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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 57 of 319 09 April 2014 at 3:46pm | IP Logged |
As I said, I'm not questioning s_allard's experience. Of course most placement tests for classes are based on grammar. It's always presumed that if a learner lacks vocabulary, they can pick it up on their own. Because you don't meet most people who like learning grammar. But they exist.
And many of them are HTLAL members. In the world of language teaching you can hardly see a learner that has a perfect grammar but can barely speak/write. But language geeks and linguists can know a lot about the grammar of the languages they're not even learning. They may well read about grammar for fun, and they're quite likely to learn way more grammar than what they really need.
I've been there too, I went through all Finnish textbooks I could find and then I would go to the library and look through scientific studies and find some structures that I still didn't know. Because the Finnish grammar is so delightful. It brought me a lot of joy but represented only a very small improvement in my knowledge.
Not to mention that not everyone is impressed by the same things as you are, whether as a teacher or learner.
Edited by Serpent on 09 April 2014 at 6:51pm
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| Gemuse Senior Member Germany Joined 4095 days ago 818 posts - 1189 votes Speaks: English Studies: German
| Message 58 of 319 09 April 2014 at 3:57pm | IP Logged |
s_allard wrote:
For me the real issue is how one uses the vocabulary.
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It's all about quality over quantity. |
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You are correct in that a good vocabulary does not imply a mastery of the language.
However, is it true that in the real world, people have a mastery of the language
without having a good vocab? Is a good vocab a side effect of mastery of the language
obtained through lots of reading?
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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 59 of 319 09 April 2014 at 4:45pm | IP Logged |
dampingwire wrote:
If you want to use one of these tests as an indication of whether you might be ready to
sit a C2 exam, then you'd only be fooling yourself by "gaming" the test. There's much
more to C2 ability than just words, which is what I think you are saying,but I'm not
quite sure why you frown on the vocab tests themselves. |
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I frown on these receptive vocabulary tests because I think they are essentially meaningless. I took the test here
and scored 37,400. Frankly, I do not know what that means. I do not know 37,400 words in English. I can
vaguely recognize some of the more rare ones because of latinate cognates with French. I just don't see the
relevance to my ability to use the language. I have never used most of these words and never will.
What I did do, and I highly recommend this, is redo the test but indicating only all the words that I recall using in
English in the past year. OK, I don't really remember all the words I spoke in the past year but I could exclude
those that I had no occasion to use. I scored 4,200. Let's call this my historical productive vocabulary.
I think this figure is an overestimation. I believe it's much closer to 3,000 - 3,500.
But all of this is besides the point. Knowing more words is certainly better than knowing fewer. But I fail to see
how checking off a list of about 120 totally decontextualized words can give me any real and actionable
knowledge of how many words I have in my head and what to do with them.
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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 60 of 319 09 April 2014 at 4:55pm | IP Logged |
Gemuse wrote:
s_allard wrote:
For me the real issue is how one uses the vocabulary.
...
It's all about quality over quantity. |
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You are correct in that a good vocabulary does not imply a mastery of the language.
However, is it true that in the real world, people have a mastery of the language
without having a good vocab? Is a good vocab a side effect of mastery of the language
obtained through lots of reading? |
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I believe, like most people here, that good vocabulary goes hand in hand with mastery of the language. And
there are lots of ways to acquire vocabulary. My argument is with this obsession about vocabulary size. I've
always said that vocabulary takes care of itself. I don't mean that you don't have to study vocabulary. What I mean
is that it comes with exposure to the language. Through reading, for example, when you look up words in the
dictionary and make flash cards. Or listening to the radio or surfing the Net. You learn words in context; you see
how they are used. If you need technical words, you get them.
If you're preparing for any of the CEFR exams, you're certainly not going to limit yourself to studying lists of
words. I would hope that you are emphasizing putting these words in meaningful sentences on paper or in
speaking. I wouldn't worry about how many words I know. Just keep learning something every day.
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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 61 of 319 09 April 2014 at 5:15pm | IP Logged |
s_allard wrote:
I do not know 37,400 words in English. I can vaguely recognize some of the more rare ones because of latinate cognates with French. I just don't see the
relevance to my ability to use the language. I have never used most of these words and never will. |
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But you can recognize/understand them. English learners from Spain will understand only a fraction whereas those from Russia or China will have to learn many of these words individually if they ever want to read advanced literature in English.
Basically, please acknowledge your privilege.
Edited by Serpent on 09 April 2014 at 5:25pm
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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 62 of 319 09 April 2014 at 8:04pm | IP Logged |
s_allard wrote:
What I did do, and I highly recommend this, is redo the test but indicating only
all the words that I recall using in English in the past year. |
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I redid the test. It seems to use the same, or very similar, vocabulary in each run.
Firstly I redid it ticking known words, but making a note of the ones that I felt I knew but
wasn't sure I had used.
("nostrum", "epigone", "pother", "clerisy", "pabulum", "williwaw").
That gave me 42,200.
I can't recall the words that I have used this year (or even in the last 365 days) so I settled
for ticking only the words that I was fairly sure that I've used at some point in my life (i.e.
I've written them or I've spoken them). That brought me down to 37,500.
But then (almost) all my emails and conversations are in English. My mother-in-law used to ask
for help with crosswords. I participate in various web-fora (such as this one) where repartee is
witty and sophisticated (more often than not). I work as a software engineer so I'm right next
to a whole department for whom "captious" is a way of life (QA). So I live almost my whole life
in English. I don't think it unlikely that I've worked my way through 30,000+ different words.
However, this test is supposed to measure passive knowledge (presumably using the sampling
techniques @emk alluded to). Using the test to measure something entirely different (active
knowledge) without further research isn't necessarily going to lead to useful results. The word
list was probably derived by sifting through magazines, newspapers, novels and so on to build up
frequency list: basically an indication of how likely you might be to come across a given word
if you are reasonably well read. So if you know 90% of a suitable sample of the words in the
1000-5000 positions and 20% of the ones in the 10,000-15,000 range and so on it should be
possible to form an accurate estimate of the number of words which you would recognise if you
had the time (and the stomach) to sit through hour upon gruelling hour of tedious testing.
That frequency list of words probably applies broadly to anyone reading a newspaper, watching
the TV, reading the web and so on.
Now the frequency list of words you might use in daily language may well differ
markedly from those that your neighbour might choose to employ. I know how to use refulgent and
vitiate but I don't recall ever using either. These are, I would suggest, words that are
relatively infrequently used. I have seen both (recently) in emails at work, so someone there
likes them.
So I'm not sure that your test is entirely fair. Partly because you are using a (presumably)
carefully designed list out of context. Partly also because I think that you may be
underestimating your active vocabulary, if by active we mean "words you are capable of using
correctly and are likely to recall in those situations where they are appropriate". If you don't
produce English on a regular basis you may well only have used a few thousand unique words this
year, but that's doing a disservice to the words you could have used had the occasion arisen. I
can't recall when I last used proprietario or inquilino or mettere in
vigore in Italian but today the opportunity arose and out they came. I would have considered
them active yesterday, but I suspect (from what you write in earlier posts) that you might not.
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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 63 of 319 09 April 2014 at 10:02pm | IP Logged |
Thanks to Dampingwire for some interesting insights. It's interesting to note that Iversen arrived at around 2500
different words used in a sample of his posts here. I estimate that I used around 3000 different words in the last
year. These are relatively closed universes here. I'm sure that if Iversen and I were to look at all the different
words used over our lifetimes, the figures would be quite different.
If I refer to Iversen's output, what I find significant and amusing is that sophistication and quality of posts are not
dependent on a large vocabulary. I suspect that there is a sweet spot around 2000 words that is probably a
minimum that one needs to write well for HTLAL.
Something else that must be pointed out here my productive vocabulary and Iversen's will overlap a lot but not
completely. So anyone reading our blogs needs a receptive vocabulary that combines the distinctive items in both
of our vocabularies.
Again, I don't see the significance of all this. I like to believe that the crux of the matter is how well one uses
words rather than the sheer number.
One of my favourite statistics - and emk will remember this - is that Dr Seuss (Theodore Geisel) wrote "Green
Eggs And Ham" using only 50 unique words. One of Geisel's most famous works "Cat In A Hat" contains 236
unique words.
Edited by s_allard on 10 April 2014 at 2:21am
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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 64 of 319 09 April 2014 at 11:13pm | IP Logged |
And anyone reading this forum needs more than 5000 words to combine all the different vocabularies. Of course the same is true about reading a wide range of non-fiction or fiction.
BTW, some actual numbers from Erik Gunnemark:
3000-4000 are enough for reading newspapers or specialized literature in your area
8000 words are what an average European uses in daily life (in L1). That's enough for reading all kinds of (modern) literature
10-20k are the active vocabulary of a native speaker
50-100k are the passive vocabulary of a native speaker
So depending on how much you read, the difference between the words you could use and do use in your native language can be 2000-12000.
Note that Gunnemark focused on European languages. Forum members have repeatedly pointed out that reading an ordinary newspaper is far less trivial in Japanese or Korean than in a European language. I've seen the number 10000 and I see no reason not to trust it. They're learning the language, they know better. See also: kujichagulia's progress in Japanese and Portuguese.
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