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Can we ever fill in all the gaps? | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| beano Diglot Senior Member United KingdomRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4620 days ago 1049 posts - 2152 votes  Speaks: English*, German Studies: Russian, Serbian, Hungarian | Message 1 of 39 29 October 2013 at 2:54pm | IP Logged | ||
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Last night I had a few beers in an Edinburgh pub. The girl behind the bar was from Lithuania and seemed to handle all the orders without any problems. This particular hostelry was situated close to the main railway station and I asked if they had any "train timetables" so I could check my departure times (I don't own a smartphone).
The young lady had no idea what I was talking about, I repeated the request a couple of times before another worker informed me they didn't have any. I'm not having a go at the girl in any way, but it got me thinking. How long does it take before we never get stumped by a request for a relatively common item? An object every native would know, regardless of education levels. Can we ever fill in all the gaps? Another example, I recently took a KLM flight from Edinburgh to Amsterdam. The flight was full of native English speakers and - as expected - the cabin crew spoke excellent English. But when the refreshment trolley arrived, I overheard one passenger enquire if there were any "spirits" available. Every UK adult would know that in a drinks context, spirits are whisky, vodka, gin etc. Strong beverages in other words. But the stewardess didn't understand the key word in the question. Edited by beano on 29 October 2013 at 2:55pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| tarvos Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member China likeapolyglot.wordpr Joined 4705 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 2 of 39 29 October 2013 at 3:24pm | IP Logged | ||
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I imagine that people who only know a different equivalent of the item in question (f.
ex. someone who calls lorries trucks) will be equally confused. You can never fill all the gaps. The question is not whether you can - knowledge is infinitely large - but how you deal with situations where you lack an item (which can happen to anyone) and resolve the problem adequately. Eventually you need to communicate adequately and as long as the man eventually got his whiskey, I wouldn't really blame the stewardesses. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5428 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 3 of 39 29 October 2013 at 3:41pm | IP Logged | ||
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I think that this is a very frequent occurrence. In my opinion it simply reflects the fact that as foreign language
learners, especially at an adult age, we have not been exposed to the vast range of learning moments that a native speaker experiences during years if not decades of speaking the language. In fact, I find that i'm still having to look up words in my own languages because they are new to me. Just a few weeks ago I learned the expression "pert near." Now I hear it regularly. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Hekje Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 4701 days ago 842 posts - 1330 votes Speaks: English*, Dutch Studies: French, Indonesian | Message 4 of 39 29 October 2013 at 3:51pm | IP Logged | ||
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I certainly think it's possible to fill in all the gaps, but not under the circumstances that most language learners
experience. Anecdata: my dad is from the Netherlands. When he came to the United States in his late twenties, he still had a very heavy accent in English. Fast-forward two decades though and you would never know that English was his second language. I have never heard him reach for a word, ever. Not even with specialized terminology in his profession (medicine). So it is possible. On the other hand, my dad obviously had several advantages that many language learners do not. English is ubiquitous, especially in the Netherlands; he's lived here for 20+ years; he married a native speaker. But I don't know if this is ultimately much to worry about. Going back to your example, I think even I, a native English speaker, might double-take if someone asked me for "spirits". Since I as an American would normally say "drinks" instead, it would definitely take me a second to understand what they wanted. While it's surprising that a flight stewardess wouldn't know the UK term, it's not totally shocking to me. So yeah. And even outside of UK/American English differences, I hear new words in English all the time. If I want to discuss computer science with my housemate, for example, I have to ask him to define pretty much every other word coming out of his mouth. I find it impossible to fill all the gaps even in my native language, so I am pretty much prepared to stumble into vocab holes forever in my second and third. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
 emk Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5530 days ago 2615 posts - 8806 votes Speaks: English*, FrenchB2 Studies: Spanish, Ancient Egyptian Personal Language Map | Message 5 of 39 29 October 2013 at 4:45pm | IP Logged | ||
Native speakers are still learning new words until quite late in life:
As you can see, native speakers climb from about 23,800 headwords at age 20 to 27,800 headwords at age 30. That's a gain of 16% in 10 years. This chart is from Test Your Vocab, a research site that estimates how many OED dictionary headwords you know using random sampling. The average native speaker included in this survey has an SAT verbal score of 700, so these are relatively well-educated folks. So even a very diligent student of a foreign language has a huge mountain to climb. It can be done. There are case studies in the SLA literature of adult learners who have vocabularies larger than their typical native, college-educated peers. But they were generally professionals, living in immersion situations, who had voracious reading habits and sometimes a taste for crossword puzzles. But on average, if you don't live in the country, it's a bit unreasonable to expect that your vocabulary will be as large as that of a native who's been making visible progress for the past 30 years. At least not using the same natural methods natives generally do. But what if you used "unnatural" methods? I'm pretty sure I'm not going to sit down and make word lists for every unknown word in a 35,000 word dictionary, but maybe that would work. Another promising approach might be to wait until you reached (say) 99.5% to 99.9% comprehension of regular texts, and then try to capture sentences containing every single unknown word when reading from electronic sources. I've been trying this recently, using some custom tools, and it's certainly possible to pick up 500 headwords per month this way without significantly disrupting my flow of reading or spending a huge amount of time using Anki. (I'm currently capturing about 2/3rds of the unknown words.) If I sustain this for a while, I imagine Anki reviews would eventually level off below 40 minutes per day. Even then, I imagine that vocabulary decay is going to be a problem. Once you start running into words that occur less than 3 times per million words, which is about 8 times in a Super Challenge's worth of books, I strongly suspect that Anki's review intervals will eventually become too long to keep the words alive without outside reinforcement. I started seeing this with my Egyptian vocabulary once the card intervals stretched out beyond 6 months or so. Of course, this raises another important question: Is it really worth knowing words you'll encounter once or twice a year, or maybe every couple of years? At some point, just saying, "Excuse me," and asking what the word means seems like a pretty reasonable solution. Edited by emk on 29 October 2013 at 5:41pm 7 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Chung Diglot Senior Member Joined 7154 days ago 4228 posts - 8259 votes 20 sounds Speaks: English*, French Studies: Polish, Slovak, Uzbek, Turkish, Korean, Finnish | Message 6 of 39 29 October 2013 at 4:49pm | IP Logged | ||
In a word: no. In a few more words: it may not matter. I think of the acquisition of a language as a bit like travelling on an asymptote. The curve (~ your level of knowledge as acquired while learning and dealing with the target language) and the second line (~ all of the variations/combinations/lexemes/semantic distinctions/registers present in the target language) will never overlap, but they'll get damned close if you move enough on that asymptote. Knowing 99.5% out of 100% is more than enough for me in this context. Even knowing 90% will likely see me through the day. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| sctroyenne Diglot Senior Member United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5389 days ago 739 posts - 1312 votes Speaks: English*, French Studies: Spanish, Irish | Message 7 of 39 29 October 2013 at 5:30pm | IP Logged | ||
What a neat find! I especially find the breakdown of survey answers corresponding with results here. Nothing too surprising but once again emphasizes what it takes to learn vocabulary in a foreign language. What's interesting is that the best students of English (self-reported) have the largest measured vocabulary among the students (at around 12,000) but the only ones that get above 20,000 words (approaching/equaling a native speaker) are those who have lived in an English-speaking country for more than 10 years. Edited by sctroyenne on 29 October 2013 at 5:31pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Henkkles Triglot Senior Member Finland Joined 4251 days ago 544 posts - 1141 votes Speaks: Finnish*, English, Swedish Studies: Russian | Message 8 of 39 29 October 2013 at 5:57pm | IP Logged | ||
Well the last time I did that test I got a score of 16,700 and I've never lived in an English speaking country so where do I fit in? 1 person has voted this message useful |
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