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Is counting your vocabulary size useless? | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| Peregrinus Senior Member United States Joined 4492 days ago 149 posts - 273 votes  Speaks: English* | Message 113 of 210 21 August 2012 at 5:28am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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I am finished with this conversation as well unless others chime in extensively and meaningfully. While I have made some longish posts here, I have tried to make them substantial and on point. But long-winded posts that ramble on about multiple topics and more anecdotal observations, instead of focusing on a point or two at a time, and not answering substantively the objections and questions of others, do not advance the discussion. Nor does setting the bar artificially low for one's own position, and too high for another's.
There is a final point I wish to make that I believe is important. Let us imagine two different learners: #1 - This person has used methods endorsed by polyglots in this forum in getting a good broad foundation/overview, completing a good beginner's course, then using intermediate study to get to a vocabulary level of 5000+ words, with increasing use of extensive methods. But he/she cannot actually carry on a conversation with ease. #2 - This person has learned only on a very minimal level but with excellent pronunciation and memorization of some very common phrases, and feels comfortable in a couple touristy type or everyday low level work situations, and absolutely does not know enough vocabulary to tackle more detailed levels of conversation, which is most of what people actually talk about except to survival level foreign learners. Now what can we say about the defects in abilities of each of those persons? Well, in line with Sproch's post in the 95% coverage in 3000 words thread, where he gave a woman with a fairly large Czech vocabulary a 2 hour course in discourse markers which helped unlock her vocabulary knowledge for conversational purposes, the defects of person #1 can be rectified fairly quickly, despite a lack of formal usage/discourse marker specific courses available. But the conversational defects of person #2 cannot be rectified without time-consuming learning of THOUSANDS of additional vocabulary words and which will also be required for him to actually understand usage from the word component level to the idiomatic non-literal level. 4 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 114 of 210 21 August 2012 at 6:41am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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I really have to laugh when people who don't get their wishes here start to huff and puff then take their marbles and leave. I want to say bon débarras but I shall refrain. As we say, "If you can't stand the heat, stay out of the kitchen." Now that the distractions are gone, we can get down to serious business. I just wanted to say that the James Milton book can be read freely on the Internet, and I highly recommend it to people who are interested in counting words.
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| Hertz Pro Member United States Joined 4513 days ago 47 posts - 63 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Spanish, Mandarin Personal Language Map | Message 115 of 210 21 August 2012 at 6:46am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Throughout this thread it seems that many consider a word either to be "learned" or "not learned," 0 or 1, as if it were a single binary bit of computer data. I consider that a poor way to describe language acquisition.
Imagine a darkened stage, with a bank of lights overhead. You turn on a single lamp and illuminate part of the stage floor. The light has a focal point where it is brightest, but farther from that point (a "hot spot" as actors call it) the light dims to blackness. The focus is not perfect. Similarly, one can begin to learn a single word. In so doing, one must learn neighboring words and concepts. One can know "boca" is mouth and "abajo" is downward, but together "boca abajo" combine to mean (in English) "face down" or "prone." One cannot claim to fully understand the word "abajo" without knowing how it intersects with "boca." As with the light, focus is not perfect. To answer the question of the OP, the emphasis on common words should, in my opinion, be this: the time one spends on those 300 common words should be in proportion to the amount they are used. To use the analogy of the stage lights, the common words take more time to fully illuminate. 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 116 of 210 21 August 2012 at 6:56am | IP Logged | ||||||||
I can't agree more. And to continue on the uses of boca, today for the first time I actually used the idiom "a pedir de boca," something I had been waiting to do for quite a while. Since I hate repeating myself, I'll just add that it's so fascinating how the simplest of words have these ramifications in so many directions. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
 emk Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5532 days ago 2615 posts - 8806 votes Speaks: English*, FrenchB2 Studies: Spanish, Ancient Egyptian Personal Language Map | Message 117 of 210 21 August 2012 at 6:59am | IP Logged | ||||||||
Please do not tell me what I'm saying and then call it preposterous. I'm quite happy to construe your arguments as generously as possible, and to help make them as strong as possible before debating them. I would appreciate the same respect in return. Personally, I find it totally plausible that somebody could speak well and fluently with a 1,000 word vocabulary. They'd be limited to one or two topics, certainly, and they'd have to ask for clarification if anything out of the ordinary came up. But that's what I've believed all along—there are an awful lot of people on this planet who have languages that they only use for a few things, if the anthropologists are to be believed. Still, a few caveats and clarifications: - I'm not remotely convinced that a 300 word vocabulary is useful by itself. You're limited to at most 150 nouns or so, which is going to be crippling. I can easily believe that 800 words suffices to say most anything, given sufficient time, genius and abuse of phrasal verbs. (Vernor Vinge, a science fiction writer, wrote a short story in which an alien race spoke "Basic English" with an 800 word vocabulary, and he made it work. If that's not your cup of tea, try Simple English Wikipedia.) - If you have a 1000 word vocabulary, there's no reason why you can't know the 8000th most common word. But every rare word you include in your 1000 means that you have to sacrifice a common word (say, the 850th most common word). But you'll encounter the 850th most common word more often than the 8000th, so you actually lose something in the exchange—unless, of course, you're focusing on a specialized domain with a different distribution of words than the language at large.
Milton's work, as far as I can tell, is mostly based on X-lex vocabulary size estimation. This procedure is apparently based on a frequency list, which is divided into 1000-word bands, and random sample of words is taken from each band. These are mixed with plausible-looking non-words, and students are asked to answer yes/no when asked if they know each word. If they claim to know any non-words, this is used to adjust their score to correct for guessing and overconfidence. As far as I can tell, X- lex is a pretty wide-used instrument in SLA research. If there's a problem with Milton's work, it may be in the assessment of students at "C1" and "C2". As far as I can tell, those levels weren't based on the DALF or the TCF (the two official tests provided by the French government). Instead, the students appear to have been assessed using various national exams in the UK, Spain and Greece, or merely by what class they were in. I'd love to sit some of these 4000-word students down for the DALF C2 and see if they score as well as they did in Greece or the UK. If there's any good SLA vocabulary size papers that you think I should read—especially ones with detailed methodology sections explaining how they assessed CEFRL levels and vocabulary sizes—I'd be happy to take a look. But I don't have time to track such papers down myself, and in the absence of detailed published research, I suspect this discussion is at a dead end. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| frenkeld Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 6943 days ago 2042 posts - 2719 votes Speaks: Russian*, English Studies: German | Message 118 of 210 21 August 2012 at 7:01am | IP Logged | ||||||||
An impeccable accent and very good grammar make it extremely unlikely that they acquired their French skills in one week, except perhaps some of the specific vocabulary. It would be curiosity worth satisfying to talk to these young men and find out more about how they had learned their French. Edited by frenkeld on 21 August 2012 at 7:01am 4 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Hertz Pro Member United States Joined 4513 days ago 47 posts - 63 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Spanish, Mandarin Personal Language Map | Message 119 of 210 21 August 2012 at 7:46am | IP Logged | ||||||||
Nor am I. It is ridiculously insufficient. I know at least 300 words in German but I cannot read a simple paragraph without encountering words I cannot parse. I believe s_allard poses the theory that by the time one learns the 300-most-common words to a high level, he will have necessarily acquired an ancillary familiarity with words beyond those 300. If that is his argument, I agree, but I could not call that a 300-word vocabulary. 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 120 of 210 21 August 2012 at 9:19am | IP Logged | ||||||||
Since I have a lot of respect for the seriousness of @emk's contributions, I'll apologize for calling his position preposterous. And, as usual, he raises important questions. I think there is a fundamental issue here that is the cause of disagreement. There is no doubt that 1000 words will allow you to do more than 300. I have said that 300 is a threshold to be able to have a conversation. If 300 is too small, then we can bump it up to 500. That's not a big problem. The real question seems to be: what can you do with 300 words? Can you have a conversation with 300 words? I say yes because people do it all the time. We all do it because many conversations do not require large vocabularies. The problem stems form the fact that we are assuming that all individual vocabularies are identical and that a 300-word vocabulary means the first 300 words in a frequency list that is top-heavy with grammar words. This is where the fallacy of a homogenous frequency distribution causes a problem. If we look at the snippet of the British conversation that uses 113 words. Could a five-minute conversation use 113 words, or let's say 200? Of course, if you use the language as these people are doing. When I go to visit my aunt in the hospital and we talk for an hour, how many different words do I use? I would suggest less than 500. Why so little? It's simply because we talk about mundane topics of family and illness. @emk's position is that given the known frequency ranking of words across a range of samples, you can only use or understand certain words because you understand all the words that come before it. This is why he says that it takes a vocabulary of 10000 words before you can use the word DJ or quid. I take the word preposterous back, but I will say that I think this is patently not true. If two teenage girls are talking about a male student and one says "I'm like "What a hunk"," we first have a problem with the ranking of "like" in this usage. It's a fairly recent usage and ranks quite lowly, maybe around 17000. And then hunk is maybe lower, around 18000. Obviously, these figures are fictitious. But are we to conclude that it takes 18000 words for these girls to understand each other? And that each of these girls has a vocabulary of 18000 words? I say no. I say that those girls have their respective lexical sets that include "like" and "hunk." And in fact when they are talking to each other, they probably use less than 300 words. I just don't buy this idea that your lexical set is determined by the ranking of the words that you use. Where I think @emk has a point is that if you take the 300 most common words of the given frequency list and ask what you can do with them, there will be some limitations that I acknowledge. But remember that I have always insisted on the complexity and richness of use of these words. And when you add the sound component, there are a lot more possibilities than just counting 300 words would admit. What is also true as @emk has pointed out is that vocabulary tends to increase with overall proficiency. No problem with that. If you want to ace that C2 exam in French, you'll need more than 1000 words. But how many do you need? Is it 3500 or 10000? I'll let the specialists duke it out. But really, I don't think that the big issue is whether 300 is a magic number. My fundamental interest is how the words are used. Since I have some problems with how words are measured, I think these figures, including my 300, are misleading. By the way, this figure 300 is not my invention. I don't have the exact reference, but it was suggested by a group of French teachers. All of this comes to the fore when we are learning a foreign language. Because of this obsession with the number of words, the push is to learn as many words as possible. Words seem measurable, and there is this macho thing about having more words that the next person. But what's the problem? It's plainly evident that learning many words does not translate necessarily into good speaking ability, including pronunciation. My whole reason for even raising this topic is basically to shift the focus away from accumulating words and more towards precision in the assembling of words. Just a few days ago I had to point out to quite an advanced student that "étage" in French is masculine and that one says "grimper dans un arbre" and not "grimper un arbre." When I talk about relative pronouns in French to individual students, they are always surprised by the importance and the usefulness. I have seen time and time again people with university degrees in French and undoubtedly large vocabularies unable to carry on a fast-paced casual conversation. And by contrast, I see people with limited vocabularies able to fully participate in conversations because they have acquired the necessary interactive skills. And, by the way, these skills include the ability to deal with the lack of the right word in the heat of a conversation. Why does it take so long to become proficient in a language? Why do something like 99% of buyers of self-teaching products give up? Is it because of the 1000 words it takes to have a decent conversation? I believe not. I think it's the complexity of putting the words together. When users have a look at a verb book in Spanish or French or hear about irregular verbs and gender agreements, they chicken out and say that they're too old for this. And I always chuckle when Mandarin speakers tell me that French is much more difficult than Mandarin. WE don't have this problem here at HTLAL but why are many of us unable to engage easily in a conversation in our target language with someone we meet on the bus or in a waiting room? We may know a bunch of words and all sorts of rules, but we seem unable to put it all together anywhere close to native-like speed. Is the solution to learn more words? Edited by s_allard on 21 August 2012 at 9:50am 1 person has voted this message useful |
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