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Is counting your vocabulary size useless? | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| atama warui Triglot Senior Member Japan Joined 4701 days ago 594 posts - 985 votes  Speaks: German*, English, Japanese | Message 105 of 210 21 August 2012 at 2:24am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Maybe the thread should have been named "Is flaming useless?".
Sorry, but seeing you ignoring all my arguments and jumping at an additional comment caused my short circuit. Let's go back on-topic. Edited by atama warui on 21 August 2012 at 2:24am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5430 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 106 of 210 21 August 2012 at 2:29am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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I can't really be bothered to get into a long debate about this issue of learning usage because my position is pretty clear. I really don't care about counting words and, really, the question about the so-called minimum or threshold is, at the end of the day, quite irrelevant as well. I'm not going to argue over 300 or 500 or 750 words. It's not important.
What I find quite fascinating is seeing how people learn to actually speak. A short while ago I was in a BBQ chicken restaurant and I realized that I was witnessing the very thing we were discussing here. The two young men behind the counter were native speakers of English and were learning French on the job. Like most Canadians, they probably had some French in school. Here they were serving the customers in French. Obviously the kind of interactions were highly repetitive and I'm sure they repeated the same phrases dozens of times every day. From time to time there were some complications (i.e."Can I have the potatoes in two separate containers, one with spices, one without?") But you could tell that there were rarely any problems because the context was very helpful in determining meaning. As I observed these young men, I thought about the French lesson they were getting. Their accent was impeccable, the grammar very good but the vocabulary was somewhat limited to the environment of the restaurant. How many different words do they use in a day? Well, it's certainly not 5000. Is it 1000? Can they talk in depth about a medical emergency in the restaurant? Well maybe not the first time in happens but they have all the linguistic tools to learn so that the next time it happens they will know what to say. And much of these resources can be transferred to a different environment. Should they go to work in a hospital in French, how long will it take them to learn the necessary vocabulary. Three days? A week? The important thing is when they go for the job interview they can speak in fluent and correct French as long as they stick to what they know. Now compare this to people who have been studying French for years and who are afraid to open their mouth. Or when they do open their mouth, you wish they had not. They cannot get a job in a French-speaking environment. The more I observe these situations and the more I work with students the more I'm convinced that it is important to master what I call grammar or speaking skills and let the vocabulary take care of itself. Today I spent an hour with a Spanish-speaking student working on verb tenses and explaining why we prefer to say "I"m late because I had a problem." and not "I"m late because I have had problem." Or why we say "I was born in Spain." and not "I have born in Spain." My goal is the make his English impeccable by cleaning up the little details of grammar and interactive skills so that he doesn't make all those big and small mistakes that I see in people who try to teach themselves or never had access to individual tutoring. When it comes to teaching French, the goal is the same: get the person talking correctly as soon as possible by mastering the basics. You've got to master those four key verbs inside out because you'll be using them for 50% of all verbs. With less than 100 verbs most of the battle is won. And you don't have to learn all the conjugations. Just the key ones. Don't waste your time on stuff you'll rarely use. Focus on the core stuff and start using your ears and mouth. The end result of this approach is that people can actually speak. Fluently and correctly most of the time. I happen to believe that it's best to work hard with a small number of words, and nothing has made me change my mind, but I will admit that it's not for everybody. Edited by s_allard on 21 August 2012 at 2:34am 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| atama warui Triglot Senior Member Japan Joined 4701 days ago 594 posts - 985 votes Speaks: German*, English, Japanese | Message 107 of 210 21 August 2012 at 2:38am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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You can get used to and master a relatively small niche relatively quickly. What the two men you described do was not "having conversations" though. They worked, using what little was needed to accomplish their job.
Put them in another environment and they'll have to learn the appropriate words, too. I assume you won't let them work as medical staff in a hospital though, because that kind of language requires more than 3 days to study. But seriously, a job in a BBQ chicken restaurant, how hard is that? One week of training while you're busy getting used to everyone and everything in the environment anyways. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5430 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 108 of 210 21 August 2012 at 3:40am | IP Logged | ||||||||
Rather than pursue a debate of diminishing returns, I would like to return to this point in @emk's post because it raises some interesting fundamental issues. I touched on this question earlier when I said there was a statistical fallacy in this idea that in order to understand a word you need to understand all the words that come before it in a frequency table. Here @emk is saying that you can't really understand the words "quid", "online", etc. unless you understand the 9999 words that precede them in the frequency table. This is preposterous. Let's look at this from a different angle. How would you calculate the number of words you know or can identify. @iversen is one of the few persons I know who has made the actual effort of going through a dictionary and counting the words he knew. Most people guess out of thin air. But wait a minute; using @emk's logic, you don't have to do much work. All you have to do is look at a frequency list and find the last word that you recognize. Then ipso facto you have the number of words you know because to know that particular word is to know all the words that come before it. I see, for example, that in a list at http://www.wordfrequency.info/files/entriesWithoutCollocates .txt the word "anorectecl" occupies rank 59962. I happen to know what that word means. Does that mean that I know the 59961 words that precede it? Hardly not. To come back to the snippet of dialogue that I gave, it seems to me pretty clear that to understand what is being said you have to understand the meaning of 113 words and not more. The other methodological issue here is how individual vocabulary size is measured. To my knowledge, there are very few cases of individuals who have systematically measured the number of words they use over a given time. This basically means wearing a recording device for, let's say a week, and creating a record of every word spoken. I know that some scientists have done this. But @iversen is one of the few people who has attempted to do this with emails if I recall correctly. What most people do, besides those who just guess, is to look at lists and see how many words they can identify. This tells us nothing about how they can use the word and any collocations or idioms. I recognize "dar", "quedar" and "andar" so, I say that I know at least three words in Spanish. Can I use them in spoken Spanish? Well, that's another story. Maybe yes, maybe no. For counting purposes, use doesn't matter. What would be far more useful but so difficult to assess is how many words I actually use in whatever language. Wearing that recording device I could actually record my usage of words in the various languages. What I suspect, and I think many people here would agree, is that we use a very small portion of the words even in our native language. How many different words in French or English do I speak in a week? Of course, much depends of the nature of my activities. I do a fair amout of speaking and writing in English but if we disregard writing I doubt that I use more than 1000 different words in speaking French or English in a week. Again, the point of all of this is that when we look at real active usage of vocabulary from an individual perspective, we use only tiny fractions of the collective pool. And finally, there is the issue of what we do with the words we use. We know that many words have different meanings depending on context. For example the word "out" is English has a rich semantic set associated with it. The other day I heard someone say, "Everybody is out for themselves." And that same word shows up in "I gave out the food" and "the engine just gave out." How do we calculate all this in our use of the word out? My conclusion, as always, is that the issue of vocabulary size is useless. And all the more so that true assessment is fraught with major methodological obstacles. Edited by s_allard on 21 August 2012 at 7:01am 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5430 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 109 of 210 21 August 2012 at 3:58am | IP Logged | ||||||||
Enfin, maybe something is getting through. How can one say that these men were not "having conversations"? Then what were they doing? They were not mumbling to themselves. They were not parroting from a phrase book. They were interacting with customers. If that is not conversation, if that is not using the language, then obviously we're not talking about the same thing. If it took them only one week to achieve that level of performance in French, I have to say that it shows the power of a small vocabulary when used properly. That is exactly what I have been trying to demonstrate. Give somebody an environment where they hear and speak the language 8 hours a day and some basic instruction and they will blossom linguistically. As for going to a different environment, be it a hospital--and I'll let that snide remark about medical staff pass--or a government office, the point is that these young men have a leg-up in terms of speaking ability on those people who are studying in the classrooms or diligently listening to Michel Thomas. Edited by s_allard on 21 August 2012 at 6:47am 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5430 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 110 of 210 21 August 2012 at 4:21am | IP Logged | ||||||||
I thought it might be interesting to have a look at just how the CEFR levels correlate with vocabulary size. Since many people around here claim that levels like 20,000 or more words are necessary to speak a language fluently, I decided to have a look at what the C1 and C2 levels might require. I chose those levels because they are the highest and most people around here aspire to reach them. One reference on the subject is James Milton's Measuring Second Language Vocabulary Acquisition. Most of the issues that we have discussed here are studied in great detail. For our purposes, it is interesting to note on page 187 that the vocabulary size associated with the C2 level ranges from 3300 to 3721 words. For English as a foreign language the range is 4500-5000. It's interesting to note that these figures are a far cry from the ones we have seen touted around here. Now, my question is the following: If to pass the C2 in Spanish or French requires less than 4000 words, why are there so few C2 levels in those languages here at HTLAL? Edited by s_allard on 21 August 2012 at 7:05am 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Peregrinus Senior Member United States Joined 4492 days ago 149 posts - 273 votes Speaks: English* | Message 111 of 210 21 August 2012 at 4:50am | IP Logged | ||||||||
I don't wish to be insulting, but you are starting to stray into the territory blazed by the ShamWow! folks here over the years. You are using an unlimited use of the term conversation, when atami warui and others including myself have clearly limited with qualifiers, our use of that term. In other words, you are saying that a very limited ability in a very limited niche qualifies as a broader conversational ability.
And now you implicitly implying (whether you mean it or not) that the easy successes of the first week will be replicated later, even after discussing diminishing returns in another post. AND you are now adding a semi-immersion environment on top of merely learning to use 300ish words well.
Since you have added a semi-immersion environment, of course they have a leg up. If you wish to qualify your position and say that 300ish words plus semi-immersion trumps MT/Pimsleur in isolation, I'll concede. But very rapidly the self-learners who proceed to Assimil/FSI/whatever, will pass your counter clerk by and reach the point where with some intermediate intensive study they can use extensive means and really take off to higher levels and much more quickly. If you wish to maintain the counter clerks, talking daily about the same things, will learn more quickly that the purposeful learner, then again I would refer to Linguamor's posts and Dr. Arguelles' videos. And especially note that Linguamor's partner, who only by completing half a Pimsleur 3 part course and then listening to 2 hours of Spanish TV for 2-3 years afterward, did reach a high conversational proficiency. But he wasn't watching the same 2 hour program day after day and his approach took longer than Linguamor's own where that time each day after the intermediate stage would be spent on extensive reading. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| atama warui Triglot Senior Member Japan Joined 4701 days ago 594 posts - 985 votes Speaks: German*, English, Japanese | Message 112 of 210 21 August 2012 at 5:11am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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I give up. No use discussing something with someone who can't be arsed to read other participants responses properly but resorts to comments like "maybe you understand only 80% of what I wrote.
This is hilarious. 勝手にしろ 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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