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How many words do we actually need? | ||
Tags: Number of words | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5224 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes  Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 49 of 115 29 January 2013 at 10:33pm | IP Logged | |||||
I'm not sure if this is @juan's intent but I totally disagree with this idea that learning a given number of words brings the learner to a certain level. If it were as simple as that, we would learn a language just by reading a dictionary and a frequency list. This is why we get into these often sterile debates about the minimum number of words necessary to do certain things. The only thing I've said in this regard is that 300 - 500 is a kind of threshold that will allow to start talking fluently. After that the sky's the limit. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Juаn Senior Member Colombia Joined 5139 days ago 727 posts - 1830 votes Speaks: Spanish* | Message 50 of 115 29 January 2013 at 11:42pm | IP Logged | |||||
Vocabulary develops in response to the need to express concepts and ideas. The vocabulary required to discuss a particular topic is just that, the reflection of the nature, shape and variety of its subject matter. You can attempt to force discourse into a more limited set of vocabulary, but inevitably it will result in a reduction of scope and a loss of precision and pertinence. You can make do with a limited set of vocabulary for common tasks and simple conversation, but there is no escaping that for anything beyond that an education is required. Let's not lose sight of either that vocabulary involves more than an inventory of words along with their definitions. Words and concepts don't exist by themselves. That's why I stress the connection between vocabulary and syntax. Which leads to the following:
If they learnt them in any conventional way, absolutely. Perhaps not if they simply memorized them. 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5224 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 51 of 115 30 January 2013 at 12:53am | IP Logged | |||||
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If I can reiterate one more time, the OP is about a challenge to express complex ideas with relatively few words. It is not about attempting to prove that 1000 words is a good number of words. There is no doubt that technical vocabularies develop for a purpose. But that's not the point of the thread.
As for assuming that a person who has learned 15,000 words can speak at a B1 level, the question of course is how these words are learned. For the same reason, I believe that a lot can be done with relatively few word. It all depends on how the words are learned. Most people don't use actively more than 2000 words in speaking and writing. So you can speak and write very well with a relatively small numbers of words. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6391 days ago 9753 posts - 15779 votes 4 sounds Speaks: Russian*, English, FinnishC1, Latin, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Danish, Romanian, Polish, Belarusian, Ukrainian, Croatian, Slovenian, Catalan, Czech, Galician, Dutch, Swedish | Message 52 of 115 30 January 2013 at 1:59am | IP Logged | |||||
3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5224 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 53 of 115 30 January 2013 at 10:12am | IP Logged | |||||
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Let's not get distracted by some irrelevant ramblings.
The main theme of the thread is can you - not ought you or should you - express complex thoughts using a limited vocabulary? I think the whole thing is quite intriguing but obviously some people here think that the whole idea is silly and is just a disguised attempt to prove that one does not need more than 1000 words to speak English. This challenge makes me think a bit of the Plain English movement that promotes using language that is easy to understand and free of jargon and verbosity. Here is the Wikipedia entry. Sure we may have to use periphrases and more simple words instead of some more precise but obscure terminology but the advantage is that more people can understand. Well-known areas of application of the Plain English principles are insurance contracts and official language. If we want to extrapolate to the field of language learning, we can ask if one can communicate effectively with relatively few words. I believe so. I also recognize that some people go apeshit when I say that in English the majority of people have a productive or active vocabulary of less than 2000 words. Most people here at HTLAL have no idea what their real active vocabulary is. They just pull figures out of thin air or use some Internet tests to arrive at some outlandish figures. To my knowledge, only one person, our dean, @Iversen, has actually measured the number of different words used in his posts here at HTLAL. If my memory serves me well, he came in at around 2500 different words. You don't need 5000 or 10000 or 15000 words to express yourself well. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| petteri Triglot Senior Member Finland Joined 4726 days ago 117 posts - 208 votes Speaks: Finnish*, English, Swedish Studies: German, Spanish | Message 54 of 115 30 January 2013 at 10:52am | IP Logged | |||||
To whom are you referring when using the word "people" above? Do you really imply that the complete active vocabulary of typical English-speaking adult or non-native active HTLAL poster is less than 2000 words? 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| iguanamon Pentaglot Senior Member Virgin Islands Speaks: Ladino Joined 5056 days ago 2237 posts - 6731 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Portuguese, Haitian Creole, Creole (French) | Message 55 of 115 30 January 2013 at 1:14pm | IP Logged | |||||
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It is also true that you have to be able to understand. You don't need a word, until- you need it. I'd much rather have the word "actor" at my beck and call than to have to use a rather long and convoluted circumlocution. I hardly ever use that word in everyday speech but when I need it, I need it. That small percentage of words that we only use occasionally is, to me, what makes the difference in speaking a language well.
I think your point (I may be wrong here) is not in adhering to a strict limit of words forever, but rather to master a limited set of words and use that as a solid base upon which to build more easily. This may have some use. I mean this sincerely, s_allard, doing speaks louder than saying. Why not start a log called "Vietnamese with 500 words", "Modern Greek in 300 words" or "X in 1,000 words"? Your new log would do more to prove your point and show its possible usefulness than seven pages of posts. You're probably not going to convince people by talking about this for another seven pages, but if you show us... . Edited by iguanamon on 30 January 2013 at 2:22pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
 emk Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5326 days ago 2615 posts - 8806 votes Speaks: English*, FrenchB2 Studies: Spanish, Ancient Egyptian Personal Language Map | Message 56 of 115 30 January 2013 at 1:21pm | IP Logged | |||||
You're looking at this backward. If Iversen talks about a single subject for a few months, he may use 2,500 words. But by definition, that's not his active vocabulary. That's just the subset of his active vocabulary that he actually used speaking about one subject in a fixed period of time. If you asked him about other subjects (which are off-topic here at HTLAL), he would use a different subset of his active vocabulary. I know, for example, that Iversen is a voracious reader of science magazines. His active vocabulary may very well include obscure words like "oncogene", a gene which causes cancer (my active vocabulary does). But he'll never use those words here on HTLAL. Here's what happens when you try to write about science with a 1,000 word vocabulary: xkcd: Up Goer Five 
It's a funny cartoon, but the limited vocabulary is obvious. Iversen's vocabulary is surely more than twice as big as that. If you think that 300 words are enough to speak fluently, or that 2,500 words are enough to pass a C2 exam or speak like Iversen, I encourage you to actually write out a list of these terribly useful words, either for French, English or Spanish. But you need to pick the list before you know the topic. As for CEFRL exams, you pretty much know the topics of an A2 exam in advance: You'll be asked about your biography, you'll be asked to (say) order a meal, and you may be asked to describe a personal interest of your choice or recount a simple event. By B1, the topics become somewhat less predictable, covering a wide range of touristy and travel vocabulary. And by B2, it's starting to sound like a high-school current events class. Will you be asked about single-sex schooling? Whether we should have more tollbooths? Adolescent rebellion and drinking? Environmental degradation in Africa? Or the price of magazines? And C1 questions can get nasty. My tutor used to give me a few of these, and some of them were things like what kind of policies governments should take towards separatist movements in Catalonia and Quebec. My active French vocabulary is pretty decent, but it wasn't nearly good enough to deal with that sort of issue. So here's my question: If you don't know the actual subject in advance, can you make a list of 300 or 2000 words (or whatever) which will cover it? Or can you only pick those words in retrospect, by analyzing a conversation about that specific subject? Edited by emk on 30 January 2013 at 2:20pm 8 persons have voted this message useful |
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