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Spanish Course, few words taught | ||
Tags: Number of words | Spanish | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Programs, Books & Tapes |  | |
| Peregrinus Senior Member United States Joined 4291 days ago 149 posts - 273 votes  Speaks: English* | Message 25 of 51 04 September 2012 at 6:44pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
Although I disagreed in the other thread with s_allard regarding the number of words necessary to begin to learn usage really well, this is the crux of his argument and an important one. As I mentioned there, I have been extracting sentences from WordReference.com's Spanish-English dictionary, going in rough frequency order, with the high frequency words naturally having a lot of idiomatic use. Picking some examples from the verb "poder", we find: en cuanto puedas - as soon as you can no podía dejar de reír - I couldn't stop laughing corrimos a más no poder - we ran as fast as we could no pudo haber sido Pilar - it couldn't have been Pilar no pudo ser - it wasn't possible caer en poder de algn - to fall to sb no pude menos que - I couldn't help sentireme halagado The above are non-literary uses falling into 3 categories that I see: 1) strictly idiomatic set phrases; 2) non-literal idiomatic usage that can be adapted to different examples (given in bold); 3) more or less complex multi-verb constructions (like Synergy teaches); and to which could be added phrasal verbs for rounding out lexical chunks. The above phrases are very conversational and useful. While #3 can mostly be had from either intensive grammar study or passive assimilation, the other two can't nearly as well be intuited from such less intensive reading/listening. Making s_allard's overall point, all the above mainly use, or could be adapted to use, very low frequency words. And someone with a high level of vocabulary but who could not produce in conversation such usage, would appear much more stilted/wooden in everyday "chit-chat" than someone who has a much lower vocabulary knowledge but knows all the usage of such a restricted vocabulary. The reverse would be true for reading however excluding perhaps the lowest level of popular fiction. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| Peregrinus Senior Member United States Joined 4291 days ago 149 posts - 273 votes Speaks: English* | Message 26 of 51 04 September 2012 at 7:13pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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Here are some more examples including a couple prepositional phrases:
fue por eso que vine - that was why I came si no fuera por mi hijo . . . - if it wasn't for my son . . . es de esperar que . . . - it is to be hoped that . . . no es para tanto - it's not that bad por más que llorar - no matter how much you cry no bien - as soon as si bien - although Phrases like these are the basis of lexical chunk/n-grams/whatever-you-call-it studies that I have seen, and which imply that we learn such phrases as whole units in our native languages. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| frenkeld Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 6742 days ago 2042 posts - 2719 votes Speaks: Russian*, English Studies: German | Message 27 of 51 04 September 2012 at 7:45pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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Idiomatic expressions certainly belong in one's Anki deck no less than individual words. At the same time, they don't need to be treated as being different from individual words and thus don't require separate study. Just read and listen to appropriate authentic sources, converse or correspond if you have access to a native speaker, and your 'regular' vocabulary as well as your 'idiomatic vocabulary' will grow over time.
The idea of needing a separate extended period for "usage study" still escapes me. Edited by frenkeld on 04 September 2012 at 8:07pm 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| Peregrinus Senior Member United States Joined 4291 days ago 149 posts - 273 votes Speaks: English* | Message 28 of 51 04 September 2012 at 8:09pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
Well to get to the point of being able to use extensive methods, one has to have a fairly high threshold of knowledge, as in 95-98% according to Linguamor, although I'm OK with 90% for myself.
Note that s_allard in his past postings advocates learning usage from the very beginning. As to why a need for separate study, for conversational purposes, is simply because of the lack of much lexical chunk material in standard courses, or in the way people study on their own, *especially* if they are trying to limit their study to a compressed time frame. If I could find a fairly comprehensive source of such phrases, I would be glad to use that instead of mining examples from dictionaries and other sources. Indeed I remember reading an article which dismissed the importance of studies of lexical chunks simply because of the lack of such resources, i.e. as a practical matter. If standard courses really included a lot of such material, as in really demonstrating all the uses of prepositions in phrases and verbs with prepositions, that would in itself go a long way in my opinion. Fairly uneducated native speakers can rattle off such (non-literary) phrases with ease with a much lower vocabulary than educated ones, so why not spend some time learning such usage instead of learning it much more slowly? As I mentioned in the other tread, I suspect that the expanded conversational ability learners would have with "only" 2500-5000 words and knowledge of such usage would be what would give many the confidence and motivation to persevere unless their interests are primarily understanding news broadcasts and non-fiction writing. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| frenkeld Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 6742 days ago 2042 posts - 2719 votes Speaks: Russian*, English Studies: German | Message 29 of 51 04 September 2012 at 9:55pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
When referring to reading and listening, I did not imply that those have to be done only extensively. In fact, intensive reading (and listening), where you notice that you are dealing with an idiomatic phrase and then look it up, helps acquire such vocabulary, just as it helps with individual words.
Recognizing that my Spanish is an interrupted work in progress that is not all that far along to tout as an example, I was nevertheless commended on a couple of occasions by native speakers for my writing being relatively idiomatic. I should add that these positive remarks only make sense relative to my overall level in Spanish. Be that as it may, I can think of two sources of idiomatic phrases I had been exposed to. One is the textbook I used, "Spanish for Beginners" by Charles Duff. It is not a perfect textbook, but he does talk about the importance of idioms, and in fact also introduces a number of those. The other, probably by far the most important one in my case, was just novels. A page for Chris Pountain's course at Cambridge lists several novels he regards to be of particular linguistic interest. In fact, some of those novels represent particular dialects, and I have only read one on the list, "La Colmena", but as you can imagine, Spanish is hardly short on novels one can read profitably to boost one's idiomatic treasure chest and develop a sense for some of the patterns of ordinary speech. And then, every conversation I had had with a native speaker had taught me something too, I just hadn't had enough of them. As you point out, courses don't cover idiomatic expressions to the extend needed, but then why would one want to learn just from courses and then follow by culling idioms from dictionaries? Why not go to authentic sources? OK, one needs a bit more regular vocabulary as well to read novels, although even with novels those of more trivial genres may be manageable sooner. I would certainly prefer a cheesy novel to reading a dictionary any time, and just using a dictionary one can also overdo it - you don't want to speak only in idioms, and you'll only know how much is too much by seeing continuous speech. And there are comic books too. Edited by frenkeld on 07 September 2012 at 12:22am 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| Peregrinus Senior Member United States Joined 4291 days ago 149 posts - 273 votes Speaks: English* | Message 30 of 51 04 September 2012 at 10:37pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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frenkeld,
I actually have that book too, just as I do the Spanish grammar book mentioned in another thread. Back in those days there was not nearly as much available. My own emphasis as to usage is for conversational purposes, and also I really don't care much for literature and its type of idioms. But perhaps popular fiction would suit, and I remember the work of Corín Tellado in particular being suggested somewhere. And what I would really love is for one of the large Mexican production companies to release their scripts for all of their telenovelas. That could be mined using free/cheap software to extract lexical chunks. Almost every large Spanish corpus that I have seen for generating frequency lists or for use in extracting chunks (often called n-grams), is heavily biased toward written sources.
The reason I use a dictionary is that I find the sentences highly conversational, located in one convenient place online, and am reasonably sure that they will be grammatically correct, though of course one has to adjust for register and dialect. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| hrhenry Octoglot Senior Member United States languagehopper.blogs Joined 4929 days ago 1871 posts - 3642 votes Speaks: English*, SpanishC2, ItalianC2, Norwegian, Catalan, Galician, Turkish, Portuguese Studies: Polish, Indonesian, Ojibwe | Message 31 of 51 04 September 2012 at 11:12pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
I don't know that I would classify (most of) those as idioms, really, rather the third category, but I suppose it's splitting hairs. Idioms are really more chunks that have a specific set of words that make up an idea, such as "consultar con la almohada", "no lo tomes a pecho", etc. I think I was very lucky with a couple of my Spanish teachers in school - they taught plenty of idioms to us. Later, just before moving to Mexico after college, I purchased a paperback book titled 1001 Spanish Idioms (I think). I wish I could find it - my parents seemed to save every other last piece of paper that entered my life, so I should eventually run across it (three years after the last parent's death, and I'm still sorting through things!). Anyway, it was really a useful book that had the most common (by far) idioms all in one place. R. == 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| frenkeld Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 6742 days ago 2042 posts - 2719 votes Speaks: Russian*, English Studies: German | Message 32 of 51 05 September 2012 at 12:12am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
Could it have been "2001 Spanish and English Idioms" from Barron's?
Which grammar book was that? I may have missed that thread. Edited by frenkeld on 05 September 2012 at 12:14am 1 person has voted this message useful |
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