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How many words to speak? | ||
Tags: Number of words | Speaking | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| fiolmattias Triglot Groupie Sweden geocities.com/fiolmaRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6687 days ago 62 posts - 129 votes  Speaks: Swedish*, English, Arabic (Written) | Message 241 of 309 22 September 2014 at 6:33am | IP Logged | ||||||||
Sure! But if you are going to ask a man what he does for a living and you only knows those 28 words (+the question words) you're in trouble. Or extremly lucky that he does just that for a living. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5428 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 242 of 309 22 September 2014 at 7:02am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Part of the difference between emk's and my approach to developing productive vocabularies lies in the
difference in objectives. emk's primary objective is to understand the widest range of French movies. Therefore it only makes sense to study the most frequent words to be found in such movies My goal, not mine personally, but that of my students, is to speak French well as quickly as possible. Therefore, our approach is to learn the vocabulary as needed. A major part of the strategy for learning to speak is to study transcriptions of spoken French. Nothing is wrong with reading great literature and lots of extensive reading, but if speaking is the goal, why not concentrate on studying speaking. That's why I love the France Bienvenue site. It's raw and real spoken French.One of the wonderful things about the site is the many explanations of grammar, idioms and usage that the authors add to the transcriptions. I use other sites as well to illustrate other varieties of spoken French. It could be a conference, a newscast, even television and radio commercials. The vocabulary of the students progresses with the material. I would never suggest learning a bunch of useless words just because they are on a frequency list. I say learn a word when you encounter it by looking it up in a dictionary. So let's say that my first 300 words are derived from three conversations in France Bienvenue. That's a hell of a good start. I have three conversations to work with. I can study the speaking strategies. I can see the patterns. I can extrapolate to other speaking situations. I certainly don't care whether these words are among the 400 most common words of French movies. Of course, I don't stop at 300. If I read something that I feel that I can incorporate into my active vocabulary, I pick it up, I expand as I go along. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| robarb Nonaglot Senior Member United States languagenpluson Joined 5057 days ago 361 posts - 921 votes Speaks: Portuguese, English*, German, Italian, Spanish, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, French Studies: Mandarin, Danish, Russian, Norwegian, Cantonese, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Greek, Latin, Nepali, Modern Hebrew | Message 243 of 309 22 September 2014 at 8:44am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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All the words on emk's list of 400 most common words in French movies are also common in real French
conversations. If you wanted to learn the 400 most useful words for natural French conversations, one approach would be to take a corpus of natural French conversations and learn the 400 most frequent words in that corpus. This, by definition, would give you the highest % coverage of natural French conversations. Instead, s_allard suggests to learn the words as they are encountered. This is a viable strategy, but not because the words learned this way are particularly useful. Instead, the advantage is that the words are learned in context, so it should be easier to acquire them more quickly than an equal number of words from a word list. This strategy combines vocabulary learning with input, providing an integrated approach that feels natural. Still, the 400 most common words in movies will certainly have a very high overlap with the 400 most common words in natural conversation. In the hypothetical scenario where you can only learn 400 words and have to stop, the first 400 you pick up from observing conversations may not serve you well. Too many spots will be wasted by words specific to the topics you happened to read about first, and many core words will have to be missed to make room for them. On the other hand, maximum % coverage is probably not the best thing for early speaking. If you only learn the most common words that give you the most coverage, you end up with almost no words that refer to specific things. Instead you get a core of function words, connectors, and basic verbs that can be used on any topic, plus a few words for people and such. You end up with the ability to build the backbone of any sentence, but the crucial content words are not covered. For really early speaking it's better to have a more bare-bones version of the core, with some frequent but nonessential words removed, and some infrequent words added about the topic you're going to try to talk about. If you learn your words by studying conversations about that topic, you get pretty close to this, so the strategy seems like a good one. Edited by robarb on 22 September 2014 at 8:46am 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Bao Diglot Senior Member Germany tinyurl.com/pe4kqe5 Joined 5764 days ago 2256 posts - 4046 votes Speaks: German*, English Studies: French, Spanish, Japanese, Mandarin | Message 244 of 309 22 September 2014 at 11:24am | IP Logged | ||||||||
Ah, the joy of one's questions being ignored.
I gather that you don't know any substantial German.
I seem to gather that when you say word you mean what is generally called word family and not lexical item, and that you ignore lexical items in your count with distinct meaning that consist of known lexical items out of those 300 basic word families?
Which all are, obviously, part of your set of basic word families. Edited by Bao on 22 September 2014 at 11:26am 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6595 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 245 of 309 22 September 2014 at 12:20pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
Far less viable outside of an immersion situation, imo. At least if it's about learning from conversations. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5428 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 246 of 309 22 September 2014 at 12:49pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
I love it. I have been accused of many things -including claiming that 300 words is all you need to learn to speak like a native - but this is the first time that I've been accused of not knowing any substantial German. I'm guilty as accused. Bao has called me out. I know no German. I don't recall ever mentioning German in the thread so far. It seems to me that hitherto we have been focusing on French, English and, very remotely, Spanish. But I may be wrong. To avoid any further confusion, let me reiterate that my remark on the use of prefixes during the speaking test for the French C2 speaking test applies only to French and not to German. Edited by s_allard on 22 September 2014 at 1:10pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5428 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 247 of 309 22 September 2014 at 1:05pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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As I am about to start reading the book Cinco horas con Mario by Mario Delibes, I got to thinking about how
to deal with the inevitable unknown vocabulary that I'll encounter. Given the discussion we've had so far, there seems to be three approaches: 1. My usual approach. Start reading, stop when I meet a word I don't know and look it up in the dictionary. Make a flashcard or an Anki entry if I feel like it. 2. Peruse my big fat Oxford Spanish-English dictionary and try to learn as many words in advance. This is the brute force approach. 3. Find a Spanish 20,000 Spanish word frequency list and look up the words I don't know. The big advantages of approaches 2 and 3 is that I won't have to stop when reading the novel. But there's a trade-off here because I have to spend time studying the words. It might be worth a try. Edited by s_allard on 22 September 2014 at 1:08pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
 emk Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5530 days ago 2615 posts - 8806 votes Speaks: English*, FrenchB2 Studies: Spanish, Ancient Egyptian Personal Language Map | Message 248 of 309 22 September 2014 at 1:21pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
These phrases are essentially just another form of vocabulary. Rather than words, they're fixed phrases. However, I'm a little skeptical that tirer par les cheveux is going to help you much when your vocabulary is still limited to 300 words, because: 1. You'd need to know cheveux, and it's actually far more likely to show up on a 1000-word list than a 300-word list. 2. There's not much point in mastering idiomatic sayings when French conversations still look like this:
Now, I agree that it's useful to master the basics, and to know lots of fancy idioms. But our hypothetical student has far bigger problems at the 300-word level: Most real-world conversation is basically just a blur. They certainly can't work with native materials, and if they buy a grammar book, it's hard to learn grammar when the example sentences are full of XXXXXXXX. To learn idioms, you need to know the words they use. To learn grammar, you need to know the words in the example sentences. To benefit from an excellent accent and fluid speech, you need to understand the native-speed responses that you'll get. I notice the importance of vocabulary a lot with Egyptian. It doesn't matter how well I understand adverbial sentences if I don't know two or three of the most important words. But once I know the words, the grammar can usually be puzzled out, or at least accepted as a mysterious new data point which may be clarified by later examples. Edited by emk on 22 September 2014 at 1:22pm 3 persons have voted this message useful |
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