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How many words to speak? | ||
Tags: Number of words | Speaking | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| 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 249 of 309 22 September 2014 at 1:46pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
The point here is, I believe, that in German, prefixes are only a small part of the way you modify words to give them new meaning. Germans usually clunk words together (whole words) in order to create new words, and they can build long words at will this way to indicate concepts which in English or French derive from another root. Dutch uses a similar strategy, but it is more wont to also accomodate loans in this context. The Russian system of suffixes, infixes and prefixes is almost bewildering and can be used to build tons of words and give new meanings. It's worth spending time on those structuralities alone. Not to speak of Hebrew where that is basically how you build nearly every word. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Bao Diglot Senior Member Germany tinyurl.com/pe4kqe5 Joined 5767 days ago 2256 posts - 4046 votes Speaks: German*, English Studies: French, Spanish, Japanese, Mandarin | Message 250 of 309 22 September 2014 at 2:24pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
That was not an accusation, it was an observation. I was under the impression that you were talking about learning languages, and used the ones you found yourself adequately proficient in to illustrate your points, not that you were talking about learning those particular languages and no other ones. But that may have been my mistake, guided by this thread being in the General Discussion section, and not a particular language subforum. And why did you not answer my question about your personal definition of word? tarvos, no, my point was that German has a system of verbal prefixes which do make sense to some degree, but learners never know for sure if a word carries the obvious meaning of prefix + verb, has different connotations or carries a seemingly unrelated meaning. You as a native speaker of Dutch probably don't struggle with that as much as many of my friends do. (I heard that Russian is ... much more interesting than German in that respect.) And you need to understand the main meaning of those compound verbs to understand the adjectives and nouns derived from them ... Edited by Bao on 22 September 2014 at 2:31pm 3 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 251 of 309 22 September 2014 at 2:39pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
We seem to be up against the same wall here. emk sees the example sentences full of xxx's because he hasn't learned the underlying words since he learned other words that are useless. On the other hand I see the words instead of xxx's because those are the ones I studied. I didn't learn other words I don't need. Why try to understand a given conversation by first learning the 400 most frequent words in French films? Why not just learn the 130 words here? What is true is that neither 130 nor 300 words of productive vocabulary will allow you speak to all people on all topics. But nobody is saying that. Edited by s_allard on 22 September 2014 at 2:40pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| daegga Tetraglot Senior Member Austria lang-8.com/553301 Joined 4522 days ago 1076 posts - 1792 votes Speaks: German*, EnglishC2, Swedish, Norwegian Studies: Danish, French, Finnish, Icelandic | Message 252 of 309 22 September 2014 at 3:07pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
There is a 4th approach that might be more suiting to you: prelearn the unknown vocabulary in the text. If you have a digital copy of the text and a list of known vocabulary, filtering the unknown vocabulary is not much of an issue. If you also calculate the frequencies you could then decide whether it is worth learning even hapax legomena. This is basically your approach 1 without having to stop while reading. Edited by daegga on 22 September 2014 at 3:10pm 1 person has 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 253 of 309 22 September 2014 at 4:47pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
To be clear, I think that learning all the words on a frequency list is actually a terrible idea. My favorite techniques are described at length elsewhere, and they're largely based on using the language and learning vocabulary in context. Short form: I personally despise isolated vocabulary study with a fiery passion.
You seem to have strong opinions about my methods, but I almost never recognize the methods you claim to be mine. When you study Spanish, you presumably see the words because you're pretty advanced. But there are also thousands of obvious cognates with French and English. For example, here's Peter Rabbit: 
I've done exactly one Assimil Spanish lesson, and it's easy to see that los conejitos is probably "the baby rabbits", vivian is probably "lived", con su madre is "with their mother", and las raices de pino muy grande is probably "the roots of a very large tree/pine/?". When I study Egyptian, I see XXXXX everywhere because it's an unrelated language, because it's 3500 years old, because it's actually an entire family of dialects, and because the only two cognates are "ebony" and "adobe." Let's try Peter Rabbit again: 
If it helps any, here's an excellent Egyptian/French dictionary and a set of flash cards to learn ~175 key signs. But even with those, looking up the words is going to be a long, brutal slog, because you need to find the word breaks, decipher the idioms, and work around the decidedly unfamiliar grammar. But once you know most of the words, this passage is much easier to tackle. To really appreciate just how cruelly limiting 300 words really are, you need to learn an unrelated language. "300 words plus 15,000 cognates" is profoundly different situation from "300 words." Edited by emk on 22 September 2014 at 4:50pm 5 persons have 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 254 of 309 22 September 2014 at 4:53pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
Yes, that too. German is much more consistent in its morphology in this sense. 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 255 of 309 22 September 2014 at 5:33pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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My apologies to Bao for my bit of sarcasm there. But it did create an opportunity to think about learning some
German for a possible trip next year to the Polyglot meeting in Berlin. I might actually buy Assimil or some method, but German is not high on my list of future languages. Since my interest is really only in speaking, I'm doing a bit of strategizing. What's the best way of going about this? Do I start by finding a frequency list on the Internet and work my way down that list with a dictionary and a grammar book? It just so happens that the other day I picked up for free an old Walt Disney Lustige Taschenbūcher Donald Duck comic book in German. The first page of dialog goes like this: - Onkel Donald, dürfen wir dich kurz sprechen? - Aha! Euer höflicher Ton zeigt mir dass meine Versuche, euch Manieren beizubringen, nicht erfolglos waren! Gut erzogene Jungen pflegen sich immer zu vergewissern, ob sie die Erwachsenen auch nicht stören. - Wir wollen dich nicht stören! - Na schön! Sagt schon, was es gibt! Here is the Google translation: - Uncle Donald, we may talk to you? - Aha! Your polite tone shows me that my attempts to teach you manners, were not without success! Well behaved boy groom always make sure if they do not disturb the adults also. - We will not disturb you! - All right! Says it what it is! I must say that Google Translate is really quite useful. And you can hear the texts spoken. What I loved about this little dialogue was that I immediately got a sense of how the language worked. Plus the pictures helped convey some of the meaning. I'll skip all the details of what I saw but I have to say that the last two lines - Wir wollen dich nicht stören! and - Na schön! Sagt schon, was es gibt! really caught my attention. Here were two things that I felt would be really useful. I also had a look at a Wikipedia German word frequency list. Kind of scary to me. I gave up trying to find the words of this dialogue in the list. Why bother learning a bunch of words that I don't need immediately just to understand this page of the comic book? Whereas I can learn the words I need in context and start trying to speak very quickly. I have to say that I find the whole thing so interesting that I might continue reading the whole comic book. Edited by s_allard on 22 September 2014 at 5:36pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Bao Diglot Senior Member Germany tinyurl.com/pe4kqe5 Joined 5767 days ago 2256 posts - 4046 votes Speaks: German*, English Studies: French, Spanish, Japanese, Mandarin | Message 256 of 309 22 September 2014 at 7:41pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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You do seem to have some time to waste ...
ETA: tarvos, yes, I think word formation is pretty straightforward in German, the only real hurdle seems to be figuring out whether a word is used literally, figuratively, or figuratively in a way that made sense a couple of centuries ago. Edited by Bao on 22 September 2014 at 7:43pm 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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