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How many words to speak? | ||
Tags: Number of words | Speaking | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5429 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes  Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 201 of 309 19 September 2014 at 3:08pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I think that iversen has got it partially right. People are way too worked up about this idea of passing a CEFR
exam knowing only 300 words. I seriously don't think that anybody will learn 300 words and then head off to a B1 exam. At this point in the discussion, some people are jumping in, see this figure 300 and make all kinds of wild statements. If I may take a step back a bit and try to put this discussion in perspective, I'll just mention how this whole things started. I've always been struck by how conversational language generally uses a very small range of words. When I see two natives of Mexico meet for the first time and engage in a 10-minute conversation, I don't see 500 unique words being used. It's more like 150, if that many. Now, I consider myself an advanced learner of Spanish, with hundreds of hours of listening, reading, studying and even speaking under my belt. But there is no way that I can interact anywhere close to native-like with any Spanish-speaking person. By all standards I have a large vocabulary in Spanish from my extensive reading. I have a repertoire of all kinds of idiomatic expressions, many interesting words and a ton of verbs. But when it comes to participating in a fast- paced conversation with natives, I'm left in the dust. But it's not complicated Spanish. No fancy literary words. Just plain everyday words of people chatting. What's wrong? Not enough vocabulary? No. Not the right vocabulary? A bit of that, especially the informal language. The real problem is how to bring it all together and quickly produce smooth, connected and error-free speech with good pronunciation. What natives can do with 100 unique words is vastly different from what I can do with those same words. I see the same problem every day with people speaking French. It is extremely rare to meet adult learners who come close to reproducing the quality of speech of native speakers. Is vocabulary the problem? It's part of the problem. What I find striking is the presence of mistakes that a native would never make, the lack of idiomatic expressions, awkward word usage and difficulties of pronunciation. When I observe conversations in French and even in English, I see that the vocabulary used depends on the nature of the subject and not on the length of the conversation. I will use a certain vocabulary set professionally and another set when talking with a relative over the phone for an hour. When I transpose all these observations to a discussion of language learning and the assessment of proficiency, plus lots of reading in the field, I've come to the conclusion that good speaking performance is a matter of quality over quantity. The quantity is all the words that we can use. The quality is in the binding of the words together and the actual enunciation. I don't have to tell people here that speaking a language is a lot more than learning 300 words. Or even 5000. I wish it were that simple. That said, I believe - and this is what has gotten me into trouble here - is that around the 300 word level, and with the right components, a learner can start building meaningful sentences in the language. And I'm not the only one saying this. What has really created a fuss is my statement that one could have a sophisticated discussion, i.e. of the level of a CEFR exam with 300 words. Well, I might just have said that the world was flat and that the law of gravity did not exist. s_allard has gone too far. Prove it. Show me what you can do with 300 words. You can only talk about one thing, and in the simplest of terms with lots of pantomime and grunting. God forbid the topic should change. But I observe that native speakers have all kinds of discussions with less that 300 words all the time. I've given a number of examples here, particularly two doctors discussing salt intake research in 217 unique words. Of course, I'm well aware of the fact that they are discussing one subject only. This is one corpus, as iversen puts it. Speaking a language involves using a variety of corpora. That we all agree on but the fact remains that the discussion required only 217 words. How many of us could have such a discussion in our target languages with the same level of fluency and accuracy as those two persons? We may not be interested in salt intake research. Pick any subject and imagine that you are being interviewed for a popular science program. I imagine some readers here will feel comfortable doing this in other languages. Congratulations. I certainly don't think I could do this easily in Spanish. But it's only the equivalent of 217 words. I also gave a series of examples of French conversations with tiny vocabularies. The conversations may be short but how many learners of French could speak French at this level of proficiency even with such small vocabularies? If I look at speaking exam situations, I see basically the same phenomenon. Despite the vast range of possible subjects that one may be confronted with, actual speaking performance only requires a small vocabulary. That's how natives use the language. In fact, vocabulary size counts for less than 20% of the mark at the B2 level. Please, I hope nobody believes that I'm suggesting you should prepare for the B-level speaking exams by learning 300 unique words. What I am saying however is that in the actual test, you might or probably use only 300 unique words. How well you put those words together is the real challenge. The objection we see all the time is that you never know what subject might come up. Therefore you need more than 300 words. Indeed, the 300 most common words of a language will only give you a low X% coverage of all the subjects in the language. You would best prepare by having a very large vocabulary. This is very true, but the plain fact remains that you will probably only use around 300 words in the test situation. It's just that you don't have foreknowledge of which words. In a sense we all agree. Learn an many words as you can. Where I disagree with some people here is that I believe that the key to success is mastering the core, be it 300 or 600 components. This is the foundation of that speaking proficiency that natives have in their everyday conversations. And since we often disregard this core in pursuit of more vocabulary, we end up not being able to speak fluently and correctly. Edited by s_allard on 19 September 2014 at 3:14pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Bao Diglot Senior Member Germany tinyurl.com/pe4kqe5 Joined 5765 days ago 2256 posts - 4046 votes Speaks: German*, English Studies: French, Spanish, Japanese, Mandarin | Message 202 of 309 19 September 2014 at 3:39pm | IP Logged | |||||
But isn't that what makes this part of the discussion rather ... pointless? 7 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Maecenas23 Triglot Newbie Ukraine Joined 4610 days ago 21 posts - 56 votes Speaks: Ukrainian*, Russian, English Studies: German | Message 203 of 309 19 September 2014 at 4:29pm | IP Logged | |||||
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To be laconic and precise in your speech - the first requirement you'll need is a big
vocabulary. You can't state to know the word unless you have a sophisticated unarticulated knowledge of its relatedness to hundreds of other words. Language is like Munchhausen - it pulls itself by its own hair out of meaninglessness of its single parts by intertwining them with other meaningless parts and somewhere on this way the meaning is created.Look at any dictionary entry.What you'll find there is circumlocution - every word definition sends you to another definition and so on ad infinitum. Word can function only through its vastly complicated connections in the huge web of other words. There is no starting point in the language - it's not a straight line, it's an ever expanding sphere. You'd achieve no fluence unless sufficient number of word connections is established. You need, so to say, to know the ways the words interact among themselves in different contexts, it makes you more precise and efficient in their usage. Also have you ever heard about the dialectical law of transition of quantity into quality? I think it can be applied to the language learning in the first place. Quality comes as a byproduct of quantity and you can't cheat on this law by studying 300 most frequent words or in any similar way - it would be almost to no avail for your understanding, not to mention, for your speaking. 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| tarvos Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member China likeapolyglot.wordpr Joined 4706 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 204 of 309 19 September 2014 at 4:33pm | IP Logged | |||||
So do I, but don't put the cart before the horse. One step at a time. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6596 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 205 of 309 19 September 2014 at 8:44pm | IP Logged | |||||
I'd say it's less about a core and more about a comfort zone: words&grammar that you are confident about, that you can use without worrying whether you're incorrectly using a word from a related language (I have this problem with Italian, Spanish, Polish..). But it's also hard to be confident if you literally only know 300 words, although as I've pointed out, you're unlikely to actually work with such learners. But I perhaps disagree most when you draw the conclusion that if native speakers tend to use basic vocabulary in complicated ways, beginning learners should focus on that too. But why? It's much easier for a beginner to learn one more word than to learn a phrasal verb or idiom consisting out of words they already know, unless it's something trivial that they come across all the time (such as "get up"). It's often easier to learn more words than to really master the simple ones. But I agree that we shouldn't ignore the power of the basic words either - I just think that for most learners, it makes more sense to learn it later on, just like it's already done. Speaking of that, you haven't addressed the point about your method requiring a teacher - and convincing said teacher that you really need the most multifunctional words first. Also reminds me on the AJATT post saying language is like peeing. In the comments, someone also said that speaking from day 1, single-word cards etc are like diuretics. They can make you pee even when you're dehydrated, but that's harmful in the long run. I'd say the same applies to focusing on 300 words. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5429 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 206 of 309 19 September 2014 at 9:59pm | IP Logged | |||||
I don't disagree with the idea of a wide-ranging discussion requiring lots of vocabulary. If your subjects demand more vocabulary, you get it. My objection here is with the idea that a small vocabulary is only good for small talk. We mustn't confuse a limited range of topics with a limited depth within a topic. You are not limited to a 3- minute conversation in French by 300 words. In fact here is an 8-minute discussion called How the Body Recognizes Viruses on medical crystallography from the same great Australian radio station as the previous. When I have a minute, I'll do some preliminary analysis of the vocabulary size. An interesting feature of this recording is the fact that Stèphanie Gras is from France and makes quite a few mistakes in her Engligh. The recording can be heard here: How the body recognizes viruses
Edited by s_allard on 19 September 2014 at 10:08pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| luke Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 7204 days ago 3133 posts - 4351 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Esperanto, French | Message 207 of 309 19 September 2014 at 10:40pm | IP Logged | |||||
A quick back of the envelope count is 453 unique "words". tr -d '[:punct:]' transcript | tr '[:upper:]' '[:lower:]' | tr ' ' '\n' |sort -u|wc -l 453 This all reminds of why I use an SRS. My dad used to tell me, "Never wrestle with a pig, you'll both get dirty and the pig will enjoy it." We didn't live on a farm, so I never learned that lesson. Edited by luke on 19 September 2014 at 10:53pm 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| robarb Nonaglot Senior Member United States languagenpluson Joined 5058 days ago 361 posts - 921 votes Speaks: Portuguese, English*, German, Italian, Spanish, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, French Studies: Mandarin, Danish, Russian, Norwegian, Cantonese, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Greek, Latin, Nepali, Modern Hebrew | Message 208 of 309 19 September 2014 at 11:58pm | IP Logged | |||||
But this is basically the holy grail of language learning. Most people can move to a foreign country, use the local language as their primary language every day for decades, acquire thousands upon thousands of words during massive exposure of all types to the language, and they still can't quite manage to get the "quality" skills quite right. This is the real hard problem of language learning. As far as I know there's no way to obtain those skills without massive exposure and use of the language. With systematic study, you could get the grammar correct, but you won't interact in a fluent natural way. With speaking practice you could get fluency, but the rest of quality wouldn't come until you'd listened to other people talk for hundreds or thousands of hours, if ever. By learning words, you can get decent comprehension, but your output will be poor. Pronunciation can be achieved by people skilled in vocal imitation, but obviously won't get you very far on its own. The whole set of intangible skills simply can't be reached without massive training until most parts of the language system become second nature (barring some claims that certain "geniuses" partially circumvent this long process). In all this, vocabulary is the easy part. It's basically the only part of language (well, maybe alongside writing "properly" in which anyone, with enough hard work, can surpass a native speaker. Most language learners see vocabulary as an integral part of their goal, since it's necessary to comprehend advanced speech/text in multiple topics, and in certain situations it's necessary to use a rare word to get the effect just right. As for acquiring the hard skills, you only need enough vocabulary to engage with the language over a prolonged period; the number of words required depends on the type of situations in which you'll engage with the language. However, this doesn't help us figure out how to get better at learning the hard skills. P.S. The HSK level 3, which is rather generously equated with CEFR B1, holds the examinee responsible for 600 words. You can pass the exam without knowing all the words. At this level, the test materials are still significantly simplified relative to normal conversational speech. Edited by robarb on 20 September 2014 at 2:39am 3 persons have voted this message useful |
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