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How many words to speak? | ||
Tags: Number of words | Speaking | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
 emk Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5616 days ago 2615 posts - 8806 votes  Speaks: English*, FrenchB2 Studies: Spanish, Ancient Egyptian Personal Language Map | Message 73 of 309 05 September 2014 at 1:44pm | IP Logged | |||||
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To help provide some concrete data for this discussion, I have prepared a list of approximately 750 words, organized by parts of speech, that might be useful to anybody trying to construct a list of 300 essential French words. This is based on the very cool Lexique database with a bit a manual cleanup. And the list should be biased towards conversations, because I used Lexique's movie data.
As for the receptive vocabulary needed to understand arbitrary native input, here is graph showing what percentage of words would be known for any given vocabulary size: 
As you can see, if you want to go watch a movie with a friend or read a book that everybody is talking about, you need a receptive vocabulary on the rough order of 8,000 words, assuming you want to understand 97 or 98 words out of every hundred. There are lots of ways to cheat this, including sticking to children's books, or to your favorite genres and subjects. But as the movie corpus shows, you actually need quite a bit of vocabulary to get high coverage of arbitrary movies. Fortunately, one-on-one conversation is much easier—you can talk to a sympathetic and helpful native speaker with a passive vocabulary of less than 2,000 words, and an active vocabulary even smaller than that. But I do feel strongly that vocabulary is one of the major components of language learning: somewhere along the way, you need to learn a whole lot of words if you want to interact like a normal adult. 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| montmorency Diglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4912 days ago 2371 posts - 3676 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Danish, Welsh | Message 74 of 309 05 September 2014 at 2:38pm | IP Logged | |||||
Not that much of a shock. I read Treasure Island in primary school, and I don't think I was that unusual. It's a particularly accessible book for young people, young boys especially, despite its age. It's full of non-standard English as well, which is good to stretch a growing mind, capture the imagination, and teach that language is a flexible living thing. 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5514 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 75 of 309 05 September 2014 at 3:07pm | IP Logged | |||||
I totally agree with these figures. They are typical of all vocabulary studies by Paul Nation and other researchers. You need a very large receptive vocabulary in order to cover a very wide set of different texts. As a matter of fact, the more texts you put into your data set the higher the number of words needed for coverage. If you wanted 97% coverage of all the newspapers published in English yesterday around the world, you would probably need a humungous vocabulary. In the case of movies and television what may change things a bit is the fact that the spoken words are accompanied by intonations of the voice, music and sound effects, and, above all, moving images. I would argue that, unlike the printed word, movies do not require 97% coverage for one to understand and enjoy what is happening. But this does not alter the fact the if you want to understand all the words, you need that huge vocabulary. There is absolutely no controversy about this. Nor is there any doubt that it is good to know more words than less. What is more controversial is how many words does the language learner need to begin actually speaking with native speakers. What would be a minimum number of the various building blocks needed to start making meaning? As everyone knows I've put this threshold very low. A variation of this theme of a very low threshold is what we see in the video of Emanuele Marini where we observe him uttering probably less than 200 overall words and maybe around 50 - 60 different words, if that many, in 15 languages, Nobody disputes the fact that he probably can use more than these words in each language. Nobody disputes the fact that he speaks all those languages. We're also told that he can do this in a total of 30 languages. It's interesting that on the basis of a tiny snippet of actual performance, we can extrapolate an entire level of capability. What we see is great fluency, good pronunciation and pretty good grammar. That's good enough for most of us. The fact that maybe only 50 different words were used in each language is pretty irrelevant. We don't hear French in the video, and I don't know if it is one of Marini's languages but it shouldn't be more difficult for him than the other languages, many of which are way more complicated. I believe that the only way to explain such a high level of polyglottery is a learning and speaking strategy that focuses on mastering the core of each language. I believe this core to be in the 300 - 1,000 word range. Edited by s_allard on 05 September 2014 at 3:09pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5514 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 76 of 309 05 September 2014 at 3:17pm | IP Logged | |||||
I was thinking of the learner of English going from Harry Potter to Treasure Island. Maybe the word shock is too strong, but I'm not sure that all that non-standard English is that easy for many students of English. Just for fun, I've included the first two paragraphs of Treasure Island for people to see how this compares to Harry Potter. SQUIRE TRELAWNEY, Dr. Livesey, and the rest of these gentlemen having asked me to write down the whole particulars about Treasure Island, from the beginning to the end, keeping nothing back but the bearings of the island, and that only because there is still treasure not yet lifted, I take up my pen in the year of grace 17 and go back to the time when my father kept the Admiral Benbow inn and the brown old seaman with the sabre cut first took up his lodging under our roof. I remember him as if it were yesterday, as he came plodding to the inn door, his sea-chest following behind him in a hand-barrow—a tall, strong, heavy, nut-brown man, his tarry pigtail falling over the shoulder of his soiled blue coat, his hands ragged and scarred, with black, broken nails, and the sabre cut across one cheek, a dirty, livid white. I remember him looking round the cover and whistling to himself as he did so, and then breaking out in that old sea-song that he sang so often afterwards: ‘Fifteen men on the dead man’s chest— Yo-ho-ho, and a bottle of rum" 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6681 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 77 of 309 05 September 2014 at 3:27pm | IP Logged | |||||
I think the real controversy here is whether mastering small talk is an important skill for most learners (outside Montreal) and whether it's an obligatory step on the way to fluency/proficiency. Basically, just because it's possible to speak when you know only 100 words, doesn't mean everyone should aim for that, even those who do care about speaking in the long run. In addition to that, another controversial topic is whether it's even practical to focus on the advanced usage of the basic words so early on, especially for those that don't get the comprehension skills for free. And of course your most controversial claim is the CEFR level one can achieve with a small vocabulary, especially as for you it's often synonymous with passing the respective exam. 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| tarvos Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member China likeapolyglot.wordpr Joined 4791 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 78 of 309 05 September 2014 at 3:46pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I think the real issue is how you target your vocabulary learning to your personal goals.
I certainly could do without knowing the word "screwdriver" in Russian, because I barely use it. On the other hand, the variants for "I don't give a flying dingo's kidney" in French are very useful to me. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5514 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 79 of 309 06 September 2014 at 2:44am | IP Logged | |||||
I couldn't agree more. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6681 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 80 of 309 06 September 2014 at 3:57am | IP Logged | |||||
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Then just accept that people have different priorities (both short and long-term), and they aren't necessarily afraid of speaking, not interested in speaking, or bad learners or whatever. They're just different from the learners you meet offline. Edited by Serpent on 06 September 2014 at 3:58am 3 persons have voted this message useful |
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