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How many words to speak? | ||
Tags: Number of words | Speaking | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6598 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 129 of 309 14 September 2014 at 4:10pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Do you also think that one can pass the listening part of B1 with 300 words? Or at least reading? Wouldn't such a person speak better than they understand? ;) Edited by Serpent on 14 September 2014 at 4:11pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| tarvos Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member China likeapolyglot.wordpr Joined 4708 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 130 of 309 14 September 2014 at 4:14pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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If they had the right subset of 300 words for the task, sure. But that certainly isn't
going to equal the speaking task. But eventually you need to pass all four anyways :D 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| rdearman Senior Member United Kingdom rdearman.orgRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5237 days ago 881 posts - 1812 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Italian, French, Mandarin | Message 131 of 309 14 September 2014 at 5:18pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
Copying this post (minus the quotes) into a file:
shows you used 554 unique words in this post alone. So you wouldn't have been able to post this small (by HTLAL standards) comment in 300 words. EDIT: Added Style results. 2377 characters 554 words, average length 4.29 characters = 1.38 syllables 36 sentences, average length 15.4 words 38% (14) short sentences (at most 10 words) 19% (7) long sentences (at least 25 words) 11 paragraphs, average length 3.3 sentences 13% (5) questions 41% (15) passive sentences longest sent 41 wds at sent 5; shortest sent 1 wds at sent 24 word usage: verb types: to be (18) auxiliary (12) types as % of total: conjunctions 5% (29) pronouns 12% (67) prepositions 13% (73) Edited by rdearman on 14 September 2014 at 5:25pm 5 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
 emk Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5533 days ago 2615 posts - 8806 votes Speaks: English*, FrenchB2 Studies: Spanish, Ancient Egyptian Personal Language Map | Message 132 of 309 14 September 2014 at 7:54pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
I continue to believe that this is extremely implausible. CEFR B1 exams often involve drawing conversational subjects from bowls. B1 students are expected to handle a wide range of concrete, day-to-day topics. My vote is for a 2000 to 3000 word vocabulary, which isn't too far off most researchers' estimates. This large vocabulary is required precisely because you don't know what the exam will be about, except for the usual broad B1 parameters.
I think this strategy might work for people like Benny Lewis. As I understand it, he used to arrive in a country, and sort out his problems step by step: Day 1: Buy food. Day 2: Figure out public transportation (or whatever). Day 3: Explain why I'm butchering your language so horribly. Day 4: Fix the next biggest problem, etc. At first he's basically just regurgitating things from phrase books and abusing grammar terribly. But looking at the vocabulary frequency charts, I think there's a tipping point somewhere around 300 words (not including nouns). At this point, he could have tolerable coverage of everything except: 1. Adjectives. Workaround: Use very simple adjectives: good, bad, expensive, blue, etc. 2. Verbs. Workaround: Use very simple verbs: be, have, like, want, must, go, give, take, etc. 3. Nouns. Workaround: Learn 20 critical nouns before undertaking each day's task. If you wanted to try this approach, you'd need to use lots of substitutions. Instead of "buy", you might say, "give money for." And so on. Instead of "nice, excellent, kind, delicious, acceptable, OK", etc., you'd say "good." Somewhere around 400 to 500 words (including nouns), I see how this might actually start coming together. You'd still be zillion miles off a real A2. But if you crammed vocabulary before each encounter, and you had the right social skills, you might be able to fake A2 conversations on single topics. And it wouldn't take long to ramp up: It's entirely possible to learn 40 words per day with Anki for short bursts, which would get you near the threshold within a week. From there on, you could add 40 subject-specific words per day. This would obviously require hours of work per day: researching what to learn, carrying on conversations, creating Anki cards, reviewing Anki cards, and so on. Personally? I'm not sure I'd actually enjoy learning this way. I like to assimilate a solid base before trying to speak. But it would be an interesting experiment, and if I were already in the country for another reason, it seems like it would be a better solution than either staying indoors, or building an English bubble around me. Of course, I'm speaking hypothetically here. This is all just based on numbers and guesswork and other people's experiences and reading Benny's book. But I know how powerful it can be to focus on a few subjects at a time, even at higher levels. (TV series are awesome, for just this reason.) So I'm willing to believe you could speak very early by adding one survival topic a day. 4 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5431 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 133 of 309 14 September 2014 at 8:16pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Let's compare apples to apples. In a previous post, I took a sample French B1 question for the speaking exam.
Readers will recall that the situation was an identity check by police in Paris. The examiner played the role of the police officer. I created quite a detailed dialogue that I think was pretty realistic, and it took around 130 unique words. Admittedly, there are a lot of subjects that we did not talk about. Maybe the officer wanted to chat about how a heavy oil refinery works or how to sail a 19th century clipper ship. Those two topics would have required more than 130 words, I agree. But we did what the exam question asked us to do. In the discussion so far I'm the only one who has provided actual examples of conversations. I invite people to find examples of real recordings of conversations. They would be surprised how few words are used. Here is a challenge: show me a French B1 question that cannot be answered in less than 300 different words. But rather than counting words, let's look at the quality of the speaking. People who know French well enough will notice that the dialogue contained some examples of very idiomatic French associated with high proficiency. And there were no serious mistakes. Any examiner who hears this level of French would be very impressed by the overall quality. No common B1 candidate speaks like this. This is a very important point. I've said this before: speaking a language does not consist of reeling off a list of words. Does anybody think that the C2 examiner wants to hear 2,000 words in alphabetical order from your Anki stack? If you are going to have debate on climate change where the examiner takes the position that science has not definitively proved that climate change is a product of human activity, are you going to make a list of 500 words that you must use and read them to the examiner? Just how many special words do you need to debate this topic? I don't know. I'll let other people tell me. The real question is what does it take to impress the examiner. Here it's very important to understand the fact that you will be giving just a sample of your speaking capabilities. Your productive vocabulary in French may be 5,000 words, you won't have time to show them all off. What does impress the examiner? We've been through this before: 1. Good control of grammatical complexity, especially advanced forms 2. Ability to render nuances of meaning 3. Ability to play with words 4, Lack of mistakes and the ability to recognize and correct any mistakes 5. Good speaking fluency Your dialogue with the examiner is an example of your ability. What you do here illustrates what you can do elsewhere. If, for example, you master the complexity of "la concordance des temps", this tells the examiner that you know how to use your tenses well. Or maybe you make an advanced use of the subjunctive or maybe even one of the surcomposé tenses or maybe it's an advanced pronominal verb form. The examiner will be blown away because these uses reveal real mastery of the language. The big problem here is that people believe that the way to master a language is to throw more words at it. People can't get by with 300 words because they can't use them properly. The solution is to learn more words. If only I knew 5,000 words, I would be "fluent" in French. That I find laughable. Stumbling and massacring the language with 5,000 words is just as ugly as with 300 words. Edited by s_allard on 14 September 2014 at 8:20pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5431 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 134 of 309 14 September 2014 at 8:54pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Since there is so much talking about passing the French B1 oral production exams, I decided to have a look at
some sample questions. Here is a web site with sample questions right up to C2. Sample questions for DELF B1 The test is in three parts, as below:
If I look at Exercise 1, the candidate is asked to to talk for 3-4 minutes freely about subjects concerning future plans, vacation, hobbies, etc. How many words are required to do this? What is the examiner looking for? In Exercise no. 2, the candidate must choose between two interactive subjects. In the first one, the candidate is a student who often arrives late to class. The teacher is upset. The candidate meets with the teacher after class and tries to justify their behaviour. The examiner plays the role of the teacher. What is very technical about this topic that requires a vast vocabulary? If enough people make the request, I could write out a sample dialogue. Unfortunately, it would not be from a strictly B1 level. In Exercise no 3, the candidate reads a paragraph, has 10 minutes to prepare and then makes a 3-4 minute presentation with questions from the examiner. Note that the document to be read contains all the technical vocabulary one is likely to need. How many words does a candidate need to do all this? What is so complicated about the themes here? The real issue is can you handle the language, not whether you have enough words. If you want to talk about cycling as a hobby, do you really have to explain all the parts of a bicycle? Is the examiner going to ask you to name all the parts of the wheel? Let's be real here. The examiner is not keeping count of the words you know. The examiner is interested in your control of gender agreement, tenses, choice of right prepositions, fluency and choice of right words. With 300 words, this is a piece of cake if you know what you are doing. Edited by s_allard on 14 September 2014 at 9:02pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5431 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 135 of 309 14 September 2014 at 9:46pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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The most common objection to the idea of a small productive vocabulary is the fact that the candidate does not
know what subjects will come up. Therefore they need a large enough vocabulary just in case. Let's say 2,000 words for the B1 level and up for other levels. We're not talking about reading or listening comprehension, we're talking about oral production. The justification for this figure is always in terms of vocabulary coverage of a large universe of samples, for example French film subtitles. 2,000 words is sort of the bare minimum to give decent coverage. It's important to remember that the candidate will not use 2,000 words. It's just in case. How many will the candidate likely use? We don't really know. To my knowledge we do not have any studies of a collection of actual French answers. This would be an interesting research project. What we do know by looking at real conversations is that, individually, conversations do not require large vocabularies. None of the sample French B1 conversations that I have seen require vocabularies larger than 150 - 200 word families. So the question is what about all that infinite variety of topics that might come up? How much vocabulary is common and how much topic-specific? My own viewpoint is that when we look at how the exams are worded in sample or real exams and what the examiners are looking for, the emphasis is more on use of the language rather than vocabulary size. In fact, the topics are not particularly technical. Therefore much of the vocabulary is transferable from one topic to the other. For example, when I look at the two topics of exercise 3 of the sample questions above, I question how much vocabulary is specific to each topic. Are there 10 terms, 20, 30 terms for each topic? I'm not sure myself. But if I look at the wording of the task, I don't see any emphasis on precise technical content. You are simple asked to talk about the topic in an intelligent manner. I believe that most of the vocabulary will be shared. As I have said many times, vocabulary is not the problem that B1 candidates have. Speaking correctly and fluently is the real problem. Edited by s_allard on 14 September 2014 at 9:48pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Maecenas23 Triglot Newbie Ukraine Joined 4612 days ago 21 posts - 56 votes Speaks: Ukrainian*, Russian, English Studies: German | Message 136 of 309 14 September 2014 at 10:28pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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s allard - you don't need to overcomplicate this problem. The easy answer to this
question would be if you'd be able to show us here 10 or more dialogues on different topics, each around 500 words or more, which correspond to the requirements of A2 or B1 levels, using the same 300 words for each. It's hard if not impossible task to do in a written form, not to say, when you need to have a spontaneous dialogue. I think it's a fully absurd assumption that anybody can have a normal conversation on a simple topic knowing 300 or even 1000 words. The skillful usage of language about which you are talking so much is created by a long exposure to the language, which gives you the skill to use words properly in different contexts. Knowing words without contexts is useless. What's also wrong with that argument is the assumption that you are in a full control of the words you use, but even if you'd ask a native speaker to involve in a discussion, using 300 words only, it would be exteremely hard for him to do so. Btw, the vocabulary of an average 2 year old child is 300-450 words, children at 4 years of age have on average the passive vocabulary of 2500 words. Edited by Maecenas23 on 15 September 2014 at 1:17am 5 persons have voted this message useful |
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