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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| 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 17 of 25 24 May 2011 at 7:06am | IP Logged | ||||||||
No, figures ARE vague words, outside of science. I use measures in percentages all the time in my daily life without pretending they're precise. I'm 90% sure that they're not intended to be precisely measured. In many places in China, it's common to use a ten-grade scale to tell the waiter how well done you want your steak. When I say I give the movie a 7 out of 10, do you then suppose I made some sort of estimate of how many minutes of the movie I enjoyed? I use phrases like "I understand 85% of spoken French" because I usually speak with people who are like me, people for whom it never enters into their mind that one would want to measure the comprehension outside of a scientific experiment. I don't know the CEFR levels and neither do my friends and when I say 85% it's comparable to giving a movie a 8.5 out of 10. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| tibbles Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5191 days ago 245 posts - 422 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Korean | Message 18 of 25 24 May 2011 at 7:35am | IP Logged | ||||||||
Yes, and even in these cases of self-assessment of language learning, it sounds like only a few discrete figures are every thrown around: 0%, 10%, 50%, and 90% as opposed to a continuum of values. It's not like we have people claiming that they understand 78.334472% today and 79.444834% a week later. And while some of these numbers might have the appearance of precision, the fact is that they deserve to have big, fat error bars associated with them depending on the optimism of the language learner. Edited by tibbles on 24 May 2011 at 7:36am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6703 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 19 of 25 24 May 2011 at 12:43pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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If we want hard facts then we could set up a battery of tests with multiple choice answers. Then it can't be disputed that someone got 97 points out of 100 possible at something called a comprehension test.
The point is that it would be precise, but far from reality. In the excellent example from American football s_allard gave me some information about the game that made some of the expressions comprehensible. Until then I could understand every single word and couple them all into something that had some kind of meaning, but I had no idea what a shotgun in this particular context meant - it was obviously not a conventional weapon. So I didn't know what the meaning behind the words was. Now, if I had passed a certain test I would still have areas which I knew well and others I knew less well. A test that focused on purely American sports would be grossly unfair to people who don't give a damn about American football, but were deeply interested in African birds. Imagine the kind of uproar there would be if the roles were inversed, and the test asked you for a test that asked you about the behaviour of blacksmith plovers versus that of marabu storks. A language test simply can't be culture free. At some level you will always rewards those who are interested in certain things. Besides there are often several ways of interpreting an isolated sentence, and I have seen examples in some of the tests on the internet where the 'correct' interpretation wasn't the most logical seen from my perspective. Of course I could have missed the point of the test author, but from the moment that the test has been released the authors private associations and expectations are strictly irrelevant, and it is unfair to the test users to measure them against something that isn't a part of the package. IQ tests had the same problem, and the test authors there tried to eliminate it by using 'culture free' tasks based on small drawings and pure logic, but even this has some degree of bias (for instance against people who are smart with word, but dunces when it comes to spatial information). In language testing you can to some degree test objectively for morphological knowledge (with some reservation due to the existance of different variants), but the more you move into the realm of meaning the more sources of error and interpretation you have to deal with. And in that situation you can just as well resign and accept that some persons express their self-assessments in numbers instead of levels based on tests they haven't even taken. The world is not only weird, but also fuzzy. Edited by Iversen on 24 May 2011 at 12:48pm 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 20 of 25 24 May 2011 at 1:50pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
I'm only too well aware that most people use these percentages very vaguely. I'm suggesting that with reference to language skills this is particularly meaningless. This is not exactly the same thing as a scale that we can use to evaluate the importance of something. (On a scale from 1 to 10, how would you rate this movie?). It's interesting to note that these percentages are used only with comprehension. Nobody says, "My writing or my speaking in French is about 90%." This makes no sense at all. The problem with percentages in language comprehension is that they give have aura of precision where there is none at all. Sure, we use figures and scales all the time in our daily lives because there is a useful element of precision. If a doctor says that the operation has about a 90% chance of success, we all have a sense that what he or she is saying is that 9 our of 10 operations are successful. The weather report for today says that there is a 50% chance of rain. When someone says they understand 90% of a conversation, what is that supposed to mean? For some people, this is just shorthand for "I understand nearly everything." I personally prefer the latter formulation. Actually, the whole thing makes me think of a sign at a local Thai restaurant. When you order your food, you are asked "How spicy?" The basic choices are mild, medium and hot. There is also this big sign that says "We are not responsible for choice of spicy." This always makes me laugh because I imagine these conversations with questions like "How hot is hot? Is it really hot like hot hot or just plain hot?" Edited by s_allard on 24 May 2011 at 3:57pm 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 21 of 25 24 May 2011 at 2:17pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
But note s_allard's exact words: figures are precise, at least superficially. I don't know about other language contexts, but in English-speaking society, using figures does give a sense of authority and accuracy. This is because (even outside of scientific contexts) it has connotations of science. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| crafedog Diglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 5818 days ago 166 posts - 337 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Korean, Tok Pisin, French | Message 22 of 25 24 May 2011 at 2:38pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
s_allard makes the main point here about it being comprehension. Using this % idea with writing or speaking would be ludicrous. As others have mentioned, for something like listening for example, it's just the 'gist' of how much you understand. For example, in Avatar (kid show) in Spanish I can understand about 95% of it barring the odd new word but with a tv show aimed at adults, it drops to about 80%+ but this increases the more I watch of it. The % isn't accurate. For me saying "I understand about 95%" is no different than saying "I understand almost all of it minus a few odd words/sentences". You wouldn't ask for an explanation of what that means and to me it's no different than saying 95%. For reading, on the other hand, this is easier. I wrote about how I understood about 96% of an average news article and only about 91% of an adult, fantasy novel in a different topic (I have a feeling that this is what started this thread). Simply put, I've been reading quite a few articles in Spanish lately about a wide-variety of topics (blackholes, churches, ancient chemical warfare, earthquakes, porn, the extreme right, a downed nazi plane, a famous album, a school expulsion etc) and wrote the new words/expressions in a notebook. I later counted the new words, minused them from the total amount of words in the article and figured out the percentage to be a consistent 95-96% (Meneame is a great website for diverse Spanish news articles btw). Had I stayed on one topic for the entire time (Politics for example) my perceived/mathematical comprehension rate could be higher but this would be a misleading statement due to a lack of diversity in the reading material. Saying "I understand 95% of what I normally read" is not the same as saying "I understand 95% of everything I ever read" especially if you only read one style/topic. Plus the latter sentence is a bit of a silly one anyway. The novel on the other hand was more difficult because I had never really attempted to read a novel in Spanish before hence the abundance of new vocabulary that you wouldn't normally hear in TV/see in a newspaper. Descriptive verbs like 'mutter', 'shiver', 'whisper', 'frown', 'shrug' plus more diverse adjectives/adverbs ('icy', 'bloody', 'cloudy') that you wouldn't normally see in a newspaper article. Again, minusing new from total told me my comprehension of the book and I did the same with one or two other books as well to get a better idea of how I was doing. My percentage of understanding unsurprisingly dropped but I'm sure if I managed to power through the huge series and then tackle another completely different type of novel after it, I would most likely still experience an increase in overall comprehension compared my initial attempt. If you've never checked the % of words you understand before in a text, try it. It will probably be higher than you anticipate and it will be a nice confidence booster. Just don't take it as a golden rule for yourself. Edited by crafedog on 24 May 2011 at 2:45pm 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 23 of 25 24 May 2011 at 6:30pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
Is this really accurate? Although we're not into rocket science here, I wonder if the method of calculation is so simple. This assumes that all the words are equal in terms of value or meaning. But we know that certain words may be more function words than full-meaning or lexical words and we know that certain words may be part of idioms or collocations that stretch over multiple words. Here is an example taken from an article on the financial problems of Greece and the EU: "Is Greece simply kicking a rusty can down the road?" There are 10 words including the proper noun Greece. These are all well known words, but many people know that there is an idiom here, "kick a can down the road" meaning to delay or put something off. In our analysis of the sentence, should that be a distinct unit because that is the meaning? Let's say somebody doesn't understand the idiom, could one say that they only understand 30% (Is Greece simply) of the sentence? I suspect that this sort of problem in more important in works of fiction than in non-fiction and in spoken language (as in dialogues) than in pure narratives. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| crafedog Diglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 5818 days ago 166 posts - 337 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Korean, Tok Pisin, French | Message 24 of 25 24 May 2011 at 7:59pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
In your sentence above (if it were a very similar expression in Spanish), if I didn't know 'rusty' in Spanish (I do but anyway...) and I had never seen 'kick a can down the road' before then that would be two unknown 'words' for me. Even if I knew the pieces but didn't know the whole then it would still count as an unknown, hence a new word/expression/whatever added to my list. I would try to remember it and then the following day, week, month etc if I couldn't remember it at later testings, it would remain an unknown/unlearned word if I saw it again in a different context and it wouldn't add to my overall 'comprehension percentage'. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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