Register  Login  Active Topics  Maps  

Can we ever fill in all the gaps?

  Tags: Advanced Level
 Language Learning Forum : General discussion Post Reply
39 messages over 5 pages: 1 2 3 4 5  Next >>
beano
Diglot
Senior Member
United KingdomRegistered users can see my Skype Name
Joined 4382 days ago

1049 posts - 2152 votes 
Speaks: English*, German
Studies: Russian, Serbian, Hungarian

 
 Message 1 of 39
29 October 2013 at 2:54pm | IP Logged 
Last night I had a few beers in an Edinburgh pub. The girl behind the bar was from Lithuania and seemed to handle all the orders without any problems. This particular hostelry was situated close to the main railway station and I asked if they had any "train timetables" so I could check my departure times (I don't own a smartphone).
The young lady had no idea what I was talking about, I repeated the request a couple of times before another worker informed me they didn't have any.

I'm not having a go at the girl in any way, but it got me thinking. How long does it take before we never get stumped by a request for a relatively common item? An object every native would know, regardless of education levels. Can we ever fill in all the gaps?

Another example, I recently took a KLM flight from Edinburgh to Amsterdam. The flight was full of native English speakers and - as expected - the cabin crew spoke excellent English. But when the refreshment trolley arrived, I overheard one passenger enquire if there were any "spirits" available. Every UK adult would know that in a drinks context, spirits are whisky, vodka, gin etc. Strong beverages in other words. But the stewardess didn't understand the key word in the question.

Edited by beano on 29 October 2013 at 2:55pm

1 person has voted this message useful



tarvos
Super Polyglot
Winner TAC 2012
Senior Member
China
likeapolyglot.wordpr
Joined 4467 days ago

5310 posts - 9399 votes 
Speaks: Dutch*, English, Swedish, French, Russian, German, Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Afrikaans
Studies: Greek, Modern Hebrew, Spanish, Portuguese, Czech, Korean, Esperanto, Finnish

 
 Message 2 of 39
29 October 2013 at 3:24pm | IP Logged 
I imagine that people who only know a different equivalent of the item in question (f.
ex. someone who calls lorries trucks) will be equally confused. You can never fill all
the gaps. The question is not whether you can - knowledge is infinitely large - but how
you deal with situations where you lack an item (which can happen to anyone) and resolve
the problem adequately.

Eventually you need to communicate adequately and as long as the man eventually got his
whiskey, I wouldn't really blame the stewardesses.
3 persons have voted this message useful



s_allard
Triglot
Senior Member
Canada
Joined 5190 days ago

2704 posts - 5425 votes 
Speaks: French*, English, Spanish
Studies: Polish

 
 Message 3 of 39
29 October 2013 at 3:41pm | IP Logged 
I think that this is a very frequent occurrence. In my opinion it simply reflects the fact that as foreign language
learners, especially at an adult age, we have not been exposed to the vast range of learning moments that a native
speaker experiences during years if not decades of speaking the language. In fact, I find that i'm still having to look
up words in my own languages because they are new to me. Just a few weeks ago I learned the expression "pert
near." Now I hear it regularly.
2 persons have voted this message useful



Hekje
Diglot
Senior Member
United States
Joined 4463 days ago

842 posts - 1330 votes 
Speaks: English*, Dutch
Studies: French, Indonesian

 
 Message 4 of 39
29 October 2013 at 3:51pm | IP Logged 
I certainly think it's possible to fill in all the gaps, but not under the circumstances that most language learners
experience.

Anecdata: my dad is from the Netherlands. When he came to the United States in his late twenties, he still had a
very heavy accent in English. Fast-forward two decades though and you would never know that English was his
second language. I have never heard him reach for a word, ever. Not even with specialized terminology in his
profession (medicine).

So it is possible. On the other hand, my dad obviously had several advantages that many language learners do
not. English is ubiquitous, especially in the Netherlands; he's lived here for 20+ years; he married a native
speaker.

But I don't know if this is ultimately much to worry about. Going back to your example, I think even I, a native
English speaker, might double-take if someone asked me for "spirits". Since I as an American would normally say
"drinks" instead, it would definitely take me a second to understand what they wanted. While it's surprising that a
flight stewardess wouldn't know the UK term, it's not totally shocking to me.

So yeah. And even outside of UK/American English differences, I hear new words in English all the time. If I want
to discuss computer science with my housemate, for example, I have to ask him to define pretty much every
other word coming out of his mouth. I find it impossible to fill all the gaps even in my native language, so I am
pretty much prepared to stumble into vocab holes forever in my second and third.
3 persons have voted this message useful





emk
Diglot
Moderator
United States
Joined 5292 days ago

2615 posts - 8806 votes 
Speaks: English*, FrenchB2
Studies: Spanish, Ancient Egyptian
Personal Language Map

 
 Message 5 of 39
29 October 2013 at 4:45pm | IP Logged 
Native speakers are still learning new words until quite late in life:



As you can see, native speakers climb from about 23,800 headwords at age 20 to 27,800 headwords at age 30. That's a gain of 16% in 10 years.

This chart is from Test Your Vocab, a research site that estimates how many OED dictionary headwords you know using random sampling. The average native speaker included in this survey has an SAT verbal score of 700, so these are relatively well-educated folks.

So even a very diligent student of a foreign language has a huge mountain to climb. It can be done. There are case studies in the SLA literature of adult learners who have vocabularies larger than their typical native, college-educated peers. But they were generally professionals, living in immersion situations, who had voracious reading habits and sometimes a taste for crossword puzzles.

But on average, if you don't live in the country, it's a bit unreasonable to expect that your vocabulary will be as large as that of a native who's been making visible progress for the past 30 years. At least not using the same natural methods natives generally do.

But what if you used "unnatural" methods? I'm pretty sure I'm not going to sit down and make word lists for every unknown word in a 35,000 word dictionary, but maybe that would work.

Another promising approach might be to wait until you reached (say) 99.5% to 99.9% comprehension of regular texts, and then try to capture sentences containing every single unknown word when reading from electronic sources. I've been trying this recently, using some custom tools, and it's certainly possible to pick up 500 headwords per month this way without significantly disrupting my flow of reading or spending a huge amount of time using Anki. (I'm currently capturing about 2/3rds of the unknown words.) If I sustain this for a while, I imagine Anki reviews would eventually level off below 40 minutes per day.

Even then, I imagine that vocabulary decay is going to be a problem. Once you start running into words that occur less than 3 times per million words, which is about 8 times in a Super Challenge's worth of books, I strongly suspect that Anki's review intervals will eventually become too long to keep the words alive without outside reinforcement. I started seeing this with my Egyptian vocabulary once the card intervals stretched out beyond 6 months or so.

Of course, this raises another important question: Is it really worth knowing words you'll encounter once or twice a year, or maybe every couple of years? At some point, just saying, "Excuse me," and asking what the word means seems like a pretty reasonable solution.

Edited by emk on 29 October 2013 at 5:41pm

7 persons have voted this message useful



Chung
Diglot
Senior Member
Joined 6916 days ago

4228 posts - 8259 votes 
20 sounds
Speaks: English*, French
Studies: Polish, Slovak, Uzbek, Turkish, Korean, Finnish

 
 Message 6 of 39
29 October 2013 at 4:49pm | IP Logged 
beano wrote:
Last night I had a few beers in an Edinburgh pub. The girl behind the bar was from Lithuania and seemed to handle all the orders without any problems. This particular hostelry was situated close to the main railway station and I asked if they had any "train timetables" so I could check my departure times (I don't own a smartphone).
The young lady had no idea what I was talking about, I repeated the request a couple of times before another worker informed me they didn't have any.

I'm not having a go at the girl in any way, but it got me thinking. How long does it take before we never get stumped by a request for a relatively common item? An object every native would know, regardless of education levels. Can we ever fill in all the gaps?


In a word: no. In a few more words: it may not matter.

I think of the acquisition of a language as a bit like travelling on an asymptote. The curve (~ your level of knowledge as acquired while learning and dealing with the target language) and the second line (~ all of the variations/combinations/lexemes/semantic distinctions/registers present in the target language) will never overlap, but they'll get damned close if you move enough on that asymptote. Knowing 99.5% out of 100% is more than enough for me in this context. Even knowing 90% will likely see me through the day.
1 person has voted this message useful



sctroyenne
Diglot
Senior Member
United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name
Joined 5151 days ago

739 posts - 1312 votes 
Speaks: English*, French
Studies: Spanish, Irish

 
 Message 7 of 39
29 October 2013 at 5:30pm | IP Logged 
emk wrote:
As you can see, native speakers climb from about 23,800 headwords at age
20 to 27,800 headwords at age 30. That's a gain of 16% in 10 years.

This chart is from Test Your Vocab, a research
site that estimates how many OED dictionary headwords you know using random sampling.
The average native speaker included in this survey has an SAT verbal score of 700, so
these are relatively well-educated folks.

So even a very diligent student of a foreign language has a huge mountain to climb. It
can be done. There are case studies in the SLA literature of adult learners who
have vocabularies larger than their typical native, college-educated peers. But they
were generally professionals, living in immersion situations, who had voracious reading
habits and sometimes a taste for crossword puzzles.


What a neat find! I especially find the breakdown of survey answers corresponding with
results here. Nothing too surprising but once again
emphasizes what it takes to learn vocabulary in a foreign language. What's interesting
is that the best students of English (self-reported) have the largest measured
vocabulary among the students (at around 12,000) but the only ones that get above
20,000 words (approaching/equaling a native speaker) are those who have lived in an
English-speaking country for more than 10 years.

Edited by sctroyenne on 29 October 2013 at 5:31pm

1 person has voted this message useful



Henkkles
Triglot
Senior Member
Finland
Joined 4013 days ago

544 posts - 1141 votes 
Speaks: Finnish*, English, Swedish
Studies: Russian

 
 Message 8 of 39
29 October 2013 at 5:57pm | IP Logged 
sctroyenne wrote:

What's interesting is that the best students of English (self-reported) have the largest measured vocabulary among the students (at around 12,000) but the only ones that get above 20,000 words (approaching/equaling a native speaker) are those who have lived in an English-speaking country for more than 10 years.

Well the last time I did that test I got a score of 16,700 and I've never lived in an English speaking country so where do I fit in?


1 person has voted this message useful



This discussion contains 39 messages over 5 pages: 2 3 4 5  Next >>


Post ReplyPost New Topic Printable version Printable version

You cannot post new topics in this forum - You cannot reply to topics in this forum - You cannot delete your posts in this forum
You cannot edit your posts in this forum - You cannot create polls in this forum - You cannot vote in polls in this forum


This page was generated in 0.5313 seconds.


DHTML Menu By Milonic JavaScript
Copyright 2024 FX Micheloud - All rights reserved
No part of this website may be copied by any means without my written authorization.