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Ziad Fazah - does he exist? | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Polyglots | ( Topic Closed) |  |
| Journeyer Triglot Senior Member United States tristan85.blogspot.c Joined 6871 days ago 946 posts - 1110 votes  Speaks: English*, Spanish, German Studies: Sign Language | Message 217 of 377 18 September 2006 at 12:57pm | IP Logged | ||
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Translator2 is right, it depends on your goals. For my immediate goals are to be conversational, although that is kind of a grey area because I don't want to have limited, superficial conversations. I'm not looking to write poetry where I need a grasp of flowery expressions, although that knowledge is...I guess you could call it a long term goal, or passive goal, until I decide that's what I really want.
I think 5000 or 6000 should certainly be a foothold though. It's true that you never stop learning a language, and so 3.000 is a fairly small number. I think personally, if Ziad Fazah he can speak his other languages as well as his Spanish, English, Portuguese (I'm sure, although I can't speak it), and I suspect German, then he has underestimated that number. Because even if he did set out to learn 2.000-3.000 words (20-30 words a day for 2.5 months is also part of his method, I believe), that's all neat and nifty, but if you continue using your target language with a X.000 vocabulary as a foundation, you are going to eventually learn even more words through watching TV/movies, reading books or the paper or cereal boxes, or via conversing, and will eventually end up with an even larger vocabulary. So perhaps he meant 2.000-3.000 would be good start. I'm still shooting for 6.000, though. =D Edited by Journeyer on 18 September 2006 at 12:58pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Dave M Groupie United States bfmfightwear.com Joined 6929 days ago 56 posts - 63 votes | Message 218 of 377 18 September 2006 at 9:50pm | IP Logged | ||
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translator2
If you're vocabulary lists of 40,000 words are only scratching the surface of advanced then I think you are a snob. 3000 words should get you by in most conversations. If you think that you are only fluent if can debate 16th century German philosophy versus modernd day existetialism and nihilism as fluent, then I feel sorry for you as you are truly one of those people who goes to movies to see scenes where the directors erred in continuity. Im sure my Portuguese vocabulary exceeds well over 3000 words but I have friendsa who probably speak around their and they do just fine in their fluency. Lighten up and take a bubble bath your standards are not only unrealistic they are arrogant and priggish 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Spasty Groupie United States Joined 6872 days ago 92 posts - 113 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish, Arabic (Written), Mandarin, French | Message 219 of 377 18 September 2006 at 10:10pm | IP Logged | ||
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What 3000 words does he learn? Is there a list?
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| lengua Senior Member United States polyglottery.wordpre Joined 6687 days ago 549 posts - 595 votes Studies: French, Italian, Spanish, German | Message 220 of 377 18 September 2006 at 10:10pm | IP Logged | ||
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We've actually been having this discussion (how many words do you need) in a thread in the 'language materials and tapes' forum under the thread titled '2500 words is enough' or something like that. Iversen counted every word he'd written since he joined the site (with some 400+ posts), and he found he'd only used 2,400 different words. I completely agree that once you hit a couple thousand words, you have all you need to be day-to-day fluent in a language, provided your grammar/knowledge of structure is top notch (which it would also have to be whether you knew 2000 or 20,000 words, in order to be fluent). 40,000 words is rather excessive - I doubt the overwhelming percentage of any population of language speakers uses 40,000 different words in a *year* of speaking, much less in daily life.
I wish people with these lofty requirements for fluency would follow the golden rule and see how often they abide by these requirements in their daily lives. I doubt any one of us would log more than ~2,500 different words if we walked around with a tape recorder and recorded every word we said for a week, much less for a month. Keep up with the site, Dave. I'd like to see it when it's done, and hopefully learn more about ZF, his methods, and the number of stories he's sure to have amassed over decades of being able to talk to virtually anyone he's come across. :^) Edited by lengua on 18 September 2006 at 10:12pm 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Journeyer Triglot Senior Member United States tristan85.blogspot.c Joined 6871 days ago 946 posts - 1110 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, German Studies: Sign Language | Message 221 of 377 18 September 2006 at 11:49pm | IP Logged | ||
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40,000 is quite an accomplishment, Translator2. Rather a lethal gash than just a scratch, I'd say. :-) Realistically, though, I'm not sure I'll ever be able to reach that level in anymore than a few of the languages I study, *if* even those.
To provide everyone here with an example, here's a link discussing the number of words Shakespeare used at least once (and then some) in his collected works. It comes to 31,534 different words, and with a wave of the statistical wand, we can guesstimate that ole Bill knew maybe about 35,000 other words he didn't use in his works. But even if those words were still in common usage, it's unlikely the average person would know them all, much less use them. Still, though, the bigger the vocabulary, the better off you'll be. I'm trying to increase my English vocabulary because my friends in college have a more expansive vocabulary than I do. But I can still function quite well without those words. Edited by Journeyer on 19 September 2006 at 1:49am 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6706 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 222 of 377 19 September 2006 at 4:45am | IP Logged | ||
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I noted in another thread that Dysphonic reached 80.000 (passive) words when counting in a two-tome megaton-dictionary, 50.000 in a smaller one, and I have seen an unsubstantiated claim that Swedish author Strindberg used more 100.000 (active?) words in his works, - but that is totally unrealistic unless every morphologic form is counted separately.
One of these days I'm going to count my Danish vocabulary using the biggest dictionary I can find, but for English I counted 35.000 (passive) lexical entries using a dictionary with somewhere around 70.000 entries. Many of these are however international terms that I already knew from Danish, though maybe with minor ortographic or morphological differences. The point is: there is no reason to believe that I will ever use the majority of these English words, they are just waiting for better times somewhere in the background. I should also add that the 2400 words that Lengua refers to are the net result of cutting down from a total of 3900 different FORMS, throwing out plurals, different forms of verbs, adverbs in -ly, proper names and all that stuff (plus all my spelling errors, that are mercilessly exposed by this sort of procedure). Maybe Ziad is counting in the same way, - but I still think that a man with 50+ languages up his sleeve must know more than 100.000 words, not least because his languages are so diverse. Edited by Iversen on 19 September 2006 at 4:53am 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| andee Tetraglot Senior Member Japan Joined 7080 days ago 681 posts - 724 votes 3 sounds Speaks: English*, German, Korean, French | Message 223 of 377 19 September 2006 at 9:00am | IP Logged | ||
I better edit my language profile. According to your way of thinking, I would suggest that I'm not even an advanced user of my native language... and I probably never will be. Considering that much of the research available suggests that the 1500 most frequent words in most languages make up 90-95% of the spoken portion of a language, what would you do with 40'000+ words? I personally would be happy with 5000 words.. and absolutely elated with 10'000 words! 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| translator2 Senior Member United States Joined 6922 days ago 848 posts - 1862 votes Speaks: English* | Message 224 of 377 19 September 2006 at 11:09am | IP Logged | ||
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It depends on how you define a "word".
If you re-read my original post, I included idiomatic expressions in my defintion of words. If you look up any word in a dictionary, you will see between 10 - 1000 expressions using that word, many of which cannot be guessed by the sum of their parts and that is how I arrive at the 30,000 total. If you only know 3,000 words, you may be able to communicate effectively (depending on how skillfully you can manipulate what you know), but this is defintely not "all you need to know". Once you reach a level at which you are able to function, you may think that it all you need to know. In fact, many foreigners learning English reach a certain level of proficiency and then become "stuck" at that level, never advancing or progressing any further. It may seem to a person who has amasssed a vocabulary of 3000 - 5000 words, for example, that they are fluent because they can function at this level. However, once that same person reaches the next plateau, say 10,000 words, they realize that they really were not as fluent as they thought. And the cycle continues. I am not a snob. Far from it. I am just realistic. If Mr. X next door said he knew 3000 words of Spanish, I would say that Mr. X knows some Spanish or has a passive knowledge therefore and can, as they say, "defenderse". However, if Mr. Fazah (who remember we are lauding as being the "great one") only knows 3000-5000 words in some of his languages, then I personally would not consider that he "speaks" that language. With skill, one can learn to manipulate a small number of words and fool a native speaker into thinking you are fluent through ready-made and clever responses even though you did not understand the speaker. How many of us have had a conversation with a non-native and it did not become apparent until much later that they were actually understanding very little of what we were saying and they were very skillful at pretending. However, this is no reason to become disheartened. There are translators (professionals who work with the foreign language all day long) who have been working for 20+ years and they still need help with unknown words or expressions. And measuring fluency by the "number of words" (no matter how you define a "word") is only arbitrary and not very effective anyway, since they are many other factors involved such as whether said words are active or passive, how fast or well you can recall them when needed, grammatical knowledge, etc. Most of the time, one's "potential" ability (your performance under ideal conditions) is much better than one's "performance" in real life. My point is not to say that 3000 words is not an accomplishment because it is! And you should be proud of such an achievement. However, please do not delude yourself into such thinking as "ok, I have memorized 5,000 words, so now I'm done.". That never happens. You are never done because new words and expressions are added to the lexicon everyday. The study of a foreign language is a life-long journey and those of us who choose to explore more than one path (learn several languages) much face the fact that we will probably never get as far as someone who sticks to just one path (one language). However, everyone's journey is unique. There really is no way to compare one person's knowledge to another. Is knowing 3,000 words in 58 languages, better than knowing 30,000 in 5 languages? No, of course not. But why then do we laud the former over the latter? Is breadth of knowledge better than depth? It really depends on the circumstances, doesn't it? Edited by translator2 on 19 September 2006 at 12:05pm 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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