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How many words you learn per year (avg) | ||
Tags: Poll | Vocabulary learning | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Learning Techniques, Methods & Strategies |  | |
| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5270 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes  Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 17 of 229 30 April 2015 at 3:47pm | IP Logged | |||||
Yes, you are missing something, a lot as a matter of fact. We're talking about counting words for the purpose of estimating vocabulary size. I won't go into this very complicated debate right now. I suggest reading any of the articles by Paul Nation who is probably the most well-known author on vocabulary size. 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 18 of 229 30 April 2015 at 3:59pm | IP Logged | |||||
This is actually a very interesting point. Aside from showing off one's knowledge of rare words, one can question the purpose of using obscure words that the interlocutor does not know. This seems self-defeating in terms of communicating effectively. Does using a lot of rare and obscure words confer quality to one's speech or writing? For example, do better writers use more different words than lesser writers? Does use of complex words and grammatical structures automatically make a better writer or speaker? In fact, I tend to believe the very opposite. I personally prefer simplicity in speaking and writing but I accept that other people prefer more complexity. But the fundamental question here is not so much how many different words one uses but how well one can use words in general. Great writing does not mean using a lot of rare words. That would be too easy. Great writing is more about using the right words to great effect. If the words are rare, so be it but rarity does not necessarily mean quality. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| chaotic_thought Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 3382 days ago 129 posts - 274 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Dutch, French | Message 19 of 229 30 April 2015 at 4:09pm | IP Logged | |||||
1. Should 'Web site' be written as one word ('website') or two ('Web site')? If I learn 1000 such "multiple word" items, does it mean I've learned twice as much vocabulary as if I learned 1000 monosyllabic words? 2. If I learn "food" and "fed" and "feed", does that count as 1 word learned, or 3? 3. Suppose I am learning English and I learn that the word "cup" means an object for storing my coffee. Later, I am watching a cooking show and discover that the same word "cup" can ALSO mean a unit of volume of about 250ml. Later, I am watching a sports show and discover that the same word "cup" can ALSO mean a protective device worn to protect athletes' genitals. Does my new knowledge of the 2 additional meanings of "cup" count as two additional "words". Why or why not? 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| tarvos Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member China likeapolyglot.wordpr Joined 4547 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 20 of 229 30 April 2015 at 4:47pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Aaaand S_allard comically misses the point. The point was, S_allard, that they didn't
actually correct these words because I was using them properly in context, they're simply rare. Sometimes a rare word or term is the one you need to describe something properly, even though it isn't common knowledge. The interlocutor was one of my Russian teachers. I use complex vocabulary because I was writing a complex essay on the meaning of the word tolerance in Russian. And you simply have to use specialized vocabulary to do that. Most of the text will still consist of a lot of linking words and verbs, but you simply have to be able to express yourself in finer shades of nuance, and for that complex vocabulary, alas, is essential. I'm at the level where I can't take the kernel much further. The only way up is through knowing these essential new, complex, domain-specific words. 4 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Jeffers Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4749 days ago 2151 posts - 3960 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Hindi, Ancient Greek, French, Sanskrit, German | Message 21 of 229 30 April 2015 at 4:48pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Rdearman is making a good point however. Almost every single study of vocabulary size begins with a discussion of what a word is. And they almost invariably settle on the obvious meaning: a lexical item (e.g. what you would expect to be a dictionary headword). Some researchers use the term "word family", including a word and a bunch of different suffixes and prefixes such as -ish, -ness, un-, in-, etc.
When people ask questions on HTLAL about "how many words", it is almost inevitable that someone says, "that depends on what you mean by a word". But somehow, just like the researchers, almost everybody means more or less the same thing when they ask about it. It's like we want it to be more controversial than it really is. EDIT: here's a classic article co-written by Paul Nation, which is worth having a look at. http://www.nflrc.hawaii.edu/rfl/PastIssues/rfl82hirsh.pdf What's interesting is that they don't really have much discussion about what vocabulary items are (except for discussion of what a "word family" is). Like rdearman, they just assume that the meaning is pretty clear. Edited by Jeffers on 30 April 2015 at 4:59pm 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| daegga Tetraglot Senior Member Austria lang-8.com/553301 Joined 4361 days ago 1076 posts - 1792 votes Speaks: German*, EnglishC2, Swedish, Norwegian Studies: Danish, French, Finnish, Icelandic | Message 22 of 229 30 April 2015 at 5:56pm | IP Logged | |||||
The first question is a bit tough, but seems rather special to English conventions to me. I haven't come across any other language of interest to me where this would be a problem. If you write it as one word it is one word, if you write it as two words it's to words (but if you know these words already, they aren't new words of course). If you write it as two words and the meaning depends on both words then it's a multi word expression, but still comprised of two words. Questions 2 and 3 should be rather apparent. Word forms are word forms and not words. Word senses are word senses and not words. Words are words. So for question 2: 2 words. Except if you mean "the fed", then 3. for question 3: 1 word. A polysemous word if you want to make this distinction. If one wants to use any other unit of measurement for counting "lexical items" than words, than one can say so, there are terms for that. Type, token, lemma, word sense, word family, ... edit: But for the sake of comparing learning effort per year (how many new "words" do I usually learn per year), does it matter? I feel like the effort depends on how well you can map target language words to native language words. So if the word "cup" in English has 8 meanings and there is a German word that covers 6 of these meanings and another word that covers the remaining 2 of these meanings, then the effort is 2 "words". If a German word has the same 8 meanings, than it's an effort of 1 "word". So this is all highly dependent on your language pair and not really comparable anyway. edit2: Could it be that the need for discussing what the word word means arises from the fact that for discussing the English language, the concept of a word is usually just useless in respect to what one actually wants to talk about? For any meaningful discussion you need more specialized terms like the few I mentioned before. So many words have been merged in English and this created highly polysemous words. In some other languages you don't really have this problems. So in English you have a string of characters and word class to distinguish between words. In Icelandic for example you additionally have gender (for nouns) and declination/conjugation class. This allows for a more fine- grained distinction between words and in many contexts, talking about words (as opposed to types, word senses, ...) would suffice, even though you still don't get rid of polysemy. So people wouldn't ask what one means when using the word word. The definition is clear and useful enough. Edited by daegga on 30 April 2015 at 8:55pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| rdearman Senior Member United Kingdom rdearman.orgRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5076 days ago 881 posts - 1812 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Italian, French, Mandarin | Message 23 of 229 30 April 2015 at 6:12pm | IP Logged | |||||
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This is all getting to esoteric for me. To me a word is just as the definition I quoted stated. It would appear you're all about to set off on another quasi-religious linguistic HTLAL discourse about some obscure irrelevant linguistic tangent. So I'm going to bow out of this discussion and go study some vocabulary (which I'm not going to count)
:D 2 persons have 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 24 of 229 30 April 2015 at 8:09pm | IP Logged | |||||
Aah, ı see. I mixed up obscure, rare and technical. And comically at that. Let's see if I get my English right now. If we are talking about technical subjects, we need technical words of course. But these are not obscure. They are technical or scientific. I guess we don't have the same understanding of what obscure means. I read for example: You should know the obscure words I come across in Russian every day that I actually use in Russian. I did not understand this as technical vocabulary. I understand this as words that are rarely used and not widely understood. For example, a pantograph is not a particularly obscure word in the world of tramways or electric trains, but the word impecunious is quite rare in general and bardolatry is obscure. So, what are we talking about here? Was the article on tolerance full of technical, rare or obscure words? 1 person has voted this message useful |
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