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Number of words: a flawed strategy | ||
Tags: Number of words | Learning Strategy | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Learning Techniques, Methods & Strategies |  | |
| FuroraCeltica Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 6799 days ago 1187 posts - 1427 votes  Speaks: English*, Spanish, French | Message 1 of 8 07 February 2012 at 10:35pm | IP Logged | |||||
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One of the most common questions on this forum is "How many words do I need to know to
learn XXX language?". Once they have a number, they then set off to learn this number, focussing on the most common. It is usually suggested that 5,000 words or so occur in 95% of everyday use. Thus, many learners focus on these words in the belief once they have all 5,000, they will understand 95% of daily utterances. As anyone who has tried this will tell you, this isn't quite as sharp a strategy as you think. Certain words are in this 5,000 word corpus, but everyday language has potentially tens of thousands of words outside this corpus that "pad the rest of the conversation". In English, the sentence "The capricious young maiden traversed the pathway" is one that features several words outside the 5,000 word range, the fact "the" and "young" are known to you due to study of the 5,000 won't help you one bit with the rest. We must also bear in mind that people advocating a "minimum number of words" approach need to understand that there is an interesting definition of "word". My french lexical frequency dictionary tells me that one word is "être". This is counted as one word in the dictionary. In fact, être is actually several words (suis, est, serais, serai, soyez etc), all of which need to be learned individually. So what they count as one word is actually twenty or so. For most languages, each verb form needs to be learned, and in languages with lots of noun declension, each noun could have multiple endings which need to be learned too. But your trusty "minimum words" strategy won't help you much. In short, the "minimum number of words" question is not easy to answer. The only way to get mastery of a language is to study LOTS of it, including words outside of this "most common corpus" 5 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6637 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 2 of 8 08 February 2012 at 1:42am | IP Logged | |||||
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The number of words you know is a convenient guide to your knowledge about the language, but of course it isn't enough to know a lot of words. And of course there aren't fixed limits - you can survive on a holiday with just a few hundred words, but just to read newspapers and magazines you need far more than that. There is no reason to set a fixed target: just go ahead and study - you will never have learned enough words. If you do decide to calculate the size of your vocabulary then the simple thing is to count headwords in your preferred dictionary and go along withits definition of what it takes to become a boldly typed headword.
It can't be a secret that I have written a few times about acquisition of vocabulary through wordlists and other systematic methods, and my personal feeling is that MOST of my vocabulary in different languages has come through wordlists, either based on words from intensively studied texts or directly from dictionaries. But I have also stressed that getting acquainted with a word only is the first step - you need to meet it in different contexts and use it yourself in order to make it a useful part of your arsenal. The other side of the coin is however that the first contact with a word doesn't have to cover all its uses. 'Above' the words there are idiomatic expressions, and even though it may help to write them down and reread your notes later this is not quite the same thing as a wordlist. However that's another discussion. 'Below' the words you normally would put on a wordlists there are the 'grammatical' words, irregular words, extremely common words (which often also are irregular) and words which are used in connectors - all in all maybe 1000 words. There is so much to learn about each of these words that no wordlist or SRS system can cope with it. Your grammar will contain a lot of relevant information about such words, and because they are so common you will also meet them again and again in genuine texts and recordings. The systematic methods are better suited to less common words, and you should let your own interests and your personal situation influence which words you choose to learn in this group. Edited by Iversen on 14 February 2012 at 4:20pm 6 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| leosmith Senior Member United States Joined 6484 days ago 2365 posts - 3804 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Tagalog | Message 3 of 8 08 February 2012 at 8:01pm | IP Logged | |||||
It's an interesting topic, but I just wanted to point out that most people don't set off to systematically learn XXX words. 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| FuroraCeltica Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 6799 days ago 1187 posts - 1427 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, French | Message 4 of 8 08 February 2012 at 9:33pm | IP Logged | |||||
Most don't, but quite a few do 4 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| atama warui Triglot Senior Member Japan Joined 4635 days ago 594 posts - 985 votes Speaks: German*, English, Japanese | Message 5 of 8 10 February 2012 at 9:53pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I could agree to this, if sentences like "The capricious young maiden traversed the pathway" was how people actually speak. They do not. Those 5.000 words (better: 6.000) are actually what makes 95% of the content. If you are at that percentage, you might not perfectly understand 95%, but you can guess the meanings of those blind spots, and if that's not the case, just look that up.
Hence, I disagree. Learning those "most frequent words" is actually a GoodThing(TM). 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| carlonove Senior Member United States Joined 5920 days ago 145 posts - 253 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Italian | Message 6 of 8 11 February 2012 at 3:07am | IP Logged | |||||
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Many language learners do not have the ability to practice their spoken target language, or are more interested in reading. In these cases, learning abstract, literary, or descriptive terms like "capricious", "maiden", or "pathway" is probably of greater benefit than colloquial or "everyday" language they're not likely to encounter in their studies in the near term. With a basic-intermediate understanding of your TL's grammar, a bilingual text, and the assistance of a pop-up dictionary like Globefish, you can read much faster than you would ordinarily be able, and passively "acquire" much of the vocabulary relevant to your reading material without resorting to direct memorization.
3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5364 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 7 of 8 12 February 2012 at 6:39pm | IP Logged | |||||
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In these discussions about the number of words necessary, I have always maintained that the question is usually poorly put. The real question is: how many words to do what? We know that all the studies have shown that in the spoken language a very tiny number of words account for the bulk of usage. Just the other day, I read that in French just 38 words account for about 50% of all the words in a corpus of spoken French. And in a few experiments I have done with spoken French I observed that just two verbs (être, avoir) account for around 40% of all the verbs.
This does not mean of course that you can understand 50% of French speech with 38 words. It just means that you will encounter these words very frequently. What this does mean however--and Iversen alluded to this--is that a small number of words are recombined in many different ways and mixed in with all the other words. This also means that the number of words is just one part of the equation. The other part is how they are used. And this is the real complication. If learning a language were as simple as learning 2000 or 5000 words, we would all be polyglots. What we all know is that the real problem is learning how to combine them correctly and spontaneously. And of course the many idioms in all languages only complicate things further. For all these reasons, I have always maintained that a small number of words well mastered in terms of usage is more useful than a large number of loose words. For example, in French, English or Spanish, a vocabulary of 500 words is fine for ordinary conversations. This is what native speakers do. On the other hand, if the spoken language is not of great interest or use, and you are more interested in technical or literary texts, then it is a different ball game. There you need a much wider vocabulary. Then there is more emphasis on recognizing many different words and less on actually mastering the recombinations of a small number of words. Edited by s_allard on 12 February 2012 at 9:01pm 4 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| clumsy Octoglot Senior Member Poland lang-8.com/6715Registered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5112 days ago 1116 posts - 1367 votes Speaks: Polish*, English, Japanese, Korean, French, Mandarin, Italian, Vietnamese Studies: Spanish, Arabic (Written), Swedish Studies: Danish, Dari, Kirundi | Message 8 of 8 13 February 2012 at 8:36pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Well, I have made myself a goal of learning 300 words, in order to cross out all
countries in the world map (tac challenge). I find such an rough estimate helpful - I feel I am improving. Of course I am learning grammar at the same time, but I have no clue how many grammar items I have to learn to reach A1. Of course when you are at highter level you need to learn less frequent words too, but knowing where you stand may help you in learning. It's easier to run, when you know ho much of the road is behind you, and how much you need to run yet. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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