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How many words to speak? | ||
Tags: Number of words | Speaking | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5215 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes  Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 185 of 309 19 September 2014 at 12:13am | IP Logged | ||||||||
This is a very valid point and is the number one objection to this idea of a small vocabulary for a test. I have never said that 300 words is all you need for all tests. But with reference specifically to the very general nature of the speaking test at the B1 level, I suggest that a vocabulary of around 300 words is sufficient. I'm not talking about reading, writing, etc. As I tried to show in my last post, talking about any of the likely topics at the B1 level does not require a large vocabulary and even if the topics in the three parts of the test are different, there is enough common verbs plus specific vocabulary for each topic within a 300-word limit. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
 emk Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5317 days ago 2615 posts - 8806 votes Speaks: English*, FrenchB2 Studies: Spanish, Ancient Egyptian Personal Language Map | Message 186 of 309 19 September 2014 at 12:15am | IP Logged | ||||||||
All of the numbers in my last post are based on coverage, not unique words. So, for example, if we assume that there are 300 words on a page, that's an average of 51 unknown words per page. Personally, I would find it very difficult to answer reading comprehension questions under such circumstances. If we follow my favorite suggestion, and start with a moderately repetitive and obvious TV series, we could do better. Alas, accurate numbers will have to wait until I write more software.
That you can't watch movies with only 300 words?
I'm actually rather fond of fluidity and grammatical accuracy. The only reason I discuss vocabulary with you is that you make radical claims about vocabulary, straying far outside the 1,100 to 7,000 word range that earlier researchers have claimed for B1 students (not all of whom have passed a B1 exam). Your claims about fluidity and grammatical accuracy, on the other hand, are quite plausible. Generally speaking, if somebody claims, "I can do X with 300 words," my first reaction is to ask for a word list and see what I can do with it—I want to know what clever tricks can be used to stretch it as far as possible, and what limitations are unavoidable. But I have no list, and I'm frustrated by that fact, because it means that I have no way to test the claims. Edited by emk on 19 September 2014 at 12:16am 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5215 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 187 of 309 19 September 2014 at 12:48am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Although I sometimes feel that I'm all alone defending this idea of a highly-functional core vocabulary, I take
solace in the statistics of actual conversations. I earlier gave a transcription of a four-minute conversation between two doctors talking about salt intake research. I took some time to count the unique words by category: Nouns: 60 Verbs: 49 Adjectives: 60 Adverbs: 11 Pronouns: 10 Connecting words: 27 Total: 217 I'm amazed that a four-minute conversation used only 217 unique words. It's not even 300 that so many people are frothing at the mouth about. Actually, it was pretty much in line with what I expected. This is a conversation on a specific topic. The real question that everyone around here is dying to ask is: What can you do with these 217 words other than talk about salt intake research? Aren't you limited to that one topic. Doesn't 217 words give you a coverage of only 40% or less of some dataset of English vocabulary? And 40% is pretty useless, isn't? Well, are you really limited to one topic, outside of which you are totally dumbfounded? Not really. If you take topics that are relatively related, there may be a large amount of shared vocabulary. So, for example, if the two persons were talking about sugar, meat or fibre intake research, there would only be some small adjustments of vocabulary. On the other hand, as the domains move further and further apart, the common vocabulary will shrink as new content-specific vocabulary is needed. So, the above set of 217 words will not be adequate for talking about the development of the modern piano from its origins to the present day. No surprise. This means that to talk about a wide variety of topics one needs a wide vocabulary. This is not surprising. What we should keep in mind is that native speakers, just like language learners, do not know all the vocabulary for all purposes. Our vocabulary reflects our centres of interest and our occupations. Most people going into a French pastry shop could not probably name more than 10 pieces of pastry whereas the salesperson could name all 40 on display. How many people know all the different cuts of beef? Many vegetarians probably know none at all. This does not prevent people from being native speakers of the language. They share a common knowledge of the workings of the language, depending generally on their level of education. When they need more vocabulary they get more. Start with 300 and expand from there. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6382 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 188 of 309 19 September 2014 at 1:24am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Now try to write a few more conversations with the same 217 words and even 83 extra words total. Quite difficult even when writing in your native language, isn't it? Now how is a learner supposed to go about that? BTW, it's much easier to think in words than to keep stumbling (mentally) and using circumlocutions for pretty basic things. Do you expect the learner with 300 words to be able to think directly in the language?
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| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5215 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 189 of 309 19 September 2014 at 1:28am | IP Logged | ||||||||
I'll just modify this statement slightly. "That you can't watch all French movies with only 300 words." I agree totally. I've had said this all along. Could you understand one French movie with 300 words? Probably not. But we are not even talking about understanding French movies. We are talking about having conversations with 300 words or less. We have plenty of examples of that. I just gave one above. Can you have an English conversation with 217 words? Yes you can, as I have shown above. Could you watch an movie chosen at random in English with just those 217 words? Probably not. I don't see how one can test what can be done with a given number of words other than by seeing how people use them. Here, for example, is the list of the adverbs from the English conversation above: quite, basically, too, pretty, whole, spot, forward, most, clearly, probably, hopefully How do you go about testing what can be done with these eleven adverbs? I imagine one compares them to a dataset of English adverbs and sees what kind of coverage one gets. Whatever that figure is, it doesn't change the fact that this conversation used only these 11 adverbs. Edited by s_allard on 19 September 2014 at 1:32am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| luke Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 6990 days ago 3133 posts - 4351 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Esperanto, French | Message 190 of 309 19 September 2014 at 1:40am | IP Logged | ||||||||
Back to the UFC analogy. You seems to suggest you can put an MMA amateur (B1 candidate)in the octagon with Georges St. Pierre, the champion, (native speaker), and the amateur will win the title (B1 exam) if he just fights like Georges. You ignore the world of difference between a native speaker and a B1 candidate when it comes to foreign language proficiency. Edited by luke on 19 September 2014 at 1:41am 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5215 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 191 of 309 19 September 2014 at 2:15am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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When we look at vocabulary purely in terms of countable words, it is very hard to imagine how they can be used
in many different ways. Meaning and use are irrelevant. The only consideration is the statistical representation in the sample. From this perspective, it is nearly impossible to imagine what can be done with a small number of words. Here, for example, is a set of 31 unique words. Each one would be an Anki card. I've even cheated and put them into categories. way, paper,factor, lifestyle, pressure, salt, week, New England Journal of Medicine speak, change, be, go lifestyle, blood, your, obsessed, three, this, either quite, rightly, kind of you so, of, and, with, there, in, the, on What can you do with these words? If you look at a dataset of English words, you'll be discouraged. Some people will say you can't do anything with 31 words because they hardly register in terms of text coverage. But here is what someone did with those words. "So speaking of lifestyle factors and changing your lifestyle and blood pressure, you are obsessed with salt, quite rightly, and there are three papers this week in the New England Journal of Medicine on salt which kind of go either way." The reason people are obsessed with large vocabularies is because this seems like a quick fix to a more fundamental problem of weaknesses in the other components of speaking performance. "If I only new more words, my French or English would be better" is the mantra. The same words in the mouth of a A2 speaker and a C2 speaker give different results because the skill level is higher. This is why two native speakers can easily have a conversation with 217 words whereas two B1 speakers will be stuttering along. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5215 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 192 of 309 19 September 2014 at 2:24am | IP Logged | ||||||||
Thanks to iguamon for the interesting link. I also thought the article was a little light on substance but I certainly agree with the basic principle. I wonder if he got the 300-word idea from me, since I've been getting beat up here at HTLAL for years on this issue. Just kidding. The big difference, I think, between his approach and mine is probably the fact that I don't adhere rigidly to the idea of the most frequent words. I would go with the most relevant words. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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