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Amount of Vocabulary Research | ||
Tags: Number of words | Vocabulary learning | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5430 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes  Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 17 of 34 17 May 2011 at 5:04pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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I think we can agree to stop fighting over flashcards. They are tools to be used when judged useful. The real problem is how to we best reach our goal of learning to speak accurately, idiomatically, fluently and spontaneously in the shortest time. The position I take is that learning single words is better than nothing but has its limitations. We know that the real problem is not learning words; it's how to string them together correctly then pronounce them all the while thinking about what next to say. It's not easy.
Since this act of actually speaking is my primary focus, I emphasize the importance of learning how the put words together rather than the actual learning of the individual words. For me, learning that "avoir" is "to have" is just the very tip of the iceberg. In fact, it may sometimes be misleading. I'm more interested in how to use it in real conversations. But at the end of the day we all share the same end goals (at least for those interested in speaking). How we get is a matter of individual learning strategies. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Cainntear Pentaglot Senior Member Scotland linguafrankly.blogsp Joined 6011 days ago 4399 posts - 7687 votes Speaks: Lowland Scots, English*, French, Spanish, Scottish Gaelic Studies: Catalan, Italian, German, Irish, Welsh | Message 18 of 34 17 May 2011 at 6:16pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
I don't get you. Either you're talking about something completely irrelevant to the topic of this thread, or you're arguing against the main point of this thread. Yet you keep saying that you're not disagreeing. Like yourself, my main goal is speaking and, like yourself, I want to know how to use a word, not merely to recognise it. But I can't deny that I there are words in all my languages that I haven't mastered actively, but I do recognise passively. I cannot argue with the article when it states (in a roundabout way) that my passive vocabulary assists me in working out the meaning of new, unknown vocabulary. But "vocabulary" doesn't just mean "words" -- it also includes fixed phrases and collocations.
Yes, but as Ari says:
What he was pointing out is that it is impossible to learn every sense and every usage of a given word simultaneously. Having an incomplete understanding of a new word or structure is therefore inevitable whatever method you use to learn/discover/acquire that word or structure. This is in fact one of the biggest problems with any debate on language learning. Whatever your method, whatever your stance, someone will always attack you with the same argument: that you are teaching an incomplete model. And they don't even see how short-sighted that argument really is. And it's not just random internet punters who do this. Many professional teachers will do the same thing. And not just teachers. Even respectable journals will publish papers from tenured professors that make the same criticism. Oh, the sheer interminable mindlessness of it all.... Edited by Cainntear on 17 May 2011 at 6:17pm 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 19 of 34 17 May 2011 at 7:50pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
I won't comment on this entire post because I'll just be repeating myself, but I would like to address this fallacious argument of learning all the uses of a word simultaneously. Did I claim that? Did I say that when learning the French verb "avoir" that one should first learn all its uses? What a silly idea. All I said or wrote is that to read a flashcard with "avoir" on one side and "to have" on the other is just at most the very beginning of a process of learning how to use "avoir". I wouldn't even call that learning the word "avoir." I'd call that being exposed to it. I don't know how many times I have to say that there's nothing wrong with being exposed to words. What I've been trying to say--and I think I'm at my wits end--is that the real problem most people (maybe not some of the posters here) have is putting the words together correctly and spontaneously. Everybody who has studied some French knows the word "avoir" is "to have." So far so good, but many people and end up making a typical mistake I heard twice last week: "il a arrivé" (he has arrived) instead of "il est arrivé". Similarly, why do people say "j'étais treize ans" (I was 13) instead of "j'avais 13 ans?" It is because they learned that "être" in French is "to be" and they erroneously transpose English usage into French. Why do people say things like "Attendez pour moi" (Wait for me) instead of "Attendez-moi?" Again, it's because they learned that in French "pour" means "for." So, they try to use "pour" just like they would use "for." and say things like "pour sûr" (for sure) and "moi pour un" (I for one). A recipe for disaster. Similarly, many people studying French have learned--I wonder where--that all nouns ending in -e are feminine. This has to be one of the most nefarious fake rules of French grammar. It leads inevitably to many egregious mistakes that are extremely annoying to native speakers. Why do adults find learning a foreign language so difficult? One reason--not the only one, mind you, is that they believe that you just have to learn a few thousand words. The problem with learning just words is that you tend to speak the words of the target through the structure of your native language. In the same way that you have an accent when you speak, your syntax and vocabulary reflect your native language. So you end up with a kind of foreign-speak or a child-like manner of speaking. Hopefully, with time you make the appropriate corrections by observing the language around you, and everything works out itself out. But, often it doesn't, and many people just muddle along or give up and switch back to their native language. I can't think of a new way of saying this. You have to learn form and usage at the same time. This doesn't mean learning all the uses of "avoir" all at once. It does mean looking at the major ones. Otherwise, you're learning how to make mistakes. Edited by s_allard on 17 May 2011 at 7:51pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Cainntear Pentaglot Senior Member Scotland linguafrankly.blogsp Joined 6011 days ago 4399 posts - 7687 votes Speaks: Lowland Scots, English*, French, Spanish, Scottish Gaelic Studies: Catalan, Italian, German, Irish, Welsh | Message 20 of 34 17 May 2011 at 8:18pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
No, but you keep saying things like this:
Of course it is. And of course usages and meanings are tied together. And you can't learn every meaning or usage at once, and no-one can deny that. My point is that this has nothing to do with how you're taught -- it is more a question of what you are taught. Some teachers teach mistakes, but most mistakes aren't a result of teaching, but of lack of it. If a guy says "j'attend pour toi" it isn't because of how he was taught "wait" or how he was taught "for", it's about the fact that he wasn't taught "wait for". If he says "je suis trois", it's not because of how he was taught "to be", it's the fact that he hasn't been taught how to say his age. (In both cases he may have been told, but he has never been taught.) But your examples are pretty high-frequency stuff, and that's not what we're discussing here -- we're discussing the medium-frequency stuff that simply isn't used enough to learn like the high-frequency stuff, but would be a barrier to comprehension of native texts if not studied in advance.
"Avoir" is a duff example, because it's not the type of word under discussion. Let's consider "log in". In English you "log in to" a computer. Not "on", not "with", and certainly not just "*log on the computer". Let's assume the student doesn't need to know this immediately, but we want to work with texts involving computers. Knowing "log in" means to enter your username and password will help him read the text, and possibly discover other new vocabulary. That is the point of this article: that if you want to read stuff (and most of us do) there is an awful lot more vocabulary that you need to understand than you need to use productively. The usage of this vocabulary therefore is irrelevant to the learning goal. And again: We Are Not Talking About Avoir! 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 21 of 34 18 May 2011 at 5:42am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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I'll ignore some ramblings here and get back to the main topic now that we have taken care of the core vocabulary. As the article referred to in the original post points out, beyond the main vocabulary that is in the range of 3,000 - 10,000 word families individual vocabulary size depends on age, education and occupation. What generates the learning of words is exposure to diverse material.
The basic principle here is that every specialized activity, trade, occupation, profession and hobby generates specialized or technical vocabulary. While certain technical vocabularies may use a lot of Latin or Greek etymologies (the classic examples is medecine, botany and law), others may simply take common words and give them specialized meanings (in sports for example). The case of terminologies based on common words in specialized contexts is particularly interesting here because it raises again that question of learning words in an isolated manner or in contexts. If you look at a dictionary of financial terms, you see terms forms that are specific to the world of finance (e.g. mortgage, amortization), but you also see many forms, especially compound forms, that a very ordinary words used in specialized sense. For example, bridge loan, balance sheet, bull market, bear market, futures, bonds, cash flow, day trading and capital gain are terms that are made up of very ordinary words. Suppose now that these individual words are on your typical flash cards, there is absolutely no clue as to how these words are combined into specialized terms. For example, a card for "cash" and a card for "flow" will not tell you what cash flow means. Of course, this is why we have specialized dictionaries or glossaries for nearly every subject under the sun. In my previous post with the quote in American football jargon the words are for the most part just ordinary words. But many people here, including myself, will have to consult a dictionary of football terminology to fully understand the text. I encourage people to lookup "check off" and "hook" in a dictionary. The point in all of this of course is that context drives meaning --nothing earthshaking here--but I suggest that a learning strategy that focuses on learning individual words with minimum contextual information is not very effective. 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 22 of 34 18 May 2011 at 6:12am | IP Logged | ||||||||
There is a very common, very old-fashioned, and fairly effective approach to learning vocabulary that partly addresses the problem of contextual information: put only those words and expressions on flashcards (or in word lists) that you have met in context, while reading, listening, or having a conversation with someone. One does need to pay attention to expressions and not just individual words for this to be effective. Edited by frenkeld on 19 May 2011 at 7:44am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Ari Heptaglot Senior Member Norway Joined 6582 days ago 2314 posts - 5695 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Mandarin, Cantonese Studies: Czech, Latin, German | Message 23 of 34 18 May 2011 at 7:20am | IP Logged | ||||||||
I'm having trouble envisaging a methodology where you learn "cash flow" without first learning the words "cash" and "flow" (with incomplete meanings). And I'm not getting what stops a flashcard learner from putting the word "cash flow" onto a flashcard. Is it the space in the middle? I still get the feeling you're arguing against a position that nobody in this thread or anywhere else holds. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Cainntear Pentaglot Senior Member Scotland linguafrankly.blogsp Joined 6011 days ago 4399 posts - 7687 votes Speaks: Lowland Scots, English*, French, Spanish, Scottish Gaelic Studies: Catalan, Italian, German, Irish, Welsh | Message 24 of 34 18 May 2011 at 9:21am | IP Logged | ||||||||
Traditionally there's a space, but increasingly the space is being omitted, because it is now normally pronounced as a single word. Which I think is the point you're trying to make. s_allard, let's go back to what the article claims: that brute-force, contextless learning of large amounts of vocabulary makes it easier to work out new terms encountered while reading. So a simple question: Do you believe that knowing "cash" and "flow" makes it easier or harder to work out "cashflow"/"cash flow" from context, or that it makes no difference at all? 1 person has voted this message useful |
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