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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 25 of 210 17 August 2012 at 2:10am | IP Logged | ||
1. vocabulary and grammar - hardcore 2. vocabulary study - hardcore, grammar - natural 3. vocabulary - natural, grammar - hardcore 4. vocabulary and grammar - natural I *think* most of those that don't do grammar study either don't understand the explanations or are sick of them (e.g. because they're all written to be understood by people learning their first foreign language). 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 26 of 210 17 August 2012 at 2:33am | IP Logged | ||
I appreciate the quality of the various posts so far and thank all the people for the effort that went into making them. With reference to the post quoted here, I would like to correct what I perceive to be somewhat of a misrepresentation--ummaliciously, of course--of my position. First of all I don't believe that usage should be separated from the acquisition of grammar and vocabulary. I don't understand how one could learn 500 words, all the grammar and then proceed to learning usage, unless one learns a list of 500 headwords and then a bunch of grammar rules abstractly before putting them into practice. On the contrary, my positions is that approximately 300 words, well mastered--meaning usage--can suffice for one to speak a language well, albeit on limited topics but not necessarily in a simplistic manner. In this perspective, mastery of usage is at the very heart of this ability to do a lot with a small vocabulary. And it is precisely because mastery of usage is so central that the size of vocabulary is not a big issue since it will expand as necessary. Let's take a specific example. What is the minimum number of verbs one should know in order to speak French or any other language well? It's hard to answer because there are two subquestions: what do we mean by speaking a language well? and what do we intend to talk about? So let's look at a frequency list of French verbs of which there are over 12,000. The statistics tell us that the first four verbs, être, avoir, faire, aller make up over 50% of all verb occurrences in spoken French. So, if you learn the intricacies of just these four verbs, then half your French verbs are covered. What about the other half? It turns out that in everyday conversational French a very small number of verbs, less than 100, account for the overwhelming majority of spoken French verbs and then many verbs are used very rarely. This, of course, is not the case of written or technical French. Can you speak French well with 50 key verbs? I think you can and very well if you master those verbs. Mastering those verbs means that you can produce their various inflections very quickly and above all you have mastered their multiple contextual use, collocations and idiomatic constructions. This is why I disagree about learning usage after grammar and vocabulary. What I'm saying about French could apply to other languages. In Spanish, the spoken conversational language revolves around a tiny core of verbs that include ser, estar, hacer, tener, dar, ver, saber, venir, ir, gustar, etc. The other interesting about this concept of core usage is that a) one can often work around missing words by a circumlocution and b) native speakers will spontaneously fill in the blanks because everything else in your speaking ability is so good. As a matter of fact, this is exactly what we do with other speakers in our native tongue. To summarize then--or rather belabour the point--to speak with a vocabulary of 300 words, you have to know the language well. Let's say for example, you only knew 50 verbs in Spanish. You could be either very handicapped or very creative. It really depends on how you can work with those verbs. I don't see how it is different with vocabulary in general. 300 or 500 or whatever is a sort of threshold. You can feel very limited and confined to very simple things or you can find creative ways of using what you have, Edited by s_allard on 17 August 2012 at 2:41pm 4 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 27 of 210 17 August 2012 at 4:50am | IP Logged | ||
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If I am not mistaken, one of the points Peregrinus was making is that one cannot really master the usage of the first 300 words fully without having to learn something like 2000+ words in the process. One needs enough comprehensible input with the 300 words to nail down the nuances, and that input is not going to come packaged in just 300 words unless someone specifically designs materials to accomplish just that, assuming that's even possible.
Edited by frenkeld on 17 August 2012 at 4:59am 5 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 28 of 210 17 August 2012 at 4:58am | IP Logged | ||
But what are the percentages? My theory is that most people who are hardcore about vocabulary are likely to be the studious and organized types who would be inclined to take the next logical step and do the same thing with grammar. There are, of course, people who suffered some sort of childhood trauma involving grammar and avoid it like a plague, yet are willing to SRS themselves to a tizzy, but are they really that common? I am really getting at the question of just how statistically justified is s_allard's concern about the learners being highly unbalanced between vocabulary and grammar towards vocabulary. Edited by frenkeld on 17 August 2012 at 5:02am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| sfuqua Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 4765 days ago 581 posts - 977 votes Speaks: English*, Hawaiian, Tagalog Studies: Spanish | Message 29 of 210 17 August 2012 at 6:11am | IP Logged | ||
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Is it even possible to learn the grammar of a language well without learning a large amount of vocabulary?
Has anybody ever seen a learner who only knows 300 words, and can use the language fluently with those 300 words? Many people may be able to study a grammar text and answer questions, but can they really use the language? We hear about such learners, but do you know one? I suspect that they are very rare, sort of like that almost mythical adult learner who never studies a language,except to hang out in coffee shops, but learns to speak it with no grammar errors and with a native speaker accent. It is possible that such of learners exist, I think that they are not a good model for the rest of us. steve 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| montmorency Diglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4828 days ago 2371 posts - 3676 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Danish, Welsh | Message 30 of 210 17 August 2012 at 12:17pm | IP Logged | ||
@sfuqua:
Like the chap who runs that forum somewhere, whatever it's called ... (:<} @S_allard: I find your last post intuitively convincing, but how do you actually learn to use those 300 words (or whatever) effectively? What is the distinguishing factor between someone like that, and the person who "only has a limited vocabulary" and "can't speak the lingo"? Do you remember the press stories when Eurostar was introduced about drivers being given instruction in basic French and English respectively, in which to communicate with their opposite numbers? I never read beyond what was in the papers, so I don't know the full story behind the headlines, and still less how it all worked out. Eurostar functions well most of the time, so it obviously hasn't been a problem. Possibly nowadays all drivers just speak English. :) 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| DaraghM Diglot Senior Member Ireland Joined 6151 days ago 1947 posts - 2923 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: French, Russian, Hungarian | Message 31 of 210 17 August 2012 at 12:51pm | IP Logged | ||
The Michel Thomas Spanish course covers all these verbs in nearly all the possible tenses, but fails to give adequate vocabulary coverage. When somebody completes the course, they feel they possess a good understanding of Spanish grammar, but will be easily stumped upon starting a conversation to have the right words. I recently completed an A2 level French vocabulary course which comprised 1,200 words. This is roughly the core vocabulary needed to cover tasks such as describing yourself, shopping, eating in restaurants, arranging trips, directions, etc. Can you survive with 300 words ? I don't think so, but you could convince the other person your language level is much stronger. All you need is words to convince the other person you are a good listener. E.g. Really, Indeed, Do you think so ?. Provided the other person does the majority of the talking, they may come away with the impression you really know the language, and that you're a great conversation partner. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| petteri Triglot Senior Member Finland Joined 4932 days ago 117 posts - 208 votes Speaks: Finnish*, English, Swedish Studies: German, Spanish | Message 32 of 210 17 August 2012 at 1:17pm | IP Logged | ||
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There are two sides of communication, namely producing speech and understanding responses. If I think strictly of speaking, relatively small amount of core vocabulary combined with solid pronunciation can suffice good amount of communication needs. But in order to communicate effectively and effortlessly responses have to be understood as well. How much vocabulary is required in order to understand soap operas?
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