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How many words do we actually need? | ||
Tags: Number of words | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5432 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes  Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 33 of 115 25 January 2013 at 10:51pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I'let the experts duke it out over the usage of "quite." Personnally, I don't see a problem with "quite better" but maybe that's just me.
But I do want to come back to this issue of how to count multi-word verbs or so-called phrasal verbs. It is a big problem of course for the word counters, as is the problem of meaning. As I pointed out, the traditional solution is simply to count all the single tokens and disregard the various combinations or different meanings. So, "put up" is two words for counting purposes. The idiom "off the top of my head" counts as six words. But the real issue here - and the case of "quite" is also relevant - is that actual usage can introduce all kinds of variations and combinations in order to communicate meaning. I'm glad that someone pointed out all the things one can do with "go", minus the sarcasm. This is exactly why one can do a lot with relatively few words or tokens. When people read that you can speak a language quite decently with 500 words, many go bonkers because that seems impossible. It's not. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Wulfgar Senior Member United States Joined 4673 days ago 404 posts - 791 votes Speaks: English* | Message 34 of 115 26 January 2013 at 1:14am | IP Logged | |||||
Never heard it, but maybe it's a British expression. And I think "quite the best" is a non American usage, although I could see someone using it in advertising, or to tell a lie in general. "quite a bit better" is relatively common here though. Regarding trying to convince people that they can communicate well with 300, 500 or 1000 words - why do you keep doing it? Is it related to fluency, or conversing better than you listen? Does discussing this endlessly help you learn languages faster or better than just learning languages? You keep saying you aren't suggesting people stop after 300 words, so what exactly are you trying to accomplish here? 9 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6599 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 35 of 115 26 January 2013 at 9:25am | IP Logged | |||||
It IS related to that, though. if you learn 300 words and learn to use them really well, you'll be able to say a lot but you won't be able to understand as much as you can say. Including some combinations of known words, like phrasal verbs. But his opinion was that speaking better than you listen is impossible, hmm. (Because people who come to language exchanges always need to improve their speaking... that's why they come to language exchanges in the first place) Ahhh whatever. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| outcast Bilingual Heptaglot Senior Member China Joined 4951 days ago 869 posts - 1364 votes Speaks: Spanish*, English*, German, Italian, French, Portuguese, Mandarin Studies: Korean | Message 36 of 115 26 January 2013 at 9:46pm | IP Logged | |||||
No doubt my native abilities in Spanish and English helped me immensely in understanding French pronominals (one example always in my head is "plaindre vs se plaindre", because a friend learning French had such a hard time with how different they were and the reflexive thing with "se plaindre", but not being really reflexive confused him to no end), and German separable verbs... It's funny because it took me quite a long time to understand that so many of the separable verbs were in fact the first cousins of English phrasal verbs! "Auffahren (auf)" (to drive or crash into), sich umziehen, etc... for quite a while I saw no relation between the two. As for vocabulary, doesn't Assimil state you need 1500 words to speak? Or at least that's what I remember in their website. I haven't used Assimil, mainly it's not available in the public libraries in my area and I've done language learning on the cheap with courses I already had purchased (Living Language mainly). For me, the problem is I rarely enjoy small talk. A bit of it is fine, but I can't linger in that. I must speak about politics, or science or whatever. It's hard to do that with a basic vocabulary. So while I agree that if you only learn 2000 words it will be enough to live daily life with the language in question, for my personal situation that would not work. I'm sure that eventually limiting to 2000 words is not enough for anyone, and when you look back many may say "but you can't speak with so few words".. but you can, it's just that once you know 5000 or 10,000 words, you can't go back. It's human nature. 3 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 37 of 115 28 January 2013 at 11:01pm | IP Logged | |||||
I sometimes wonder if people actually read what I write, as opposed to thinking that if it's from @s_allard then it must be something weird. I am not in the business of convincing people of anything, especially here at HTLAL. My mantra has always been: Do what works for you. The OP, for those who did not read it, referred to a challenge, reported in the Guardian newspaper, about explaining complex subjects with less than 1000 words. It was not my invention. I'm just drawing people's attention to the challenge That said, I have said on many occasions that in learning to actually speak a language the acquisition of words must go hand in hand with the acquisition of the ability to use these words properly. It's a simple as that. I also stand by my statement that for languages like English, French and Spanish there is a threshold of around 300 to 500 words where one can begin to converse fluently on simple subjects. It's my observation and it is not the subject of this thread. I've never tried to convince other people to think likewise. Strangely, there are people who believe that I'm saying that you shouldn't learn more than those words. In fact, most people firmly believe that the key to what they call fluency is in learning as many words as possible. Since I've long given up trying to understand what people mean by fluency around here, I try to avoid the term myself. I'm much more interested in things like phonological, grammatical and lexical accuracy and speaking interaction than counting the number of words in one's Anki stack like a trophy. I'm always amazed at the number of people who claim to know a lot of words in French or Spanish and yet cannot have a simple informal conversation without falling all over themselves. They massacre the gender system, trip all over the verbs and the prepositions. These are the same people who believe that you have to be able to read Cien años de soledad to be able to have a conversation in Spaniish. Good luck. Give me 500 words and a good grasp of the grammar anytime. 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 38 of 115 28 January 2013 at 11:34pm | IP Logged | |||||
I totally agree. Nobody is suggesting you limit yourself to any number of words, be they 500 or 2000. You learn what you need to learn. This we can all agree on. That question out of the way, I'm glad that this poster picked up the the point of grammar about pronominal verbs in French. It resembles Spanish somewhat but is very different in certain respects. What happens is that most learners of French don't get beyond the very basics of the system and feel that to speak better French they must learn more words. In fact, if they understood the pronominal verb system better, they could get more bang out of the same verbs. One of my favorite statistics in French is that although French has over 12000 verbs, only 4 make up around 30% of all verbs in spoken French. Does this mean you learn only 4 verbs? Of course not. But you don't have to learn 12000 in order to speak French. It does mean that with around 100 verbs you could understand most French films perfectly. But you might have a hard time reading the novels of Marcel Proust. It all depends on what you want to do. Edited by s_allard on 28 January 2013 at 11:40pm 1 person has 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 39 of 115 29 January 2013 at 1:26pm | IP Logged | |||||
How often language learners, incapable of reading Cien Años de Soledad, can utter grammatically and lexically accurate Spanish small talk? Edited by petteri on 29 January 2013 at 1:26pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| tarvos Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member China likeapolyglot.wordpr Joined 4709 days ago 5310 posts - 9399 votes Speaks: Dutch*, English, Swedish, French, Russian, German, Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Afrikaans Studies: Greek, Modern Hebrew, Spanish, Portuguese, Czech, Korean, Esperanto, Finnish | Message 40 of 115 29 January 2013 at 1:30pm | IP Logged | |||||
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To be honest counting the amount of words to find out "how little do I need to learn to
get by" sounds extremely minimalist to me. Language learning for the lazy. I don't count my words really and I don't care. If I want to learn French I'll just use more French. And for the people that think I don't speak language x because I cannot read Proust; that's fine, I bet half of France has not read Proust either. I don't give a flying dingo's kidney what people consider fluent or how many words I need to know. I can talk to people in French and they understand me, and that's all *I* need to know. 3 persons have voted this message useful |
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