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300-word High Proficiency Kernel Concept | ||
Tags: Number of words | Vocabulary learning | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Learning Techniques, Methods & Strategies |  | |
| luke Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 7001 days ago 3133 posts - 4351 votes  Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Esperanto, French | Message 73 of 80 02 October 2014 at 3:46pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
This is a good point. The utility of some words is because they are used in so many different ways. The words "faire" in French and "to do" in English are examples. When you include literal, figurative, colloquial and clever uses of various common words, their utility is multiplied by their flexibility. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| luke Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 7001 days ago 3133 posts - 4351 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Esperanto, French | Message 74 of 80 02 October 2014 at 3:57pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
That's a good point. In some ways, one could count the word "orange" as more than one word because it has more than one meaning. It's a fruit, it's a color, it's a sporting team, it's a crayon, it's a smell, it's a website, it's a soda, it's a city, it's a company, and it's the new black. 5 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| robarb Nonaglot Senior Member United States languagenpluson Joined 4855 days ago 361 posts - 921 votes Speaks: Portuguese, English*, German, Italian, Spanish, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, French Studies: Mandarin, Danish, Russian, Norwegian, Cantonese, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Greek, Latin, Nepali, Modern Hebrew | Message 75 of 80 03 October 2014 at 8:15am | IP Logged | ||||||||
This is one of the reservations I have about the idea of intensively training the usage of a 3XX- word kernel. Wouldn't it be better to study additional words in the 500-2000 range, rather than learning subtle peripheral information about a core word, such as that orange is a sporting team, a city, a Dutch dynasty, and the new black? The basic usage of a non-core word (e.g. "swipe") seems closer to the core of what one needs than the above. The basic idea of a kernel for speaking makes sense in that it's a rule of thumb for assigning a higher weight to mastering high-frequency words/grammar, whereas you'd assign a higher weight to broad knowledge of low- frequency words/grammar if the goal were reading comprehension. A word list is clearly not an optimal way of concentrating study on highly useful language elements, but it might be more tractable than a list of all the core bits of information, whether they're words, particular uses of words, sentence structures, or idioms. I'd like to see more about how to use the kernel concept to concentrate study on elements that will be highly useful for speaking. Without delving deeper into how it's used, it seems to carry the risk of leading learners to waste time on obscure uses of core words. Have you ever tried to understand all the different ways of using the word "set"? Mastery of this word seems essential for speaking good English, but it also has dozens of obscure uses that don't form part of the core. Edited by robarb on 03 October 2014 at 8:15am 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Jeffers Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4705 days ago 2151 posts - 3960 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Hindi, Ancient Greek, French, Sanskrit, German | Message 76 of 80 03 October 2014 at 8:31am | IP Logged | ||||||||
That sounds like it should be true, but it depends how "peripheral" the meaning is. Secondary and tertiary uses of high frequency words are still more common than lower frequency words (again it depends how low "lower" is). This is especially true for function words, which might have a lot of functions. For example, the Hindi word लगना (lagnaa) is usually defined in textbooks at "to be fixed, applied" in the sense of sticking something to something else. However, it has loads of other uses, some of which may actually be used more often than the "core" meaning. I keep coming across it used as a type of auxiliary to mean "to begin doing something". Many of these uses would still appear in the top 500 words if they were counted separately. (I imagine it appears in Nepali in many guises as well?) I would say that it is certainly useful to study alternative uses of words in the core of a language. The example of "orange" is a bad example, but to be fair it wasn't meant to be about core words. Luke gave the example in the context of exploring the definition of the word "word". 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5226 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 77 of 80 03 October 2014 at 3:12pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
I think everyone is basically right here. Although many of the words in the kernel have multiple meanings, I don't think that the main use of the kernel idea is to systematically explore all the possible uses of specific words, I'm thinking particularly of the connector words where some uses can be rather obscure, formal or literary. In my thinking - and this evolving - the fundamental idea of the kernel is that it is a pool of word families that I will likely encounter when speaking in a certain genre. Certain uses or meanings of individual words are more frequent than others. For example, I think a big mistake many people make is to systematically learn all the inflected forms of verbs. Conjugation tables are very misleading and downright discouraging. You will never use half, if not two-thirds, of those forms, especially in speaking. What you want to do is to concentrate on the forms that you do encounter and that you are likely to use. As I have said before, the utility of the kernel idea is to bring focus on essential high-frequency items that you should feel comfortable using and that you can recall somewhat effortlessly. Intensive training of the kernel does not mean learning all the uses of individual items. It means training to call up quickly and correctly the most frequent uses. This does not preclude learning all the other things that can be useful or interesting. I would also like to add that for me an important side effect of this idea is to bring encouragement to speakers who can sometimes get discouraged by the share volume of words to learn. I don't know if many readers feel this, but I often get the impression that there is a never-ending stream of words, idioms, set phrases, meanings and cultural item to learn. Especially when one does not live in the language. There is no end of things to learn, but, thank God, we do know that in all this vast world of words, a relatively small number can take us very far. If we get good control of this small number, the others will basically fall into place as we need them. Edited by s_allard on 03 October 2014 at 3:14pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Bao Diglot Senior Member Germany tinyurl.com/pe4kqe5 Joined 5562 days ago 2256 posts - 4046 votes Speaks: German*, English Studies: French, Spanish, Japanese, Mandarin | Message 78 of 80 03 October 2014 at 3:40pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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I dimly remember I asked for a useful definition of the concept "word" some time ago ...
... and by the way, obvious transfer meanings like the ones given as examples of "orange" aren't that much trouble. Either you have the cultural knowledge to know that crayons and other paints are referred to by their colour name (and, except for the basic ones, these are inferred from naturally occuring things), and so are sports teams and political parties - and you know which word stands for which party or team, or you don't. It's probably not going to help you with genre specific output unless your genre is paint colours, sports teams or political parties, and if it is you'll pick up that meaning soon enough. Edited by Bao on 03 October 2014 at 11:15pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| luke Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 7001 days ago 3133 posts - 4351 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Esperanto, French | Message 79 of 80 03 October 2014 at 9:21pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
And the county of some housewives who have their own T.V. show. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5226 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 80 of 80 03 October 2014 at 10:54pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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This actually be a good point to look at the definition of a word that I use when talking about counting words. It's
pretty simple. I think in terms of dictionary headwords. All the inflected forms such verbs, plural forms of nouns, different genders are lemmatized to one basic form. The number of meanings such as what one would fine in a dictionary entry does not matter. This is why I have interchangeably used the words "word families" and "unique words". There are a number of problems with this definition. One is the fact that the same word form can be in different functional categories. In English "down" can be a verb, an adjective, a noun and a preposition. Is it one word or four different words? In my list the adverb category tends to be quite short because I have deliberately excluded those adverbs that can be simply derived from adjectives. In my list here, I have counted as separate words things like "la" the article and "la" the pronoun. The bigger problem in my opinion is how to count words in idioms. In my Barron's guide to Spanish idioms there are 20 entries for the word cuenta. Most of these idioms have some vague connection with the main definition of "account" or "count" but the overall meanings are not self-evident at all. In English there is the particular problem of phrasal verbs like "come up" and "put down". In my own counting, I disregard all this and look at the basic words in whatever context. What this all means of course is that a figure like 300 unique words in reality represents a much larger figure of different grammatical forms and units of meaning. That is the whole point. That's why 300 is not such a tiny figure after all. That's also why mastering 300 words is a lot more work than just memorizing a list of 300 words. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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