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Is counting your vocabulary size useless? | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6597 days ago 9753 posts - 15779 votes  4 sounds Speaks: Russian*, English, FinnishC1, Latin, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Danish, Romanian, Polish, Belarusian, Ukrainian, Croatian, Slovenian, Catalan, Czech, Galician, Dutch, Swedish | Message 161 of 210 22 August 2012 at 10:38am | IP Logged | ||||||||
And yeah, (@frenkeld) listening is easier in this regard. I've been finding it beneficial to use Italian subtitles while watching HP in Italian, to actually see the words in writing. My reading is kinda behind my listening, not that I mind really. Listening is more important for me, at least in the big languages with stuff to listen to. Edited by Serpent on 22 August 2012 at 10:50am 4 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| shapd Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 6149 days ago 126 posts - 208 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Italian, Spanish, Latin, Modern Hebrew, French, Russian | Message 162 of 210 22 August 2012 at 1:55pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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There seems to some confusion about what X-Lex type vocabulary tests actually measure. They do NOT state that only 4500 words or whatever are needed for level C2. They measure how many of a random sample of the most common 5000 words are recognized by the test subject. Therefore, the maximum score possible is 5000. How many words beyond the basic 5000 are known is not tested, so the number actually known is almost certainly much more. In their simplest form, they only test passive knowledge.
For an interesting discussion of this topic, I recommend Gethin and Gunnemark's Art and Science of Learning Languages. They agree with both sides of this argument. They start with "crawl" lexicon, 400-500 words and 150 phrases, which are to be learned very thoroughly until they are automatic, along with a basic crawl grammar. So they agree that usage of these words should be mastered, with much of the idiomatics covered by the phrases. They call this an active minimum. They then extend the numbers up through about 2000 words and a corresponding number of set phrases to define "walking" and "running" stages for a "basic vocabulary". Then of course you keep on learning new words and phrases corresponding to your interests through both extensive reading/listening and intensive study of selected passages to analyse exactly how the language expresses particular concepts. There is therefore no real conflict between the viewpoints of s_allard and those who like to learn large vocabularies. The initial foundation is the thorough learning of a comparatively small number of words and phrases but then amassing a large scale vocabulary becomes possible. 8000 words is according to them a complete communication system, adequate for understanding most material. However, much less than that is needed for active communication, so a large number of that 8000 will be passive. (Other researchers have suggested at least half) I cannot find any recommendation to actually count the number of words you know beyond the beginner stages though. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Peregrinus Senior Member United States Joined 4492 days ago 149 posts - 273 votes Speaks: English* | Message 163 of 210 22 August 2012 at 1:57pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
This is where I think Anki can really shine, i.e. for maintenance for either backburner languages or for low pressure maintenance of languages when time and real world constraints force you stop intensive studies for a while, and especially if you also include sentences/phrases. Let's face it, most people don't persevere, and even those who do sometimes stop and restart. With sub-decks and tags Anki 2 is now very flexible, and one can break down that vocabulary into smaller chunks to drill, and transfer words that are now easy (but may not be in the future if you go to maintenance mode only) to different "easy" sub-decks (instead of deleting them outright). Such small, even very small sub-decks, can even be used for initial learning Iversen style (5-7 words at a time) with such tags, and then used without tag filters later, despite habitual advice here not to use Anki for initial learning of vocabulary. 3 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 164 of 210 22 August 2012 at 3:28pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
I think @iversen has really summed up very well the difference between our approaches to learning a language. We have different goals. His goal is to be able to read a text written for native speakers. That says it all. To be able to do this you need a passive vocabulary comparable to that of a native speaker. There is no doubt about that. Speaking is a by-product that may or may not happen. My goal, on the other hand, is to speak as quickly as possible with native speakers. I want to become functional as soon as possible in daily activities. Understanding and speaking are my main focus. Reading texts written for native speakers is not a priority. And writing even less. Interestingly, this resembles the situation of my Spanish engineer who is doing a crash course with me in spoken English. Like most educated Europeans he has taken a couple of courses in English. I see his textbook and the workbook with the exercises all filled in. He knows many words. We look at the pictures in the book and he can identify many things, but when I said to him, "Hi Miguel, how's it going?" he gave me a quizzical look and couldn't answer. Oh-oh, I see; we have a problem. How is he going to meet with a prospective employer over lunch and not be able to answer a question like that? Nine days and 18 hours later, there's been a vast improvement. Now we can even start having interesting conversations. As a matter of fact, today he is going to try out his new English skills in a language meetup group for the first time What has changed? Has Miguel learned a large number of new words? Not really. In fact, much of the "new" material was actually very basic stuff that he had certainly seen before but never really learned how to use properly. Of course, he picked up whatever new words he needed for the conversations. What was the big change? The first thing was that Miguel spent about 18 hours hearing and speaking English in a structured learning situation with massive correction and feedback. His fundamental problem was that he couldn't put the words together properly. He would trip up on the simplest of things like word order. Or wanting to put "the" in front of all nouns or mixing up the verb tenses. I should also point out that we also cleaned up a lot of the pronunciation. Here was the first time that somebody actually helped him fix all those problems that Spanish speakers have. Things like distinguishing between "he's" and "his" and learning how to pronounce the past participles with "-ed." We worked on hearing and articulating the contractions that are so common in spoken English like "I'd", "I'm" and "You've." The bulk of our time was spent not learning new words but how to speak in sentences using the necessary words, old and new. We also worked on how to interact spontaneously using all those little words that help maintain the flow of conversation. Much of this was elementary stuff. The fundamental problem was that Miguel had never really had the opportunity to actively master some of the very basics of English conversation. Why should something like "I'm going to the bar; can I get you something to drink?" or "I'll see what I can do" be so challenging? It's challenging if you've never had to confront it. We spent an entire hour yesterday on a simple business conversation over the telephone. It's not as easy as it may seem if you are not familiar with telephone protocol. But when it's shown to you and you repeat it 10 times you start to get the hang of it. Now Miguel knows how to answer the phone without stumbling or muttering something incomprehensible. He can now set-up a meeting and ask for directions. When he hears "Let's get together next week for lunch" he doesn't panic. I don't understand how people can say that you can't do much with a small vocabulary. The range of topics you can talk about is limited but you can still talk a lot about these topics. But we've already been down that road. Miguel's confidence and self-esteem are increasing daily. He knows that he won't speak like a native at that job interview in two weeks, but now he's no longer scared. We'll be working on some interview simulations. He knows that he'll probably make some mistakes but at least he'll be able to handle himself pretty well without stuttering and making a fool of himself. To tell the truth, I wished I had someone like myself working with me on my Spanish two hours a day. Someone who would listen to me and then say "Not bad, but here's how a native speaker would say it...Now, let's do it again...and again." or "Here it is slowly and then at real speed." Someone to whom I can ask "How do I say this in Spanish?" Someone who would tighten up my pronunciation by pointing out my mistakes and how to correct them. Edited by s_allard on 22 August 2012 at 7:29pm 5 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Medulin Tetraglot Senior Member Croatia Joined 4668 days ago 1199 posts - 2192 votes Speaks: Croatian*, English, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Norwegian, Hindi, Nepali | Message 165 of 210 22 August 2012 at 5:09pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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For C2 level of Spanish, the vocabulary needed is more in the 20k range, than 5k range.
I know some people ( non-native professors of Spanish) who found the C2 test difficult. They said the grammar wasn't difficult, but the vocabulary was. So, I doubt that you can pass the DELE C2 test @ Instituto Cervantes knowing only 5k words. ;) 5 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 166 of 210 22 August 2012 at 5:38pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
Nice comment and thanks for the reference. It's interesting to look at the how the figures of vocabulary size necessary for the C2 exams vary widely. There are probably some major methodological issues here. This question of vocabulary size also makes me think of the situation of polyglots and the many people here at HTLAL who claim to speak a number of languages. If speaking a language requires 15000 or more words, what about speaking three, four or five languages? Obviously, I believe that with 300-500 word families per language, this is more doable but I may be all alone. I can't begin to imagine what it is like to master three times 25000 words and all the related grammar information. That said, a lot of people here do claim to speak three or more languages and seem to do so relatively well. How do they do it? 3 persons have 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 167 of 210 22 August 2012 at 8:56pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
I've known several people like that. They have 4 or 5 years of French in school, and they can understand a decent amount of written French, but they can't really speak it, and their listening skills are weak. For people like that, several weeks of tutoring and immersion can work wonders. Personally, I wouldn't be inclined to "activate" a language before reaching a solid A2. If all I can say is, "Hello, how are you? My name is ____. What's your name? May I have that pastry please?", then conversation is going to be too frustrating for me. At the very least, I want to be able to say things like, "Is it OK to park my car over there on the weekend? Or is that a problem?"—and have a fighting chance of understanding the response. That kind of concrete-but-flexible speech probably requires a bare minimum of 1,000 words, if only to make sure I have a enough general-purpose nouns to cover the kind of things I'm likely to run into. But obviously, individual preferences and needs may vary. Some people might be very happy trying to speak with 150 nouns, 30 verbs, and a pile of pronouns, grammar words and other essentials. But for me, that would be absolutely agonizing.
You can definitely speak a language fluently without knowing 10,000 or 25,000 words, and without passing a C2 exam. It's perfectly possible, for example, to live and work in a country quite comfortably—or even take university classes in your target language— without knowing that much. Plenty of universities will admit people who have the equivalent of B2 language skills. Virtually all universities (except some law schools) will be happy with C1. A while back, you asked me some questions about my listening comprehension, and I never replied. Let me see if I can explain. French vocabulary is still a major problem for me, and it affects my listening comprehension. For example, I'm currently watching Buffy contre les vampires with my wife, and it's full of tricky little bits like this:
I didn't know the words marked in bold. This isn't surprising. Neither of these words appears in Routledge's 5,000-word frequency dictionary, nor have I seen them particularly often while reading. But without those words, it's hard for me to follow this dialog at full speed, because I'm missing most of the key words. Of course, my problems may be specific to me. At least in French, my listening comprehension depends, to a certain extent, on being able to guess what people are likely to say. French phonology is very different from English: There's liaison, enchaînement, lots homonyms, and tricky short words with nasal vowels. My brain deals with all of this automatically, up to a point. But when, say, 10% of the words are unfamiliar (as in the above example), my listening comprehension starts to break down badly, and I start losing entire lines of dialog into a mush of semi-nasal liaison. I'll happily accept that this is a defect in my brain, my study methods, or merely my current skill level. But once I learn a "word" like en vouloir, it practically pops out of the audio. So I work hard to improve my vocabulary, for the simple reason that it helps. A lot. 4 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| vientito Senior Member Canada Joined 6338 days ago 212 posts - 281 votes | Message 168 of 210 23 August 2012 at 2:10am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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rebutant! what a big word. In quebec, ecoeurant is a versatile and common word on the lips of many people. To be honest, I have never ever heard "tarabiscoté" throughout my 12 years of sojourn here. I am just wondering what sort of people they search for doing all these translations and who exactly are their intended audience?
1 person has voted this message useful |
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