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Is counting your vocabulary size useless? | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| Mooby Senior Member Scotland Joined 6108 days ago 707 posts - 1220 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: Polish | Message 33 of 210 17 August 2012 at 1:20pm | IP Logged | |||||
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My thanks to the OP and all the replies so far. It's a good subject and something I've been mulling over for a while.
My Anki count is about 2900 words / word families. I can read well but output is not great. I have the words and phrases to make decent conversation, but I don't have enough grammatical patterns to hang them on. With a highly inflected language like Polish these patterns take a lot of practice to sink in. I still want to build my vocabulary, but more slowly, and focus on mastering a very select number of verbs (about 70). Mastering verbs is the key, I think, because they often dictate which prepostion and which noun case to employ. I have several books that purposefully show verb forms in hundreds of short easy to practice sentences. My aim is to progress from a stuttering pidgin Polish to something that is BOTH accurate and fluent. Mastering a small number of basic words is manageable and will hopefully train my mind to recognise, adopt and use all the other words I know, well. > Establish basic templates, build and expand (that's the theory anyway!) Edited by Mooby on 17 August 2012 at 1:23pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5433 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 34 of 210 17 August 2012 at 1:55pm | IP Logged | |||||
I think the point is well taken. How much vocabulary do you need to master the grammar of a language? Or as a previous post pointed out, do you need to learn 2000+ words to be able to use 300 words well? Let me first say again that this figure of 300 is not carved in stone. The idea or the position that I take is that often in our daily use of a language, including our very own, we only use a very tiny portion of the available resources. I think people are confusing two ideas here. The first is that as a beginner you can learn the first 300 words of a frequency list and begin speaking like a native speaker. Well, obviously, it's not as simple as that. But we see this sort of thing with people who have learned a language informally in some form of immersion. They can speak quite fluently with relatively good pronunciation but may have never opened a grammar book. This is particularly the case in immigrant families where children learn a heritage language to speak to their parents or grandparents. They can often speak with ease but only on a limited range of subjects. The second idea is that out of all your language resources 300 words will let you get by in certain kinds of conversations. We do this all the time in our native language. You can be a celebrated university professor with a huge passive and active vocabulary and still use a very small vocabulary in long conversation with an old friend in a coffee house. It all depends on what you are talking about. But to come back to main point of this topic, in my mind the real question is whether the number of words is important at all. The issue isn't whether you need 300 or 2000, it's whether there is any point in counting. I have no clue how many words I know in any of my languages, and frankly I don't see the utility of even trying to count. That said, I have nothing against people counting words for their own reasons. The main thrust of my argument is really that the focus should not be on the number of words but more on their use. We've used the word grammar for this, but it should be understood as a broad term including word order, semantics, syntax, morphology, etc. So, maybe the question should be: how many words do you need to master the grammar of a language? Good question. Let's take some examples. A Spanish-speaking student of mine had a problem with the following phrase: What's your teacher like? He kept wanting to say: What's your teacher likes? As most readers will note, the learner thought that "like" was the main verb with the subject "your teacher." In fact, the "like" here has nothing to do with the verb "to like." And then there is a third very common "like" used by young people, as in. "I'm like 'You didn't really mean that.'" This "What's...like?" construction can be very confusing to the learner. How many "extra" vocabulary do you need to learn to be able to make this distinction? Similarly, in Spanish and French, the pronominal verb construction is very challenging to master. "Je m'en vais à la maison" or "No me doy por vencido" seem strange to English speakers because they are very different from the equivalent English constructions. Again, the question raised here is how many words in French or Spanish would you need to learn to master these distinctions. I have no idea. Edited by s_allard on 17 August 2012 at 5:48pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| frenkeld Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 6946 days ago 2042 posts - 2719 votes Speaks: Russian*, English Studies: German | Message 35 of 210 17 August 2012 at 5:22pm | IP Logged | |||||
Among the buy-and-let-it-rest-forever trophies on my shelf is "Spanish Grammar" by Eric V. Greenfield, copyright 1942, 1943 by Barnes & Noble, Inc., reprinted 1958. In the introduction the author says about the book, "[It] is ... the outgrowth of several ideas that have insistently forced themselves upon me in my seventeen years of teaching beginning Spanish with various excellent and mediocre textbooks". Idea number 2 is "Very small vocabulary (620 words)". This is a specific example of the intuitively plausible fact that one should be able to cover all the core grammatical structures with a rather small vocabulary. It may not be in vogue today to do so, but seems to have been more the case in the past. Of course, the "distinctions", some of which will be covered in grammar books, while others will be more in the realm of "usage", are more slippery than the core grammatical structures. A number of them should be accessible with limited vocabulary, others may require more substantial exposure. Edited by frenkeld on 18 August 2012 at 3:12am 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Peregrinus Senior Member United States Joined 4495 days ago 149 posts - 273 votes Speaks: English* | Message 36 of 210 18 August 2012 at 12:33am | IP Logged | |||||
I was going to mention that exact book, also on my own bookshelf, as an example of learning grammar thoroughly without a huge vocabulary. The question of how much vocabulary or grammar one needs to be able to learn usage or even more vocabulary through extensive reading and listening (and the number need not be the same for different such purposes), is best answered in my opinion by looking at the premise of comprehensible input. The premise of CI as I understand it, is that one knows enough vocabulary to read/listen well and understand much more than the bare gist, thus allowing one to focus on the few words one does not know, which in turn allows one to remember those words better. One of Linguamor's old posts mentions this type of reading *without* writing down unknown words to drill separately. Rather one just continues on reading and eventually if those words come up and are looked up often enough (whether manually or electronically), then they will stick. The principle also applies I believe, to grammar. That is, the more grammar one knows, then the better able one is to concentrate on the finer points and have them stick. But you have to have a certain critical mass of vocabulary and grammar to truly be able to use CI well which would allow one to focus more on usage instead of masses of unknown vocabulary and what should be basic points of grammar. This is the key, i.e. allowing one to focus on smaller bits of vocabulary, grammar or usage. The trick as Linguamor said, was to be able to read faster and faster as one's knowledge grew and thus without drilling unknown vocabulary, still be able by dint of repetition in native materials, to acquire even more vocabulary that sticks. Knowing basic grammar, as in all the verb tenses and case declensions, etc., instead of having same dribbled in slowly over several years time as school text books like to do, allows one to in fact focus more on usage encountered in reading and listening instead of at the same time grappling with totally unknown grammar and masses of unknown vocabulary. Though my own Spanish is nowhere near what I consider good, if asked by someone today what path to follow to study same it would be as follows: 1) Use Pimsleur/LSLC/Synergy + MT 2) Read Greenfield's Spanish Grammar mentioned above, or at least Resnick's Essential Spanish Grammar 3) Pick a course like Assimil/FSI/LL/etc. 4) Stop! and go back and mine sentences and phrases showing usage for the vocabulary already known and drill them 5) Continue on with extensive reading and listening. Also I would recommend they from the beginning listen to a 1/2 hour of Spanish TV everyday even if it is gibberish in the beginning. To me, a lot of the reason for the oft reported conversational and newspaper reading failures of people who have studied a language for years, especially in school, is because of the old textbook formula of a little grammar + 50-100 new words + tedious and wasteful use of time in instruction in L1. This makes a student have to struggle with both vocabulary and grammar at the same time, while not allowing them enough knowledge to learn much usage past prepositional use perhaps. Learning the subjunctive and conditional tenses up front with a limited vocabulary would in my opinion allow students to use native materials much earlier and not be as frustrated in having to learn it along with tons of new vocabulary at the same time. The point is knowing enough (90-95% from most proponents of CI from my reading), so that one can more effortlessly use extensive reading and listening to faster and faster acquire the unknown, without having to separately drill that unknown material, i.e. be more efficient with learning time. Thus drilling vocabulary and grammar is used only in the beginning to get one to the point where extensive/CI methods can be used. Edited by Peregrinus on 18 August 2012 at 12:34am 5 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6706 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 37 of 210 18 August 2012 at 12:36am | IP Logged | |||||
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When I deal with grammar I prefer short examples with 'dummy words' (typically indefinite pronouns), because I can't remember long flowery examples and therefore I will convert such examples to a short and neutral form myself if the author doesn't do it for me.
For advanced students who understand those long and winding quotes from literary works it may be interesting to know that somebody actually have used the constructions under discussion, but for beginners they will just divert the attention from the constructions which should be learned. The situation has some resemblance with word learning: during the memorization phase you should simplify matters - and then you always can add the complications later. And this will of course as a sideeffect mean that the total number of words in the grammar will be much smaller than it would be in the type of grammar where most of the available space the space is taken up by long literary quotes from famous authors. Edited by Iversen on 18 August 2012 at 12:41am 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| frenkeld Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 6946 days ago 2042 posts - 2719 votes Speaks: Russian*, English Studies: German | Message 38 of 210 18 August 2012 at 12:49am | IP Logged | |||||
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As a side comment, while Linguamor was a very strong proponent of comprehensible input, she did not equate it with extensive reading. Although she didn't record them, she would look up the new words in a dictionary. The exception seems to be the way she learned Norwegian, but she was in Norway when that took place.
1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| kanewai Triglot Senior Member United States justpaste.it/kanewai Joined 4892 days ago 1386 posts - 3054 votes Speaks: English*, French, Marshallese Studies: Italian, Spanish | Message 39 of 210 18 August 2012 at 1:00am | IP Logged | |||||
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Has anyone here been to a Middle Eastern suq or bazaar? The best shopkeepers can haggle, flirt, seduce,
cajole, charm, and gossip in a dozen languages - and none I think have large vocabularies. It's impressive. I don't think they'd score high on CEFR, or be able to read modern literature, or attend a class - they're certainly not fluent per se. But they know and feel the language. To reach a high level of fluency you need both grammar and fluency. I don't know that it matters which comes first . As for the OP's question - if counting vocab size helps you then it's useful. For me the answer is no. I don't even know how to count my vocabulary size, especially if you work in all the nuances described above. But I like knowing that I can read Gidé at 2.5 minutes per page. Tracking my reading speed is useful for me, and possibly useless or unnecessary for others. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Peregrinus Senior Member United States Joined 4495 days ago 149 posts - 273 votes Speaks: English* | Message 40 of 210 18 August 2012 at 1:18am | IP Logged | |||||
frekeld, You are surely right in that she did not make such an explicit connection, but to me, ER relies on CI. She did use the figure 95% if I recall correctly (though saying the trick was to keep finding new material at a 95% level as one's knowledge grew), so that is what makes it comprehensible in my opinion. Otherwise, with a far lesser vocabulary and grammar knowledge, one is basically taking a book and using the grammar/translate method. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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