|
 |
How do you count words? | ||
Share with:
| ||
 Language Learning Forum : Learning Techniques, Methods & Strategies |  | |
| Flarioca Heptaglot Senior Member Brazil Joined 5816 days ago 635 posts - 816 votes  Speaks: Portuguese*, Esperanto, French, EnglishC2, Spanish, German, Italian Studies: Catalan, Mandarin | Message 17 of 19 07 January 2012 at 12:46am | IP Logged | ||
I ask myself the same question. Of course, no one will say that vocabulary acquisition is not important. However, it's very clear that for some people it isn't considered so much important. In many subtle ways, this reflects on their teaching practice or advices. 1 person has 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 18 of 19 07 January 2012 at 1:12am | IP Logged | ||
|
There are people here who write tables with the number of minutes minutes they have spent on everything they do, who calculate the nunber of pages they read, the percentage of unknown words inthose texts and so forth. I don't do that. But a couple of times I have been curious about the size of my vocabulary, and then I simply have proceeded to measure it. Last time was in 2009, so it is not something I do every other day.
I can get a hint about my level in reading by .. reading and about my degree of fluency by paying attention to the reactions of native speakers whom I meet during my travels, but word counts have the advantage of being expressed in hardcore numbers instead of just being expressed as some vague feeling. You may ask: why not attempt to take on of the formalized tests, like for instance CEFR? Well, I have taking my share of tests during my study years, and now I simply don't want to study for anything specific goal defined by somebody else. I don't deny the value of those formalized tests, but I am a grumpy old loner who just don't like the idea of sneaking to some assessment instutitute and humbly ask the august beings there to judge me. For the same reason I wouldn't care to follow an organized course in any language, even though I might learn something useful by submitting to the ordeal .... been there, done that (and didn't like it). But luckily word counts is one type of assessment which I can perform without involving anybody or anything except my dictionaries. And of course vocabulary size is important. We can discuss whether you should learn the most common words before anything else or what to do with idiomatic expressions, but because I learn from genuine texts instead of textbooks the choice is given: I will have to deal with rare words and funny expressions because they occur in those texts. It would be extremely boring to follow a course program where you weren't allowed to learn words outside the first thousand items in a frequency table. And I seriously doubt that those who follow a strictly graded scheme learn their basic words faster than I do with my unwieldy standard fare of sci mags and wikipedia articles and news broadcasts. Edited by Iversen on 07 January 2012 at 1:24am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| FuroraCeltica Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 6799 days ago 1187 posts - 1427 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, French | Message 19 of 19 07 January 2012 at 1:48am | IP Logged | ||
|
You've always got to be careful with number of words. Some lexical frequency dictionaries boast that they will teach you x,000 words. However, they will only teach you one form of the verb, they want teach you all its many conjugations (e.g. you will see 'to be' but won't see 'am', 'is', 'was', 'were' etc).
1 person has voted this message useful |
If you wish to post a reply to this topic you must first login. If you are not already registered you must first register
|  | 
Printable version
|
| Copyright 2024 FX Micheloud - All rights reserved No part of this website may be copied by any means without my written authorization. |
