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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 4663 days ago 297 posts - 618 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish | Message 17 of 100 06 August 2011 at 5:44pm | IP Logged | |||||
Yes, of course. My bad. I was more focusing on the "collect X number of words" aspect of the thread, which struck me as not such a good approach. I prefer to learn words in a context, which entails learning both the word and its containing syntactic structure. You are completely correct about learning those foundational verbs, prepositions and grammatical particles, of course. My own preference would be to learn them in a context, rather than from tables and charts, however. Instead of associating, for example, the third person singular pretérito of ir with a particular slot in a conjugation table I would rather associate it with the pronouns it usually accompanies and the situations it usually describes. If I learn it as being in a certain slot in a particular table then when I go to use it I have to think about the tables and and slots and "compute" which form of the verb to use. If I learn it in context then it becomes a habit and "selection" or "choice" do not enter into the process and production is much more fluent. That's my theory anyway. I'm truly not experienced enough to know if that theory holds any water or not, but for the time being, I'm sticking to it. :) --gary 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| lingoleng Senior Member Germany Joined 5096 days ago 605 posts - 1290 votes | Message 18 of 100 06 August 2011 at 11:16pm | IP Logged | |||||
From my experience such "table knowledge" can just as well result in fluent production, not at once, of course, but after some time there is no reason that it hinders fluency. And while some people may learn these tables without associating any meaning with it, this is not necessarily so. When I go through the verb tables I have memorized I always do "feel" the actual meaning, the person, number, mood, things like this, this is possible, and then actual production is not many steps away. One can of course learn these things as pure sound, a kind of meaningless mantra, in this case it is just a kind of mnemonic list one can use for relatively slow reference while producing output, I guess many people do this, well, I know some of them, and in this case your suspicion that it may hinder fluency for a longer while is justified, of course. In the end this kind of schematic knowledge (which I don't recommend) can still lead to good fluency, but in a less direct way. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Marc Frisch Heptaglot Senior Member Germany Joined 6463 days ago 1001 posts - 1169 votes Speaks: German*, French, English, Spanish, Portuguese, Turkish, Italian Studies: Persian, Tamil | Message 19 of 100 06 August 2011 at 11:41pm | IP Logged | |||||
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As a side note: it has been said that Konrad Adenauer, the first chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany had an active vocabulary of about 500 words.
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| Zwlth Super Polyglot Senior Member United States Joined 5024 days ago 154 posts - 320 votes Speaks: English*, German, Italian, Spanish, Russian, Arabic (Written), Dutch, Swedish, Portuguese, Latin, French, Persian, Greek | Message 20 of 100 07 August 2011 at 6:08am | IP Logged | |||||
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To quote Paul Nation, who should know what he is talking about:
"If we take 98% as the ideal coverage, a 8,000–9,000 word-family vocabulary is needed for dealing with written text, and 6,000–7,000 families for dealing with spoken text." 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Arekkusu Hexaglot Senior Member Canada bit.ly/qc_10_lec Joined 5179 days ago 3971 posts - 7747 votes Speaks: English, French*, GermanC1, Spanish, Japanese, Esperanto Studies: Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Estonian | Message 21 of 100 07 August 2011 at 6:39am | IP Logged | |||||
In his sleep? Or are you joking? Does THIS look like something a man with a 500-word vocabulary would say? "I have the honor to pay you a visit in company with some of the members of my Cabinet, thereby establishing the first contact between the Government of the Federal Republic of Germany and the three High Commissioners. Now that the German Federal Assembly has convened, and the Federal president been elected, and now that I have been chosen Federal Chancellor and the members of the Federal Cabinet have been appointed, a new chapter of German history of the postwar years begins.—The disaster of the second world war has left in its wake a Germany almost totally destroyed. Our cities were in ruins. Economic life was largely smashed. All vestiges of a government had ceased. The very souls of men had suffered such injuries that it seemed doubtful whether a recovery would ever be possible. During the four years following the disaster of 1945, legislative and executive power was largely vested in the occupation powers. It was only step by step that executive and legislative functions were redelegated to German authorities on various levels, and with a limited power to make decisions. It is fitting and proper to acknowledge gratefully that the German population was saved during these trying years from starvation by Allied help in supplying food which at the time could not be purchased with the proceeds of German exports. It was this help which made possible the start of reconstruction. Now that the governmental and legislative elements of the German Federal Republic are being built up, a large part of the responsibility and the authority to make decisions will pass into German hands. We do not, of course, possess as yet complete freedom; since there are considerable restrictions contained in the occupation statute. We will do our part to bring about an atmosphere in which the Allied powers will see their way clear to apply the occupation statute in a liberal and generous manner; only in this way will the German people be able to attain full freedom. We hope that the Allied powers will, by making a corresponding use of the revision clause in the occupation statute, hasten the further political development of our country." 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5228 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 22 of 100 07 August 2011 at 7:04am | IP Logged | |||||
Since there is no source of this quote, it is difficult to ascertain what kind of texts Paul Nation is talking about here. I think we can assume that he was talking about a generic wide-ranging sample of texts for testing purposes. Those figures certainly look possible, but I should point out that here we are talking a) about conversations and b) a very specific sample, i.e. a single soap opera with approximately 255 final episodes. In a sense it is like looking at one book with many chapters as opposed to looking at many different books. The observation that I'm making here is that in this sort of sample speaking proficiency can be very high with a relatively small vocabulary. The reason the vocabulary is so small is the very limited nature of the range of experiences of the characters in this sort of programming. If you were to look at 10 different soap operas, the total vocabulary size would expand considerably no doubt. But that's not the issue here. What is interesting here is the fact that although a given episode uses about 120 verbs, it is likely that all 255 episodes will only contain a slightly larger number. I'm just guessing here, of course, based on my observations of about 20 episodes. An interesting point worth noting is that although the verbs don't change too much from one episode to the next, there is a certain form of lexical clustering around certain themes or events. For example, when a young women gives birth, there appears a certain vocabulary related to that event. Then it disappears, never to be heard again. Characters come and go and so do the vocabulary related to them. However, the core vocabulary, just like the core characters, remains the same. Edited by s_allard on 07 August 2011 at 7:19am 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5228 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 23 of 100 07 August 2011 at 7:17am | IP Logged | |||||
I think there's an important distinction here. I read here that Adenauer used a vocabulary of 500 words in his speeches. That may certainly be true, but his general vocabulary was no doubt larger. It's like saying that Obama uses less than 800 words in his speeches--actually that sounds quite accurate--but that is not a reflection of his total active vocabulary. Edited by s_allard on 07 August 2011 at 8:31am 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Bao Diglot Senior Member Germany tinyurl.com/pe4kqe5 Joined 5564 days ago 2256 posts - 4046 votes Speaks: German*, English Studies: French, Spanish, Japanese, Mandarin | Message 24 of 100 07 August 2011 at 1:46pm | IP Logged | |||||
May work for some people, not for others. Doesn't work well for me, and I'd rather have people who give advice about it add "try out if it works for you, if it doesn't - there are other approaches, one of them - or a combination - will work." 1 person has voted this message useful |
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