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How many words for conversation? | ||
Tags: Number of words | Conversation | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5228 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes  Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 25 of 100 07 August 2011 at 5:38pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Although this observation of the existence of high-frequency and low-frequency words is nothing new, it raises--once again--some questions about learning strategy, especially for independent learners. To me, the fundamental lesson here is that the key to spoken proficiency is the mastery of the core components of the target language. This is a rather banal observation, mind you, but it seems a lot of learners don't get it and end up giving up quickly on learning a language because they feel overwhelmed.
If you feel you have to learn 9,000 word families to be able to understand and speak a language, it can be discouraging. But it doesn't have to be the case. You could get by very well with 500 word families. If you look at verb conjugation books, those tables are quite intimidating. But you should realize that 2/3 or at least 1/2 of those table entries are hardly used at all in the spoken language. So, if actually speaking well is the goal, then you have to focus on core grammar and syntax all the while acquiring that basic vocabulary. If all goes well, and you work on your phonology, you should be quickly speaking rather fluently. But you have to be careful here. Let's say you've really mastered those 500 core word families and you think you can do a serious imitation of one of the characters in our soap opera, you must realize that your overall vocabulary is rather limited. There are many subjects that you would not able to discuss properly. So don't get too carried away. Edited by s_allard on 07 August 2011 at 5:40pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| lingoleng Senior Member Germany Joined 5096 days ago 605 posts - 1290 votes | Message 26 of 100 07 August 2011 at 6:04pm | IP Logged | |||||
Well, of course, what else, and let's face it and add it: Maybe nothing will ever work, how could I know ... I was merely trying to point at the fact that tables have been a useful tool for many people, like me, and they can work, if you do it the right way, by associating meaning to the table entries and not by senseless memorization. It is probably off topic in this thread, but nevertheless: At first the table scheme must have meaning in itself for the one who wants to use it. Like with all the wonderful memory houses, palaces (I guess, I have never used these techniques by purpose) the scheme and its scaffolding must carry part of the information, so that you can easily transfer it from there to the single entries. Looking at a Latin verb scheme you can have a structure like this: You are in an active table, and this "active" has meaning for you (it is not passive, well, I guess this is the meaning, more or less, how many example sentences do I need to grasp this concept?). You are in a present column, and you know what present means (I go, I am going), all the forms in this column carry these informations, active, present. You are now in an "indicative" column, this contrasts with conjunctive, or you can reasonably consider it as "unmarked", so what is left is the actual process of learning a whole of 6 forms, laudo - I praise, and so on, and for any of the six forms you always keep in mind that any form has an active/unmarked, indicative/unmarked meaning, only task left is associating the single form to person and number. It is not your task to learn these entries by heart without knowing what they mean, it is your task to have meaningful entries after you have finished this memorization process. If you do this the right way, every entry in your mental table carries a lot of information (there will be plenty left to learn, of course) and my experience shows that you can activate such a table relatively easy for fluency, or at least I don't see how it should hinder it. That's all I wanted to say. Sorry for getting off topic. And the disclaimer: Do whatever works for you. Or a combination of whatever may work, maybe ... 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| William Camden Hexaglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 6070 days ago 1936 posts - 2333 votes Speaks: English*, German, Spanish, Russian, Turkish, French | Message 27 of 100 07 August 2011 at 7:26pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I would say for conversation at "survival" level, you could get by with about 400 words. However, conversation is a surprisingly tricky area in a foreign language, and to be even semi-comfortable I would say at least 4,000 words are needed. Edited by William Camden on 08 August 2011 at 3:10pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| amethyst32 Diglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 5447 days ago 118 posts - 198 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Portuguese, French | Message 28 of 100 07 August 2011 at 11:43pm | IP Logged | |||||
Senseless memorization is right up my street when it comes to verbs. Associating meaning or context with each conjugation would be nightmarishly slow and frustrating for me; as someone who gets the patterns easily I find it quicker and more direct to just brute force the tables and the less intelligence / imagination involved in it, the better. :) On the topic, I've also noticed how native speakers can stretch just a few words into a perfectly fluent conversation, but I'm not sure if this is something that can be learned by a beginner student or if it's a result of being totally at ease with and in control of the language. I have a feeling it's the latter. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6501 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 29 of 100 07 August 2011 at 11:58pm | IP Logged | |||||
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In conversations the problem is less the number of words you have to be able to say, but rather the number of words you need to understand the answers - although natives probably will try to speak in simpler language to obvious newbees. Besides you cannot just look at the number of words - expressions or 'chunks' are just as relevant.
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| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5228 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 30 of 100 08 August 2011 at 12:26am | IP Logged | |||||
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| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5228 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 31 of 100 08 August 2011 at 5:54pm | IP Logged | |||||
I agree that conversation is probably more difficult than a lot of people think, but that does not mean that you need more words than less. How does one arrive at a figure of 4,000 rather than 1,000 or even 10,000? The difficulty in determining a so-called minimum number of word families really lies in defining the contents of conversation. The academic approach is to take a large sample of conversations and determine how many word families one needs for a certain percentage of coverage. So, something like 9,000 word families will give you 99% coverage in English. But while this is methodologically very sound, the assumption is that the speaker will be equally able to converse over the range of the samples. But let's restrict our domain to something like the weather. How many words do we need to know to converse fluently about the weather? The core grammatical and lexical words remain the same, but the basic weather vocabulary is relatively small. Now, we are not talking meteorology here and the physics of hurricanes. We're just making small talk about the weather in answer to the question, "What's the weather like where you live?". How many words do you need? I'll guess a total of 300. Maybe it's more or maybe less, but the point is that you don't need an extensive vocabulary for this. If you change subjects, then you need a different set of words. Now we're talking about automobiles. How many words do we need to talk about automobiles and related topics? Of course, this is getting a bit technical. Maybe you don't actually own an automobile, so your automobile terminology may be a bit shaky. Someone may even ask you if you use a GPS to get around. What is that? How does it work? Obviously, there is no end of subjects to talk about, and even in our native languages our vocabulary reflects our personal history and interests. I don't garden and could not for the life of me tell you the names of 10 kinds of plants. Neither do I fish, so any conversation about fishing is rather difficult for me. But if you want to talk about sailing, well I'm ready to gab for hours. A large vocabulary obviously allows one to talk over a wide range of subjects. But one can be comfortable talking about a limited topic. This is why I suggested that the vocabulary of this soap opera is quite limited. There are no references to anything technological. All the dialogs revolve around banal everyday events and human relationships. Its a very small universe. Therefore the range of vocabulary is very limited. But that does not of course prevent people from talking endlessly. Edited by s_allard on 08 August 2011 at 6:07pm 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 32 of 100 08 August 2011 at 6:09pm | IP Logged | |||||
That's why I was never concerned about vocabulary or how many words I knew -- it's what you do with those words that has the biggest impact on your ability to communicate. That ability is a function of one's vocabulary and one's command over the language's grammar (in a broad sense), the latter being the most crucial of the two factors.
Individually, our universes are all more or less limited. Hence, the acquisition of vocabulary must be driven by personal needs, not statistics. 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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