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How many words for conversation? | ||
Tags: Number of words | Conversation | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| fiziwig Senior Member United States Joined 4664 days ago 297 posts - 618 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish | Message 9 of 100 06 August 2011 at 2:15am | IP Logged | |||||
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It would be interesting to see how the vocabulary differed in a general interest or celebrity gossip talk show where a host and guests chat unscripted.
It seems to me, however, that the most interesting question to ask is how often do you encounter an unfamiliar word in your reading or listening? If you've never seen a language before the first 1000 words of corpus you're exposed to will probably contain 350 to 450 unique words, and they will all be unfamiliar to you. After you've read a couple novels worth of corpus you might find that only 5% or so of the words you encounter are unfamiliar. I would think that once a certain critical mass is reached that all that is necessary to build the right vocabulary for a given task, whether that task is friendly conversation or translating medical textbooks, is more and still more exposure to the typical corpus of that task. The way to get better at conversation is to participate in more conversation. The way to get better at translating medical textbooks is to read more medical textbooks in the target language. Assuming you've reached the point of handling the grammar reasonably well, it's all about practice and exposure, not counting words. --gary 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Bao Diglot Senior Member Germany tinyurl.com/pe4kqe5 Joined 5565 days ago 2256 posts - 4046 votes Speaks: German*, English Studies: French, Spanish, Japanese, Mandarin | Message 10 of 100 06 August 2011 at 4:10am | IP Logged | |||||
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Thanks, gary.
a_allard, I'm not trying to pick a fight, but I don't really understand the thinking behind that idea. In my own experience, those very high frequency words just stick and become automatic very easily. But it takes me much longer to acquire the necessary sentence patterns and grammar points to go with them. At that level it is relatively easy to just guess at the meaning of a sentence when I know the words, but usually I couldn't form that exact sentence myself. For me it makes sense to concentrate on anything but high frequency vocabulary. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| fiziwig Senior Member United States Joined 4664 days ago 297 posts - 618 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish | Message 11 of 100 06 August 2011 at 4:23am | IP Logged | |||||
If I may paraphrase you... One does not learn architecture by studying bricks. --gary 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5229 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 12 of 100 06 August 2011 at 6:00am | IP Logged | |||||
I wonder if there isn't some misunderstanding here. When I speak about core vocabulary, it's not just learning a number of words and their basic meaning. It's really more about how they are used to build the most frequently used grammatical patterns. The reason these words are so common is because they have multiple usages. For example, those common verbs like do, get, have, be are used in many different ways and in many idioms. The same thing in French, Spanish and many languages I assume. My humble suggestion is that as a learner you should concentrate on at least mastering the manipulations of these elements because they form the foundation for everything else. For example, in French if you can't conjugate être and avoir properly or you don't understand how they are used as auxiliary verbs, your French is always going to be weak. If in Spanish you haven't figured out the distinction between ser and estar, rest assured you'll be making glaring mistakes with them. So, why not do yourself a favour and get them out of the way so you can concentrate on other things? And that's the whole point. Get those basic elements under your belt so that they are second nature and they no longer trip you up. In fact, what I find so interesting about the whole question is how native speakers can get so much mileage out of so few words. I have no doubt that, generally speaking, knowing more words is better than knowing a few. But at the same time I think it's remarkable how much information can be conveyed by a relatively small number of words. What's the point of having a great vocabulary and tripping over elementary things because you never mastered them properly. Something I see or hear every day is English speakers making grammatical gender errors in French. What could be more basic to French grammar than the LE / LA distinction of nouns? It's simple and fundamental. Everybody knows about it. Then why do people make these very grating mistakes? It's simply because somewhere along the line they didn't pay much attention to gender when learning the words. So, when the time comes to use the words, they make a guess and often end up wrong. It's the same sort of problem with the subjunctive mood in French. This is one of the hardest things for English-speakers to master, but it is also very common in French. The reason people don't master it is because they don't concentrate on it since it hardly exists in English. The end result is that even very proficient non-native speakers of French tend to make these glaring mistakes of which they are totally unaware. My advice is to work on it till it becomes nearly instinctive and then it will take care of itself. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5229 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 13 of 100 06 August 2011 at 6:42am | IP Logged | |||||
I'm not sure I understand the analogy here. All that I'm saying is this. If in a language, let's say Spanish, you observe that 3 to 4 out of all verbs you hear or use will be a variant of 5 highly irregular verbs, it just makes sense, at least to me, that as a learner you would do well to concentrate at some point on mastering those 5 key verbs. What is the alternative here? Ignore these 5 verbs and concentrate on the more obscure verbs that you are less likely to hear? So when your turn comes to speak what are you going to do? 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Doitsujin Diglot Senior Member Germany Joined 5119 days ago 1256 posts - 2363 votes Speaks: German*, English | Message 14 of 100 06 August 2011 at 7:21am | IP Logged | |||||
Actually, most bricklayers could build a nice functional house without the help of an architect. It won't be fancy, but it'll do.
I totally agree with you on that, however, since most better textbooks and language programs are already focusing on high frequency words, including the most common irregular verbs, IMHO this is a moot point. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Bao Diglot Senior Member Germany tinyurl.com/pe4kqe5 Joined 5565 days ago 2256 posts - 4046 votes Speaks: German*, English Studies: French, Spanish, Japanese, Mandarin | Message 15 of 100 06 August 2011 at 7:25am | IP Logged | |||||
So basically we are thinking about the same but mention different aspects?
The basic rules are easy, but ser/estar is just one of those points you have to refine time and again. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5229 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 16 of 100 06 August 2011 at 3:47pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I'm not sure if there's anything to debate here. I certainly don't claim to have discovered the value of studying high-frequency words. I simply pointed out that this particular soap opera is a perfect illustration of the common observation that typical conversational language uses a very small number of elements of a language.
It should be pointed out that conversational language is just one of many different genres, and that not all teaching materials focus truly on conversational language. Consider for example the following genres: 1. Great literary fiction 2. Academic and scientific language 3. Newspaper reporting 4. Legal language 5. Business language 6. Casual conversational language Most people here know the differences between the genres. In my opinion, very few textbooks actually concentrate on teaching conversational language. The bias is much more towards the written form. This is probably what most people need. This is also why I see so many people who say, "I can read French (or Spanish) but I can't speak it." Soap operas are such wonderful learning tools for this genre of language. Of course, you have to be interested in the spoken everyday language. If your interests lie more in the written language and you won't have many occasions to actually speak the language, then this is not for you. Don't waste your time watching soap operas. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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