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Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6610 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 81 of 319 10 April 2014 at 11:39pm | IP Logged |
Erik Gunnemark published lists like that too.
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DavidStyles Octoglot Pro Member United Kingdom Joined 3954 days ago 82 posts - 179 votes Speaks: English*, German, Italian, Spanish, Latin, French, Portuguese, Norwegian Studies: Mandarin, Russian, Swedish, Danish, Serbian, Arabic (Egyptian) Personal Language Map
| Message 82 of 319 10 April 2014 at 11:48pm | IP Logged |
And many others also. When it comes to the modern era, Bodmer was perhaps the main exponent of that, in the 1920s-1940s.
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| schoenewaelder Diglot Senior Member Germany Joined 5573 days ago 759 posts - 1197 votes Speaks: English*, French Studies: German, Spanish, Dutch
| Message 83 of 319 10 April 2014 at 11:51pm | IP Logged |
s_allard wrote:
.. but I reaped many a bushel of incredulity and scorn. |
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I think you might have just added a bushel of enrichment to the English language there.
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| dampingwire Bilingual Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4678 days ago 1185 posts - 1513 votes Speaks: English*, Italian*, French Studies: Japanese
| Message 84 of 319 11 April 2014 at 12:00am | IP Logged |
s_allard wrote:
Now the question is how many words does one have to know how to use. Since you don't know what words might
come up, then theoretically the number of possible words is very high. So how do we determine how many
words we need to prepare. Is it the 5,000 most common words or 10,000 or 20,000?
Well I don't see how active can be greater than passive (almost by definition) and you can measure someone's passive
vocabulary by presenting words from graded lists (as described earlier).
s_allard wrote:
And how do you go about preparing? Do you make up 10,000 flashcards and spend
your time going through them? |
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Well to start with, yes, using something like Anki or memrise.com or similar. Not the 10,000 most useful words, but
whatever might be the most useful 1000 (say) in your situation. So if you are studying from a text book then learning the
vocabulary associated with that will obviously be useful. That way when you work through examples you can worry about
something other than the meaning of the actual words and concentrate on the grammar or how the words relate to the ones
around them or whatever that particular example is trying to demonstrate.
At some point, though, the frequency lists become less useful. Once you move to native materials you need to learn the
words that crop up there, whether through an SRS system or even just through repeated exposure.
[QUOTE=s_allard]I think that people are making things too difficult for themselves. First, we have to keep in
mind that neither the IELTS or the CFER tests for vocabulary. |
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I don't imagine that many successful test candidates plough through 10,000 or 20,000 of the most common words
in their TL. OTOH I can imagine that they may well use some form of SRS to work through the articles and books
that they are reading. They might then check the breadth of their passive vocabulary to see if they are in the right ball-
park, so to speak. Now I don't know what those tests involve, but if an active vocabulary or 1500 words is what I'm going
to have to produce on the day, then I'd expect to need a passive vocabulary of 5x or 10x that. If I test myself and find
that I only know 5,000 words passively then I might be concerned. I wouldn't seek to fix that by memorising word lists
though, I'd hit the books and the magazines and the web and read voraciously.
I would certainly seek to practice as many different topics with my tutor as possible. That would provide much more
valuable feedback about my chances in the exam that a raw vocabulary power index.
In practice I think it would be hard to find a candidate who can pass C1 but has only a passive vocabulary of (say) 3,000
words. My French is appalling. I've usually made myself understood on holiday but not with any particular ease and
sometimes even having to resort to hand waving. But I've survived. So maybe I'm a B1 on a good day. I can, and have,
however, read a number of French novels. I don't have the list to hand, but at least a dozen, none of them ridiculously
short. So I'd guess at least 1,000 pages. I'm sure my passive vocabulary must be (or have been ... I've not read any in
two years!) in the 3000+ range (if anyone knows of a suitable online test, I'm all ears ...). I'm years off a C1 and yet I
think I have twice as much passive vocabulary as these C1 candidates demonstrated of their active vocabulary. I'd
be very surprised if their passive vocabulary in their TL wasn't quite a lot higher than mine in French.
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| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5443 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish
| Message 85 of 319 11 April 2014 at 6:51am | IP Logged |
I have no objection to the use of whatever learning tool that is helpful. Anki, flashcards in whatever medium, word
lists, you name it. If it works for you, go for it.
As for measuring vocabulary, I personally feel it is a total waste of time for the foreign language learner. And this
for two reasons. First, I think the results are misleading because of major methodological issues.
Second, I don't see the usefulness of measuring one's vocabulary, especially with such imprecise tools. Do I need to
set specific goals of vocabulary size? Non of the CEFR tests mention vocabulary size. Why should I bother?
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| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6610 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 86 of 319 11 April 2014 at 7:41am | IP Logged |
Okay so I found out I was one of the last people who got their Finnish grammar and vocabulary certified as C2. This part of the exam was removed a few months after I passed it.
But note how they also removed explicit grammar testing, not only the vocabulary.
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| shapd Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 6162 days ago 126 posts - 208 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Italian, Spanish, Latin, Modern Hebrew, French, Russian
| Message 87 of 319 11 April 2014 at 11:41am | IP Logged |
In the article of Nation's posted by s allard, he actually recommends learning the most common 3000 words as fast as possible so that after that stage extra vocabulary can be picked up by exposure to real language. This is what he has calculated as the takeoff stage (roughly B1). To do this, he encourages the use of directed teaching, including frequency derived word lists. Contrary to what many of us think, he claims there is no hard evidence that learning from context is more efficient. After the takeoff level, he states that formal vocabulary learning is inefficient, as there are just too many possible words.
Be careful at taking his estimates of the number of words needed for general use at face value. He tends to quote word families, which include derivatives of head words eg he would include govern and governor under the same heading. So many of his estimates should be multiplied by a factor of 2 or 3 - not such a small number. In one of his more recent studies, he looked at the number of word families required to understand the film Shrek and came up with over 6000. This was consistent with what he found for other similar films and less than for literary works, about 8-10000 families ie possibly as many as 20000 lemmas (head words).
Where I would agree with s allard is that learners should not obsess about the number of words they know. Once the bare minimum is known (?Nation's 3000) they should expose themselves to as much real language as they can cope with. Common words and expressions will be reinforced and less common ones will be learnt from context or directed study. Very idiomatic expressions using common words can be learnt as set phrases in the same way as any other vocabulary. If a wide variety of topics is read/heard, the breadth of vocabulary will come naturally. But a very large amount of input is needed.
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| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6610 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 88 of 319 11 April 2014 at 1:20pm | IP Logged |
But here on HTLAL many should also remember that no matter how much we enjoy grammar, accuracy and precision come with time and require exposure. We shouldn't get obsessed with making our grammar perfect either. Or we should just admit to ourselves that we like learning grammar and do it for fun. Similarly, those who enjoy learning loads of vocabulary need to acknowledge this. That includes many "formal" learners.
Edited by Serpent on 11 April 2014 at 1:34pm
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