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How many words do you need to learn? | ||
Tags: Vocabulary learning | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Learning Techniques, Methods & Strategies |  | |
| Andy E Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 7102 days ago 1651 posts - 1939 votes  Speaks: English*, Spanish, French | Message 41 of 64 25 January 2007 at 2:54am | IP Logged | |||||
Speaking for myself, I shall definitely not be keeping count of numbers of words placed into flashcards etc. - this is going to be difficult anyway since I've now adopted the sentence approach. There'll be light at the end of my tunnel...
Andy. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6702 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 64 25 January 2007 at 3:58am | IP Logged | |||||
Sounds reasonable, but I don't buy it (at least not for me). Of course you have to read and listen a lot to learn a language, but the main obstacle to reading and listening fluently is lack of vocabulary. For some people it may be difficult to remember words without contexts, but my own experience with wordlists have shown me that I can learn words much faster by using structured methods. By this I mean that it is not enough just to read a long list of words with translation and maybe repeating each combination fifty times. You can use different methods, but writing the lists in small chunks and memorizing, immediately followed by control in both directions, does the trick for me, and then afterwards I use the same repetition techniques that I would use on passive words to make the words stick, - in my case it is dictionary checks, but flashcards is a viable alternative. I have written extensively about that in other threads. When you first have the words inside your head, reading and listening is necessary to get the nuances, construction possibilities and idiomatic uses, but all that is only possible when you already have a nodding acquaintance with the word in question. The funny thing is that for once it is a thing that is measurable: I originally started my concentrated work on dictionaries and word lists because I just wanted to known my passive vocabulary in Romanian. But then I discovered that my vocabulary thundered upwards by relearning those half forgotten words. Later I experimented with techniques to learn new words, and now I can not only feel, but even count the effects. And reading/listening has become much more pleasurable now that I can do it without looking up ten words in each sentence. Now I can focus on syntax and idiomatics. The 10000 active, 20000 passive words proposed by Luke would be a good estimate of where you are leaving basic fluency and moving towards advanced fluency, but of course only in conjunction with a firm grasp on grammar and idiomatics, plus easy active use of the language in question (at least if you want to claim active fluency, not only passive fluency). And to get there dictionaries, word lists and flashcards are not enough, - you have to meet real living language (and produce it yourself). Edited by Iversen on 02 October 2007 at 10:11am 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
 Keith Diglot Moderator JapanRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6776 days ago 526 posts - 536 votes 1 sounds Speaks: English*, Japanese Studies: Mandarin Personal Language Map | Message 43 of 64 25 January 2007 at 6:08am | IP Logged | |||||
How about counting sentences, then? How many sentences are you aiming for? 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| tujiko Senior Member United States Joined 6532 days ago 140 posts - 144 votes Speaks: English* | Message 44 of 64 25 January 2007 at 6:14am | IP Logged | |||||
I know Khazumoto from All Japanese All the Time recommends 10,000 sentences.
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| Andy E Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 7102 days ago 1651 posts - 1939 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, French | Message 45 of 64 29 January 2007 at 3:49am | IP Logged | |||||
Again, I don't think this is something you can necessarily quantify (and I'm not sure that you should). I have certain targets to flashcard sentences from specific resources but to me it's an ongoing process that doesn't necessarily have an end. Andy. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Thuan Triglot Senior Member GermanyRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6929 days ago 133 posts - 156 votes Speaks: Vietnamese, German*, English Studies: French, Japanese, Romanian, Swedish, Mandarin | Message 46 of 64 29 January 2007 at 8:43am | IP Logged | |||||
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Where can I find the Charles Kelly list that was mentioned in this thread? I just found the flashcard game that's based on the frequency list.
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| MeshGearFox Senior Member United States Joined 6694 days ago 316 posts - 344 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Russian | Message 47 of 64 29 January 2007 at 4:50pm | IP Logged | |||||
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While you need context, learning vocab from flashcards/lists effectively lets you build a dictionary in your head. Not everything is immediately active -- mostly, it'll be passive -- and no, you're not going to get context. However, it WILL allow you to read texts without a dictionary, which disrupts the flow, and instead focus on the main acting words, getting the salient point of the sentence, and figure out intuitively, from there, what all the grammatical chaff in there is doing.
If you don't know the words, you start looking for context in all of the little particles, articles, and other things that don't really do a whole lot on their own, and are often rather obtuse in nature. If you know the main words, then you can probably logic out what the sentence should mean, and go from there. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Linguamor Decaglot Senior Member United States Joined 6617 days ago 469 posts - 599 votes Speaks: English*, German, Italian, Spanish, Swedish, Danish, French, Norwegian, Portuguese, Dutch | Message 48 of 64 19 March 2007 at 5:32am | IP Logged | |||||
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"At present the best conservative rule of thumb that we have is that up to a vocabulary size of around 20,000 word families, we should expect that native speakers will add roughly 1000 word families a year to their vocabulary size. That means that a five year old beginning school will have a vocabulary of around 4000 to 5000 word families. A university graduate will have a vocabulary of around 20,000 word families (Goulden, Nation and Read, 1990). These figures are very rough and there is likely to be very large variation between individuals. These figures exclude proper names, compound words, abbreviations, and foreign words. A word family is taken to include a base word, its inflected forms, and a small number of reasonably regular derived forms (Bauer and Nation, 1993)."
www1.harenet.ne.jp/~waring/papers/cup.html 3 persons have voted this message useful |
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