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How do you count words? | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Learning Techniques, Methods & Strategies |  | |
| Solfrid Cristin Heptaglot Winner TAC 2011 & 2012 Senior Member Norway Joined 5268 days ago 4143 posts - 8864 votes  Speaks: Norwegian*, Spanish, Swedish, French, English, German, Italian Studies: Russian | Message 1 of 19 06 January 2012 at 2:38pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I often see people write that they know so and so many words in their TL, or that you should know a certain amount of words to consider yourself at a certain level. And my question is, how on earth do you count that, and what exactly do you count?
I have no idea how many words I know in any language (except Arabic which I believe is around 13 right now :-), and unless I physically sit down and write down every word as I learn it from the very beginning, I do not see how that can be done. There is also the small matter of what you count as a word, and how well you must know it before it counts. In Spanish, tener, tengo, tuve, tuviera: Is that one word, is that four words, can you only count it as a word when yon know all possible word forms or do you count it as a word when you learn the first one? How well must you know a word before you say that you know that word? - Recognize it when you see it - Be able to translate it from your native language to your TL? - Be able to use all possible forms of the word correctly and without hesitating How do you count? Edited by Solfrid Cristin on 06 January 2012 at 4:42pm 4 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| a3 Triglot Senior Member Bulgaria Joined 5190 days ago 273 posts - 370 votes Speaks: Bulgarian*, English, Russian Studies: Portuguese, German, Italian, Spanish, Norwegian, Finnish | Message 2 of 19 06 January 2012 at 2:52pm | IP Logged | |||||
The former if we're talking about passive knowledge and the latter if we're talking about active one. In the case 'you must know X words to be able to conversate' know here means actively.
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 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 3 of 19 06 January 2012 at 4:04pm | IP Logged | |||||
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If you want to know everything about word counting from a scientific angle you should read the book mentioned by Jeffers in the thread Online book on vocabulary size.
If you want to see things from a practical rather than scientific angle then I have written about it in my Guide to Learning Languages, part 4, which includes a link to my own word count from 2009. This count is nr. 2, and I basically looked through a sample of pages in a number of dictionries and decided on fly for each word whether 1) I knew at least one of its meanings, 2) whether I was sure I had seen it somewhere and not just guessed it. The first time I did a word count it was done in a less systematic way, but then I did a control check of some of the lists with 'known words' to see whether I actually knew what the words on those lists meant. And the results were so reassuring that I didn't bother with similar controls in round 2 in 2009. If I ever do a third word count I'll operate with three categories: certainly known, guessable, certainly not known. ANd I'll use the same dictionaries to be able to see whether there is any progress. Edited by Iversen on 06 January 2012 at 4:29pm 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| aloysius Triglot Winner TAC 2010 & 2012 Senior Member SwedenRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6174 days ago 226 posts - 291 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English, German Studies: French, Greek, Italian, Russian | Message 4 of 19 06 January 2012 at 4:16pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Here's another related thread, that I find quite interesting:
Extensive Reading Vocabulary Range Video /aloysius 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Lianne Senior Member Canada thetoweringpile.blog Joined 5049 days ago 284 posts - 410 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Esperanto, Toki Pona, German, French | Message 5 of 19 06 January 2012 at 6:09pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I haven't been keeping track for French, because I'm been learning it differently (not much use of Anki, which is weird, but that's another topic), but for Esperanto I find it pretty easy. When I'm studying Esperanto, I put words I learn into my Anki deck. For verbs, I put only the infinitive form. So, the number of words in my Anki deck is the number of words I know in Esperanto (assuming I already know all the words I put in the deck).
I consider myself to know a word if I can recognize it, translate it from English to Esperanto, and, in the case of verbs, use it in the basic tenses (easy in Esperanto). My French word count is a horse of a different colour. I'm sometimes amazed by how many words I recognize, even though I haven't been learning for that long and can't really talk about very many things in French (although Michel Thomas is certainly helping that!). So my passive word count is pretty huge, my active word count pretty small, and I have no way of knowing numbers for either. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| nway Senior Member United States youtube.com/user/Vic Joined 5349 days ago 574 posts - 1707 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish, Mandarin, Japanese, Korean | Message 6 of 19 06 January 2012 at 6:29pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I've never really understood the point of keeping track of word count. In language studies, our task is relatively simple and straightforward—the more words, the better. So whether we know 250 or 2,500 words, there's still only one direction to go (and that's up, hopefully).
It'd kind of be like following the directions, "walk all the way to the corner and make a left", and insisting on counting one's steps on the way to the corner. 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Solfrid Cristin Heptaglot Winner TAC 2011 & 2012 Senior Member Norway Joined 5268 days ago 4143 posts - 8864 votes Speaks: Norwegian*, Spanish, Swedish, French, English, German, Italian Studies: Russian | Message 7 of 19 06 January 2012 at 7:15pm | IP Logged | |||||
Yet so many do it. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Lianne Senior Member Canada thetoweringpile.blog Joined 5049 days ago 284 posts - 410 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Esperanto, Toki Pona, German, French | Message 8 of 19 06 January 2012 at 7:17pm | IP Logged | |||||
By that logic, we also shouldn't bother with things like beginner/intermediate/advanced, A1 - C2, etc. Word counting is just another way of tracking your progress, whether for motivation or to give us a frame of reference for talking about how much we've learned. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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