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Has anybody tried the Gold List method? | ||
Tags: Word List | Vocabulary learning | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Learning Techniques, Methods & Strategies |  | |
| Arekkusu Hexaglot Senior Member Canada bit.ly/qc_10_lec Joined 5162 days ago 3971 posts - 7747 votes  Speaks: English, French*, GermanC1, Spanish, Japanese, Esperanto Studies: Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Estonian | Message 57 of 222 19 March 2010 at 4:28pm | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
Consider yourself lucky, I'm usually pretty picky on who gets to peck my wood... 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||
| Woodpecker Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 5592 days ago 351 posts - 590 votes Speaks: English*, Arabic (Written), Arabic (Egyptian) Studies: Arabic (classical) | Message 58 of 222 19 March 2010 at 4:40pm | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
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I think I'll pass, thanks.
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| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5211 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 59 of 222 19 March 2010 at 11:13pm | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
I agree basically with this position. I probably differ more with those folks who attempt to learn thousands of words from lists. In my opinion, once one goes beyond being able to get the gist of things with a few hundred words, it's important to start thinking in terms of entire phrases and collocations. Let me remind everyone that in all languages it is a well known fact that only a small number of different words account for most of the words in most examples of spoken and written language. Some people refer to Zipf's law or the Pareto principle; for purposes of language learning, it boils down, in my opinion, to concentrating on mastering the most important words and structures of a language. For example, in French something like 25 verbs make up over 50% of the verb forms in ordinary spoken speech. My statistics may be off, but the point is clear. Instead of trying to learn 500 French verbs, master the 25 first and then progressively work your work through the others as they come up. For these very reasons I believe that with a vocabulary of 1000 words well learned one could get by very well in French and probably fool a lot of people. Now if you want to read French literature and newspapers it's a different story, but even there an extensive knowledge of the basic forms will go a long way. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||
| doviende Diglot Senior Member Canada languagefixatio Joined 5767 days ago 533 posts - 1245 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Spanish, Dutch, Mandarin, Esperanto, Hindi, Swedish, Portuguese | Message 60 of 222 20 March 2010 at 1:45am | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
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The problem with these percentages is that even if you know those 25 words, and they come up in every sentence, you still won't understand those sentences as they are spoken to you. Also, once you add in some more specific (but less frequent) words that help you in a couple of everyday situations, then the number starts to shoot upwards. Having a low limit like 1000 is a difficult task.
In principle, though, I mostly agree. There is really a core of the language that you need to master and have it always ready. If you can fluidly produce the basic things from that core, then it becomes an easy task to learn another 20 - 100 new words in a short time period in order to deal with a new potential situation. I think it's possible to go the other way around, though. Taking what Iverson said earlier about learning many many more words right at the start, I'm starting to imagine that one should actually do this backwards. Instead of learning the core really well and then expanding your vocab later, you could learn tons of vocab as fast as you can and then use your extensive vocabulary superpowers to read and listen to tons of native material that would help you cement the core parts. I think this relates well to the idea of having a good balance of "intensive" and "extensive" reading, but I'll have to think more about just concentrating on massive vocab, which is a slightly different path than intensive reading (which is more well-rounded, not focusing entirely on vocab). This relates to my current Swedish project quite well, because I have a wonderful frequency-based wordlist of 2000 common words that each have an example sentence. I keep thinking that I'm not using this list to its full potential, since I've only made flashcards for the "A" and "B" words so far. It's just much easier to stay interested if I'm reading a real book instead of playing with a wordlist. It does look like my ability to read would be greatly increased if I spent more time on the list first, though. Maybe I just need more hours in the day ;) 8 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||
| Pyx Diglot Senior Member China Joined 5516 days ago 670 posts - 892 votes Speaks: German*, English Studies: Mandarin | Message 61 of 222 20 March 2010 at 1:47am | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
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"extensive vocabulary superpowers". Phrase of the day.
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| ellasevia Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2011 Senior Member Germany Joined 5923 days ago 2150 posts - 3229 votes Speaks: English*, German, Croatian, Greek, French, Spanish, Russian, Swedish, Portuguese, Turkish, Italian Studies: Catalan, Persian, Mandarin, Japanese, Romanian, Ukrainian | Message 62 of 222 20 March 2010 at 2:51am | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
What is this source and where can I purchase/find it? I have been looking for just such a thing. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||
| doviende Diglot Senior Member Canada languagefixatio Joined 5767 days ago 533 posts - 1245 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Spanish, Dutch, Mandarin, Esperanto, Hindi, Swedish, Portuguese | Message 63 of 222 20 March 2010 at 3:37am | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
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here it is: http://www.folkuniversitetet.se/out/swedex/dok/flik4/swe_alf _feb21.pdf
entitled "Alfabetisk lista över samtliga specifikationer". It's alphabetic, and each word has at least one example sentence. (edit: sorry, i had a space in the url. fixed now hopefully) Edited by doviende on 20 March 2010 at 4:28am 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||
| ALS Senior Member United States Joined 5585 days ago 104 posts - 131 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Norwegian, Finnish, Russian | Message 64 of 222 20 March 2010 at 4:28am | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
Wow, this is pretty awesome. Know of any like this for other languages? 1 person has voted this message useful |
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