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How many words for conversation? | ||
Tags: Number of words | Conversation | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| fiziwig Senior Member United States Joined 4705 days ago 297 posts - 618 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish | Message 41 of 100 09 August 2011 at 7:31pm | IP Logged | |||||
Are those really different meanings, or merely different applications of the same meaning? It seems to me that if the meaning can be inferred from the compound then the word is being used in a single conventional way as a part of that compound. Your list is interesting, but it seems to me you could use the same reasoning to claim that the English word "the" has many different meanings because of: ► the house ► the car ► the stock market ► the electrician ► the bottle of pills ► the kitchen window In every one of those samples "the" means basically the same thing, and in every one of your samples "casa" means basically the same thing, so no, I don't count those compounds a separate words. --gary 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6543 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 42 of 100 09 August 2011 at 7:42pm | IP Logged | |||||
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The important thing is not that you can meet the word "casa" in many different surroundings, but that you cannot use it freely: the native speakers have through some kind of collective decision-making decided that it is "casa de bebidas", not "casa de beber". Idiomatics is in principle the art of knowing what NOT to say because the natives don't say things like that. However the big problem in acquiring an idiomatic way of expressing yourself is that it is hard to know what people don't say, and therefore learners have to focus on the things they can pick up from the native speakers.
There is one good rule of thumb which I would like to promote once again: learn the elements of any expression with or before you try to memorize the whole thing. Not only will it be easier to remember the complete expression, but you will also understand the logic behind it. The same applies to words. Use the combinatorial side of language to cut down on the number of long things you have to memorize. And then just make a point of noticing when something turns up which is a combination of elements you already know. I specifically mentioned the 'chunks' because you need them to discuss with native speakers - a large vocabulary of single words isn't enough (although a large vocabulary may be necessary) to understand the answers you get). Chunks are things you use to hide that you are thinking about what to say. Edited by Iversen on 10 August 2011 at 4:08pm 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Doitsujin Diglot Senior Member Germany Joined 5160 days ago 1256 posts - 2363 votes Speaks: German*, English | Message 43 of 100 09 August 2011 at 8:42pm | IP Logged | |||||
According to Wikipedia, candidates are expected to know a minimum of 1300 words for the Basic test. Do you happen to know where I can find the official word list for this level? 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5270 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 44 of 100 10 August 2011 at 6:41am | IP Logged | |||||
I'm not sure I understand what Iversen means by 'chunks.' It seems to be synonymous with idiom or idiomatic expression. But how are chunks 'things you use to hide that you are thinking about what to say" ? That I think is usually the function of what are called fillers. The classic filler in Spanish is the pronoun 'este' that you can use when you don't know what you are going to say next and you don't what the conversation to stop. Another one used a lot in Mexican Spanish is 'así es'. Note that use as a filler does not prevent an expression from having other uses. I should also point out that use of the word 'chunk' here seems to differ from the conventional use in the literature on language learning. The so-called chunking hypothesis often associated with the lexical approach suggests that an effective strategy for acquiring speaking proficiency is to learn by heart entire 'chunks' or 'set phrases' of the target language. This is what Ben Zimmer has to say: "In recent decades, the study of language acquisition and instruction has increasingly focused on “chunking”: how children learn language not so much on a word-by-word basis but in larger “lexical chunks” or meaningful strings of words that are committed to memory. Chunks may consist of fixed idioms or conventional speech routines, but they can also simply be combinations of words that appear together frequently, in patterns that are known as “collocations.” In the 1960s, the linguist Michael Halliday pointed out that we tend to talk of “strong tea” instead of “powerful tea,” even though the phrases make equal sense. Rain, on the other hand, is much more likely to be described as “heavy” than “strong.”" Edited by s_allard on 10 August 2011 at 8:36am 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5270 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 45 of 100 10 August 2011 at 7:06am | IP Logged | |||||
I think the point is well taken although I'm not sure that the comparison with 'the' is valid. But it is true that one could say that 'casa' has basically the same meaning in the examples given. So, I wouldn't say that casa has different meanings or that in this case, they are different words. I would say that those are different instances of 'casa' in set combinations or collocations. And that is the point of Iversen. We say 'penthouse' in English to designate a unit on the highest floor of an apartment building. We could just as well have said the 'uppermost unit' or the 'top floor', but English has lexicalized the expression 'penthouse', This is precisely the problem we face when we are learning a foreign language and we are thinking in terms of our native language. So you want to say 'houseboat' in Spanish. It's not *casa bote. Why is it 'casa flotante' or 'floating house' as a Spanish-speaker might say in English? It's just a convention. The idea here is that in addition to learning that casa = house, you have to learn a very large set of combinations that use casa in a specific way. Now understanding is not a great problem because you can figure out pretty easily what the combinations mean. The real problem is how to use them spontaneously. So, given that casa = house, what is a 'housewife' in Spanish? 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| s0fist Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 4886 days ago 260 posts - 445 votes Speaks: Russian*, English Studies: Sign Language, German, Spanish, French | Message 46 of 100 10 August 2011 at 7:14am | IP Logged | |||||
I'm pretty sure Iverson was talking about collocations. And just to point out, it's not only that collocations define frequencies for words cohabitating in the fourth dimension which is important enough already to sounding like a native but also that they sometimes influence meaning. Just to take your example, generally "strong tea" is tea where you left the leaves for a longer duration intensifying the smell and taste, whereas the "powerful tea" (not being a (common) collocation, I don't think so) would most likely imply the intensity of the experience of drinking said tea (even if it's not "strong"); similarly "heavy hand" seems to imply beating, while "strong hand" implies strictness (if not used in the literal sense). Obviously this is just my interpretation of the meaning of those but the more important part is as Iversen has said:
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| fiziwig Senior Member United States Joined 4705 days ago 297 posts - 618 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish | Message 47 of 100 10 August 2011 at 7:42am | IP Logged | |||||
Yes, that makes sense. At the moment I am only reading and listening, not producing Spanish as yet, so in most cases it is easy to figure out what a collocation means without having to memorize it. When it comes to production however, knowing those collocations would be vital, so I will have to tackle them eventually. --gary Edited by fiziwig on 10 August 2011 at 7:42am 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| oldearth Groupie United States Joined 4735 days ago 72 posts - 173 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish, Esperanto | Message 48 of 100 10 August 2011 at 8:35am | IP Logged | |||||
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Googling about the idea of frequency lists and "efficient" study methods is what led me to HTLAL in the first place.
It's been a big part of my study routine so far, but I'm no longer in the mindset of racing to the "finish." The more I've learned, the more I realize I don't know. Here's my take now: Whether or not learning X,000 words is the fastest way to basic fluency, I know that I would like to learn at least 10k or so to achieve my desired reading level in my target language. Given that I need to learn all these words anyway to meet my long term goal, why not front-load my study with vocabulary and reading? Memorization is a low-stress way to get started, and with ~1300 words solidly behind me I think I'm a lot less likely to walk away from this project than if I tried to attack it from the chunk or sentence level with zero understanding of the component parts. I'm still lost on most idioms for now, but having a lot of pieces sure does make it easier to get the gist of a paragraph or conversation in spite of my lack of practical knowledge about how the 10 most frequent verbs can be contorted in the spoken language. I'm just now starting to incorporate intensive tv and listening into my routine to get my understanding of colloquialisms up to my reading level. Again, maybe not the most efficient way of going about learning Spanish, but so far it's been a very enjoyable experience. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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