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s_allard
Triglot
Senior Member
Canada
Joined 5429 days ago
2704 posts - 5425 votes 
Speaks: French*, English, Spanish
Studies: Polish
| Message 57 of 67 22 July 2013 at 1:18pm | IP Logged |
Iversen wrote:
montmorency wrote:
I seem to remember that our own Iversen reported once here that he'd
analysed all English words he'd used on HTLAL over a long period, in order to estimate his vocabulary, and this
would be active vocabulary. I'm sure he'd be the first to admit its limitations, but I'll bet that that's the most
realistic test of active vocabulary we are likely to see in practice, in quite a long time. (It does not cover spoken
vocabulary, of course). |
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That's correct. I took everything I had written in English here at HTLAL over something like 3 or 4 months,
reduced the result to something like dictionary headwords (although I was somewhat harder on derivations than
most dictionaries would be), and then I ended up at somewhere around 2400-2500 words. Given that my
estimates on passive vocabulary in English consistently lie above 30000 words and that English is my best
foreign language it shows how little of your passive vocabulary you actually use. BUT... the active vocabulary is
not the amount of words you actually have used, but the number of words you could have used. And there
is no clear method to measure this, although a test setup with open slots or a quiz of some sorts in theory might
function. However calibrating such a test would be a nightmare, and the results would be quite unreliable.
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Without wanting to stray too much from the theme of the thread, I think it is important to keep in mind three
points when we look at vocabulary size, and especially active vocabulary, First, not all words are equally present.
There is a small number of words that appear frequently and a large number that appear infrequently.
Second, there are grammar or function words like prepositions and conjuncions and other words that serve
primarily as connectors.
Third, there are idioms or multi-word units that are hard to count as words.
I would also add that although we count words, in reality words are always embedded in phrases and sentences
and therefore often have very different meanings.
This all means that an active vocabulary of 2500 words may not seem like a lot but is actually huge. You can do a
lot with those words. I would think that many native speakers, depending on their occupation and level of
education, use much less.
To come back to the OP, I really believe that at some point you have to seriously and formally study vocabulary if
you want to make real progress. There is so much to learn for both active and passive use that you should make
a systematic effort in some way.
1 person has voted this message useful
| kujichagulia
Senior Member
Japan
Joined 4846 days ago
1031 posts - 1571 votes
Speaks: English*
Studies: Japanese, Portuguese
| Message 58 of 67 23 July 2013 at 3:00am | IP Logged |
s_allard wrote:
To come back to the OP, I really believe that at some point you have to seriously and formally study vocabulary if
you want to make real progress. There is so much to learn for both active and passive use that you should make
a systematic effort in some way.
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Thank you for your reply, s_allard. Merci beaucoup! This is what I was trying to prove by putting out my hypothesis. I would love to be able to just read, talk and listen in my target language without doing anything for vocabulary, but that seems to be nearly impossible at the beginner and intermediate stages. Everyone has to do something to learn/remember vocabulary and phrases, even if it is as simple as repeating it over and over in one's mind.
1 person has voted this message useful
| patrickwilken
Senior Member
Germany
radiant-flux.net
Joined 4532 days ago
1546 posts - 3200 votes
Studies: German
| Message 59 of 67 23 July 2013 at 8:44am | IP Logged |
kujichagulia wrote:
Thank you for your reply, s_allard. Merci beaucoup! This is what I was trying to prove by putting out my hypothesis. I would love to be able to just read, talk and listen in my target language without doing anything for vocabulary, but that seems to be nearly impossible at the beginner and intermediate stages. Everyone has to do something to learn/remember vocabulary and phrases, even if it is as simple as repeating it over and over in one's mind. |
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I am not sure I agree about needing to do more at an intermediate stage (B1-B2). For German all I am doing now is reading, talking and watching movies without subtitles. It true I do ask what the meanings of some words are, or look up some words as I come across them in a dictionary, but I am make no further effort to learn the words after that.
I am not saying this is the best/most-efficient way to learn, but it works for me.
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| montmorency
Diglot
Senior Member
United Kingdom
Joined 4827 days ago
2371 posts - 3676 votes
Speaks: English*, German
Studies: Danish, Welsh
| Message 60 of 67 23 July 2013 at 11:43am | IP Logged |
I thought I would add a few snippets from Huliganov's description of his Gold List
method. I'll leave out all the stuff about the actual mechanics, and concentrate on his
ideas about the philosophy / psychology behind it. Whether you like his method or not,
some of the ideas may prove to be valid:
Quote:
1. No reliance on mnemonics and no creation of strange methods to try and “visualise”
words in contexts. No “think of a cat in a cot and you’ll remember that Polish for
‘cat’ is ‘cot’ “. – These are the ways by the way that course makers like Daniels gets
phenomenal results over two weeks but they never last. Just as well, if they did, they
would create a learner who, when he came to fluency, would not be able to say “kot”
without thinking about a baby’s bed. Ridiculous. Oszustwo. Don’t let the oszusty
deceive you by filling your shoes with the letter O at tea time.
2. No cramming, no learning against the clock. No learning for next week, or for
tomorrow, or for a test, or for an exam. No conscious “memorizing”. The long-term
memory is not a conscious function. Its samples are taken automatically and
subconsciously out of the material which is run through the conscious. What we decide
to memorise or forget only relates to s/t memory. You cannot decide to learn to the
long term memory any more than you can decide to forget to the long-term memory.
Disciplines based on the ‘aha!’ moment of putting two and two together to understand
something can use the short term memory and be sure that they will get a long-term
effect, but in languages there is very little “aha!”, and so short term memory is of
next to no use at all.
You need to think of memory as a similar function to breathing – we breath best for
our bodies when we don’t think about it, trying to breath at a special rate or
especially deeply. The body regulates itself. We breathe ideally when we keep our mind
off the process of breathing. For memory, when we take over the process consciously,
like holding breath or breathing at a faster rate (‘hyperventilating’) we shut out for
a time the body’s natural function. In other words when we take control of our memory
by trying to memorize something there and then, we automatically shut out the
possibility of long-term memorising and switch on instead the short-term memory
function. And we can’t keep it up for long, and also it results in repetition of items
in order to learn them which might be sampled on first reading even, if we just let go
and let the God-given faculties of our body work. That’s why cramming methods and
deliberate memorisation methods waste so much time for language learners and serious
polyglots never use them.
Chomsky once commented on the inability of the child to learn language so well after
the age of five or six, whike language seems naturally to be acquired until this time.
Chomskyites and other linguists have conjectured on numerous occasions what this
faculty is that is lost, and how to measure it. In fact, there is nothing to measure
being lost as nothing is in fact lost. What happens is that at that age an ‘extra
layer’ comes in as the child learns by then to be self-consciously learning. The child,
by school age, is aware that it is “now learning something” and making an effort to
remember, not just being put through life’s algorithms passively. And so the short-term
memory starts to come more and more into play, blocking the long-term memory function
essential to the easy learning of languages. This method is all about putting back the
long-term, unconscious memory into the learning process, which it does by taking any
effort to rote learn or memorise on demand out of the progress, and focus instead on
the mathematical process, the algorithm of the goldlist method, and on the pure
enjoyment of writing out new words and just liking the experience of touching those
words with our minds in a relaxed way, without pushing them on our memories.
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Quote:
12. What you then do with the words in the vocab book headlist that are more than 14
days old, but less than 60 days old is that you “distil” them. And this is what I call
a “distillation”: Hermann Ebbinghaus’ experiments and the knowledge about the sampling
habit of the long-term memory means that some of these words will already have been
learned, despite the fact (actually because of the fact, but this is of course counter-
intuitive) that all you did was try to enjoy them, not memorise them. In fact the
prediction is that up to 30% of the words will be retained. You are looking to distil
out the “hard to learn” expressions and obtain a concentrated, whisky-like list of
distilled words that are an absolute bugger for you to learn (by which time you will,
of course, actally have learned them, because they will have gone through this
distilation process ten times with two weeks’ break in between each time). I call that
the “gold list”. On the way to the gold list you will use up the first hard back book
and a thinner second one.
If you intend learning, say three or four languages to fluency (over 10,000 words) then
you’ll need three or four first books per language (with the head list and the first
three distillations) I call these the bronze books or the bronze lists. Then you will
find that as the 4th time you distil there are only about a quarter of the words left
that you started with, you only need one second level book, or “silver” book, as I call
it, per language. And likewise when you come to the final distillations in the gold
book, you’ll find you only need one gold book for several languages to fluency, as by
those higher level distillations there is less than 10% of what was in the first head
list in the bronze books.
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Quote:
21. Because you are in for the long haul with the long-term memory system, use the fact
that you have numbered the words to motivate yourself. You will know that you are 40%
through your target of 2500 words when you have 40 pages of headwords. As the number of
repetitions on average that are needed in order to learn the words to the end is 3.3
(some are learned after one but some will only be learned on the tenth reiteration or
‘distillation’) then we know that having 40 percent of one’s head list in place is
equivalent to 13 percent of the whole work. Use these numbers and statistics to
motivate yourself, and note that even a small learning session can represent a small
but irreversible advance on the road to learning the language. The s/t memory method
makes huge advances at the beginning which are forgotten and the learner goes
backwards, despairs, and drops out of class. The l/t method means that you are only
ever going forwards, so the method is a more effective use of time, and much more
motivating once the student understands memory in language learning and understands
what is going on.
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Quote:
22. Need to activate – language learners using the long term memory will obtain a large
passive knowledge of the language. They will quickly move towards being able to read
newspapers and novels in the language. But they may have difficulty and be discouraged
when placed in a situation where they have to “activate” their knowledge and start
talking. They will feel tongue tied, and not be able to find words that, when someone
tells them, they know they knew. The activation of a language learned well in my method
by means of immersion in the environment of the language takes a maximum of three days.
In this time, the person who has spend the hours with his vocab book doing what I
suggested above, and doing grammatical exercises, suddenly starts speaking the language
with fluency, and the experience of this “activating” can be very exhilirating,
actually. The person who thinks that they will learn by immersion and have not put the
hours in beforehand will not have this, and will learn to the short-term memory, and
forget it all on his return out of the milieu, and not achieve the results of the
learner to l/t memory, who is able to reactivate his language every time he goes into
the milieu for a few days, for the rest of his life. He appears to be someone who has
learned thousands of words in a few days – a claim which not even the boldest short
term system would make – but of course he knows them, he is only bringing them “to the
front of his mind”, which is a different matter to putting them there in the first
place. Some people, witnessing the remarkable effect of immersion on activating the
language ability of the long-term memory optimising student, and not giving full credit
to the work this student did in his own time beforehand, think that the immersion
method is a great way to “learn languages”. So you get people trying to combine Callan
and immersion, then doing more Callan and more immersion, and then more of the same,
and never getting off the ground with it. One Callan victim I knew had done the callan-
immersion mix three years running, and when her boss came from England the first thing
she said was “would Meester like the cup off tea?” and we’re talking about an otherwise
educated person whose knowledge of her mother tongue is nothing short of eloquent in
both speech and in writing.
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So he is relying on his interpretation of the work of Ebbinghaus (about which I know
little, but others here may know a lot).
Filling one large A4 book as he recommends, and then completing the process, would in
theory give you a passive knowledge of 2500 words, which would be a goodish working
knowledge. If you fill four books and complete the process, then that would be 10,000
words, which would be approaching what he refers to as "fluency" (I know - that's a
loaded word, and one which is not favoured on HTLAL - let's call it an advanced level
of vocabulary knowledge or something less loaded).
This is all passive knowledge, but this does not worry him unduly as activation will
take place automatically when one becomes "immersed" (e.g. by going to a country where
the language is spoken).
Things I like about his method:
- It does not rely on technology. (But that may not worry a lot of people).
- It tends to be low-stress. (I think that's always good).
- In the long-run, it could be more time efficient than conventional SRS,
because fewer repetitions are needed, on average.
Possible disadvantages:
- As he concedes, human laziness could mean that the low-stress means you just lose all
momentum. If you are serious about learning, you do have to keep up a certain pace,
being careful not to exceed the limits that he stipulates (i.e. no repetition in less
than 14 days. "Accidental" repetition - e.g. seeing the word used in context - is not a
worry though.
- No use if you really do have to learn a lot of words in a hurry for an exam or
something. (He would argue though that the short-term methods are only really good for
putting words in short-term memory).
- Although it's true you aren't dependent on high-technology and in theory can take
your book anywhere, I know personally that I could not use this method on a bus, and
probably not on a train, for example. You need to be able to sit down comfortably,
ideally with a table, and have room to manoeuvre a bit.
Edited by montmorency on 23 July 2013 at 11:50am
7 persons have voted this message useful
| kujichagulia
Senior Member
Japan
Joined 4846 days ago
1031 posts - 1571 votes
Speaks: English*
Studies: Japanese, Portuguese
| Message 61 of 67 23 July 2013 at 2:53pm | IP Logged |
@montmorency - Yes, that is what is keeping me from doing the Goldlist method. As relaxing as it sounds, I very rarely am able to sit down comfortably at a table with room to maneuver. I could sit down on the train on the way home with a notebook, yes, but if I need to be in a very relaxed state, there's no way I could do the Goldlists on the train - not with university students chatting, retirees bantering and babies crying.
1 person has voted this message useful
| s_allard
Triglot
Senior Member
Canada
Joined 5429 days ago
2704 posts - 5425 votes
Speaks: French*, English, Spanish
Studies: Polish
| Message 62 of 67 23 July 2013 at 3:53pm | IP Logged |
The Goldlist, the Iversen-type lists, flashcards, word notebooks, Anki, Memrise, etc, are all tools we can use to
learn words. But how do we learn to use these words properly? This of course has always been the criticism from
the people who prefer the sentence method. Don't learn words, learn sentences, they say.
Counting words is basically irrelevant because it does not mean much. Just this morning, I saw a phrase in Spanish
(se dejó barba - he let his beard grow) with two very familiar words (dejarse, barba) that I would never have put
together this way. I spontaneously would have made up some other more cumbersome phrase.
This made me think that yes you have to learn words, but the rreally important step is to learn how to recombine
them properly..
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| patrickwilken
Senior Member
Germany
radiant-flux.net
Joined 4532 days ago
1546 posts - 3200 votes
Studies: German
| Message 63 of 67 23 July 2013 at 5:30pm | IP Logged |
s_allard wrote:
The Goldlist, the Iversen-type lists, flashcards, word notebooks, Anki, Memrise, etc, are all tools we can use to
learn words. But how do we learn to use these words properly? This of course has always been the criticism from
the people who prefer the sentence method. Don't learn words, learn sentences, they say. |
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I used Anki from A1 to learn both sentences and words. So for every L1-L2 pair, I also had at least one sentence containing the L2 word I was learning. Sometimes a lot more as later I was mining dictionary definitions.
Learning with sentences certainly seemed to make it much easier to remember the words I was learning, and had the added benefit of not only teaching me grammar, but also reinforcing all the other words in the sentences I was learning.
I did learn individual words though as well. I found trying to learn an unknown words from within a sentence frustrating: it just took took long to continually re-read the sentence when I just wanted to quickly say/not-say the individuals words meaning.
For each word I also learnt the L1->L2 combination, which was very helpful in activating the word. If I just learnt either L2->L1, or the sentences (which were obviously in L2) the words learnt tended to be fairly passive.
Another reason I did not only use sentences was that I found it very helpful for German to learn for each card both the gender and single/plural forms of the word. This was too hard for me to extract immediately from individual sentences, especially when I was A1-early B1.
I found this method very helpful to get to a point where I could intensively read, and finally do away with word lists.
2 persons have voted this message useful
| kujichagulia
Senior Member
Japan
Joined 4846 days ago
1031 posts - 1571 votes
Speaks: English*
Studies: Japanese, Portuguese
| Message 64 of 67 24 July 2013 at 1:58am | IP Logged |
patrickwilken wrote:
I used Anki from A1 to learn both sentences and words. So for every L1-L2 pair, I also had at least one sentence containing the L2 word I was learning. Sometimes a lot more as later I was mining dictionary definitions.
Learning with sentences certainly seemed to make it much easier to remember the words I was learning, and had the added benefit of not only teaching me grammar, but also reinforcing all the other words in the sentences I was learning.
I did learn individual words though as well. I found trying to learn an unknown words from within a sentence frustrating: it just took took long to continually re-read the sentence when I just wanted to quickly say/not-say the individuals words meaning.
For each word I also learnt the L1->L2 combination, which was very helpful in activating the word. If I just learnt either L2->L1, or the sentences (which were obviously in L2) the words learnt tended to be fairly passive.
Another reason I did not only use sentences was that I found it very helpful for German to learn for each card both the gender and single/plural forms of the word. This was too hard for me to extract immediately from individual sentences, especially when I was A1-early B1.
I found this method very helpful to get to a point where I could intensively read, and finally do away with word lists.
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How did you do this within Anki? Did you put the word and the sentence on the same card? Or did you have one card with the word, going from L2->L1 and vice versa, and another, separate card with the sentence?
1 person has voted this message useful
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