the soft stuff outside, yeah, they're broken", is an above-average native speaker? Or someone who is capable of saying: "I sent a letter of application to the municipal council of my hometown in response to their job advert and hope to get an interview soon" instead of "I want a job with the big guys in the town where I live and now I'm waiting until they ask me to answer their questions" must have graduated from Oxford or Harvard? And of course, someone who writes in a letter, "What upsets me about human trafficking is that it involves so much anguish for the poor souls who have to flee their country of origin" instead of "The problem with those bad guys who take money for getting people from other countries across the part of one country where it is close to another one is that those poor guys are really, really sad", must be a professor, right? Well, I don't think so. Less than 2000 words won't get you far, and the majority of people here will happily learn as much in four month's time. Edited by Steffen on 31 January 2013 at 8:53am 8 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| petteri Triglot Senior Member Finland Joined 4934 days ago 117 posts - 208 votes Speaks: Finnish*, English, Swedish Studies: German, Spanish | Message 77 of 115 31 January 2013 at 11:43am | IP Logged | |||||
I am not interested on how many words a typical cleaner, truck driver, shop assistant or other regular Joe uses. That is not my world, not in any language. At the moment I know two languages in which I have useful active skills, Finnish and English. I dislike small talk, my job requires a high command of any used language and my hobbies include debating on intellectual subjects on Internet boards as well as language learning. In my case moderate active languages skills are practically useless. Unless I can debate on French operation in Mali, vocabulary thresholds or intricacies of education programs I will most likely keep my mount shut. On the other hand I can enjoy my passive skills being able to read and listen. Edited by petteri on 31 January 2013 at 12:25pm 4 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| beano Diglot Senior Member United KingdomRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4624 days ago 1049 posts - 2152 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Russian, Serbian, Hungarian | Message 78 of 115 31 January 2013 at 2:08pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I don't believe for a minute that a native speaker of average intellect uses no more than 2000 words in everyday life. It has to be far more than that.
Your average English-speaking Joe Bloggs on the street may not use many big words in the course of normal speech but they will still know many nouns and adjectives at their disposal that even the most educated person from abroad isn't familiar with. My wife moved to the UK as a fluent (non-native) speaker of English, she did business deals in the language. Yet I reckon she has learned hundreds of simple words from me and my family since her arrival. Conversely, my late father in law was not an educated man and did manual labour all his life, yet his German vocabulary absolutely dwarfed mine. Edited by beano on 31 January 2013 at 2:15pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6705 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 79 of 115 31 January 2013 at 3:27pm | IP Logged | |||||
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A test I did long ago on everything I wrote in English here at HTLAL through a 3 months period gave a result close to 2500 head words, i.e. counting just one form of each word and disregarding idiomatic expressions and compounds. The exact number isn't important because I probably have discussed other things outside HTLAL during this time, but given that I write a lot and like to use arcane words 2500 head words isn't much.
However this only represents a part of the words I could have used if need be, so even my active vocabulary is and was larger. How much larger is anyone's guess, but the better I know a language the easier it will be for me to mobilize the words I need to express myself. The only hint I could get about the size of my active vocabulary would be to run through some selected pages in a dictionary and ask myself whether I truly and honestly could see myself using the words on those pages, and as any subjective evalution this number would be quite unreliable. But even the number of words I potentially might use (= my active vocabulary) is just a fraction of my passive vocabulary, which consists of all the words I can recognize and understand. I have made several estimates of my passive vocabulary (based on sample pages from dictionaries), and with Websters' bulky unabridged monster I reached an estimate of 51.600 known (or guessable) words, which is far more than I would ever be able to remember in a concrete situation, but not necessarily more than your average native Joe in the streets would know. This number included words which I actually haven't ever seen, but can understand because they are derived from known items through some regular mechanism - in my latest assessment I made a special category for 'guessable' words. In every language I try to learn I would much prefer to know so many words that I could use Steffen's highbrow sentences, but we all have to start somewhere, and of course I could survive a holiday somewhere saying things like "the metal things between the middle part of the round things under my bike and the, er, part with the soft stuff outside". Edited by Iversen on 31 January 2013 at 4:02pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5432 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 80 of 115 31 January 2013 at 3:32pm | IP Logged | |||||
I get this reaction all the time and it summarizes what many if not most people think. The myth is that a so-called small active vocabulary is associated with low social class, lack of formal education, the inability to discuss complex ideas, etc. And people get very hot under the collar because they feel offended because it seems I'm saying that their 20,000 word vocabulary is useless. Let's look at this calmly. How many people have ever measured over a given period how many different word tokens actually came out of their mouths? People make all kinds of wild claims about all the words they know, i.e. they can recognize in conversations, in the media, on the Internet, etc. But how many have they used themselves? As I have written, for those who care to read, some of us work in word-rich professions such as teaching. Most of us also have occupational jargons or terminologies. At the other extreme some people may be quite isolated or work in manual professions and do not use a wide vocabulary. The dean of the law faculty uses more different and sophisticated words than the person who cleans her office. That's totally true. That's not the question. Regardless of the number of words you may recognize when you read a newspaper, how many of them have you used in the past week or month or year? For example when I look at today's home web page of the Guardian, I can "understand" every single word I see. How many different words are there on this page? How many of these have I used in the last month? Here's a sentence: "Is it possible to cook delicious pulled pork without the smoke and drama of a barbecue pit?" When was the last time I used "pulled pork" or "barbecue pit"? Not in the last year. They are not part of my active vocabulary. The point of all this is that once you look at the facts of what people really use, not what they recognize or think they recognize, most people tend to use only a very small set of all the words of a language. Edited by s_allard on 31 January 2013 at 3:45pm 1 person has voted this message useful |
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