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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 25 of 34 18 May 2011 at 10:56am | IP Logged | |||||
Voilà, you are totally right in that the solution is to put "cash flow" on a separate card and a definition or the L1 equivalent, usually with some marker indicating use in finance. It should be pointed out that in finance "cash flow" has a very specific meaning that is not readily derived from the common usage of "cash" and "flow" that one finds in a phrase like "The police stopped the cash flow of drug money." Here, actually, the point is that "cash flow" in the technical sense is a distinct unit and should be considered one "word". In fact, it is often written "cashflow." The main argument, which I must admit was not clear in my previous post, is that the counting of words without reference to meaning and context is misleading. Everybody knows "bear" and "market", but how many people know what a "bear market" is? Should this term be counted as two words or one? In the world of cruise ships, a "run of ship" or "run of the ship" category ticket has no reference to running in the corridors of the ship. Knowing "run" and "ship" as simple words is of little help in decoding the technical usage. People who read film credits will see the terms "best boy" and "grip". Again, very common words that do not tell us how the film industry uses these words. The argument is not really about flash cards. It's more about defining what is a word and how one counts them when looking at vocabulary size. As a matter of fact, how does knowing "flash" and "card" tell you what a "flash card" is? Do you count "flash card" as a separate unit, distinct from "flash" and "card"? 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 34 18 May 2011 at 4:26pm | IP Logged | |||||
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My apologies for hogging a bit of space here, but I couldn't help including the following quote dated May 18, 2011 from the Toronto Globe and Mail: (Bold emphasis is mine).
"While all EU officials have rejected the idea of a full-on default, they have now introduced at least three terms to refer to the possibility of some alteration in the repayment schedule of Greek debt: restructuring, rescheduling and reprofiling. From the financial markets’ point of view, there may be little difference among them. The manager of a debt fund in the United States joked that the only time he had heard the word “reprofiling” used was in reference to a nose job. “Clearly the European finance ministers chose this word as applied to economics because they could not translate ‘restructure’ into some language,” said Mark Grant, head of corporate syndication at Southwest Securities." 1 person has 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 34 18 May 2011 at 7:23pm | IP Logged | |||||
I found the article ambiguous in one respect. It is not clear whether they advocate making word lists without any source other than a frequency list and a dictionary, or whether they expect you to encounter the words in context first and only then work on memorizing them from flashcards. 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 28 of 34 18 May 2011 at 9:09pm | IP Logged | |||||
This is a very good observation. Although there is much talk about flashcards/flash cards, it's not exactly clear what is on the cards (for example, on the other side of the card). I see these lists and cards as potentially useful for memorization in conjunction with lots of interaction with the language. This, by the way,is how I use flashcards. When reading a text in Spanish, I look for things that I don't know and that I might find useful in other contexts. At my level, it's usually idioms or unfamiliar grammatical usages. I put the isolated element and a complete example on the front. Then a short translation goes on the back. Here's an example: Front: - venirse abajo "Sólo un día más tarde esta información se vino abajo (El País) Back: -go to pieces Sometimes I'll add other examples on the front if I find them useful. I find this sort of flashcard really helpful because I get a good idea of how the word or expression is really used instead of some vague and abstract words that I barely know how to use properly. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Sandman Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5408 days ago 168 posts - 389 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Japanese | Message 29 of 34 21 May 2011 at 11:35am | IP Logged | |||||
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Outside of the issue of exactly what defines a "word" or not, there's something else that seems to be a far larger issue for me personally ...
Namely ... how close the target language is to your mother tongue seems to majorly affect what that word "target" will be. I am guessing that at this point my Japanese vocabulary is getting fairly close to the Spanish vocabulary I've learned (learned in a formal sense) but my ability to read Japanese is no where near where I am in Spanish. It seems in Spanish it is FAAAAAARRRRR easier for me to guess at meanings or just skip over a word or two when I'm not quite sure of what it means (although usually I'll have a ballpark idea of the definition) while in Japanese as soon as a kanji pops up in a word that I'm not familiar with then the whole process comes to a grinding halt. I have no idea what it means, and I don't even have the slightest guess either, really. The flow of the passage often just dies. As I continue to study I'm beginning to suspect that I'll need to know roughly 2x the words in Japanese that I knew in Spanish to get the same general results. I'm not there yet, so I can't say for positive, but it feels like it is heading that way at this point. 2 persons have 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 30 of 34 21 May 2011 at 12:42pm | IP Logged | |||||
To each his own. I used that at first with Spanish but gave it up because I found it didn't give me much at all. Usually I'd be able to guess the meaning of the sentence on the front and thus understand what the word or expression meant through context. I wouldn't learn it properly, however, and wouldn't remember it when I encountered it in another context. And I sure as heck couldn't use it actively. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| dleewo Groupie United States Joined 5818 days ago 95 posts - 131 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Mandarin | Message 31 of 34 21 May 2011 at 2:26pm | IP Logged | |||||
If anyone is interested, I found that a sample chapter (chapter 1) and the table of contents are available here: Sample Chapter 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 32 of 34 21 May 2011 at 3:27pm | IP Logged | |||||
Although I don't know the anything about Japanese, what I suspect is happening here is basically what happens in all languages as we start to move from understanding individual words to understanding entire utterances or groups of words. I've always held that the basic unit of meaning is not the word but a higher-order unit that may be a group or words or a phrase. Of course, you start with learning words, but you inevitably realize quickly that you have to deal with sequences of words in real life. This is exactly what allows us to guess the meaning of a word or, more often, to simply gloss over something we really don't understand. This is why I have always stressed the importance of learning words by context (Note that I did not say "in context" because that will get me into trouble). It also means that you have to spend time going over the basics because as your knowledge progresses in a language you not only learn new word and structures you also learn how "old" words are used in different ways. This phenomenon is particularly striking in idioms and collocations. How do you know that you are looking at or hearing an idiom? You can't, unless you reach a level of understanding whereby you realize something doesn't make sense unless seen metaphorically or at a higher level. And even then you often need a good dictionary or an explanation from a native speaker. When you listen to natives speaking to one another there is a level of what I call idiomaticity that takes a very long time to master in a foreign language. How many of us would feel as comfortable giving a radio or television interview in a foreign language as in own native tongue? Why is is that native speakers can complete other peoples' sentences or supply missing words? How many of us can do this in a foreign language? To come back to your problem with Japanese--although I may be talking through my hat--I suspect that the problem may not necessarily be caused by having to know twice more words in Japanese than in Spanish. It could be simply that that you don't "know" the same number of words well enough because you haven't yet mastered their full range of meanings and usages. Since mention is made of my favourite target language, Spanish, I would like to point out that I find myself revisiting all those very common verbs like ser, estar, hacer, dar, andar, ver, llamar, among others because they are used in so many different shapes and forms. I'm always finding novel ways of using the same old material. This does not prevent me from learning tons of new words. I say this lest the "words only" people jump all over me. 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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