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How much time studying vocabulary? | ||
Tags: Time to learn | Vocabulary learning | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Learning Techniques, Methods & Strategies |  | |
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6390 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 105 of 350 16 May 2015 at 6:27pm | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||||||||
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Parallel texts, LR, popup dictionaries, GLOSS. Brute force.
In general a big divide seems to be over which one you find more boring - textbooks/formal learning or children's books. You can avoid either but not both, unless the language is very closely related (Portuguese for Spanish speakers, but not Italian or French). 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||||||||
| smallwhite Pentaglot Senior Member Australia Joined 5101 days ago 537 posts - 1045 votes Speaks: Cantonese*, English, Mandarin, French, Spanish | Message 106 of 350 16 May 2015 at 8:35pm | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||||||||
The problem is more the waste of time. This discussion will achieve nothing. You will not be able to change my view. I will not be able to change your view. The discussion itself is not productive. You're not trying to change my view, you're trying to prove me wrong. But even if you succeeded, your proof would be separate from my posts about the 8k/2s, so those readers who see my posts may not see your proof anyway. So, in order to make this less of a waste of time, I'm counting my typing time towards the 6WC :D
I felt very confused after reading your post. This paragraph above was placed at the most strategic position of your post, the end, so it must have been important. But firstly, that you have drawn a conclusion from something doesn't make it a fact, so you're really just saying, "I'm not just guessing; I'm confidently guessing". Secondly, I don't think having experience in something necessarily makes you good at it, but let's say we take your view and assume it does - you seemed confident that you have more experience in helping learners than I have, and I wondered why the confidence. You seem a lot younger than I am, such that chances are that I would've done many things more than you have. Then I realised that you're an active poster here so I know you pretty well, whereas I used to be dormant. Anyway, I shall rephrase, then, since it seemed important to you: "Well, you conclude one thing, I conclude another thing, and we're both concluding". Hmm... that actually goes back to what I said - this gap between you and I will never close. Conclusions don't change.
It also confused me that you said you have "experience of helping learners for years" yet you have no idea what the purpose of some learners is.
You should tell s_allard.
I don't understand how words outside of the most useful 200-300 are a dead weight. You mean I should lose weight in my mother language??
And the greatest confusion of them all. No, of course not! I do SRS precisely because I don't want to read! I can't totally eliminate reading, though, so in reality I do SRS so I could read less. My answers are no and no. I wonder why you're asking me this.
And I'm putting this in the most strategic position of my post - what I'm most concerned about: So have we completed phase 1 of the interrogation, "Am I our newbies' keeper", and have now proceeded to phase 2, "Am I our intermediate learners' keeper"? I didn't see that one coming. Will there be a phase 3 about advanced learners still? Edited by smallwhite on 16 May 2015 at 8:53pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||||||||
| Jeffers Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4702 days ago 2151 posts - 3960 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Hindi, Ancient Greek, French, Sanskrit, German | Message 107 of 350 16 May 2015 at 9:26pm | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||||||||
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Phase 3 is entitled, "who's being fragile now?" If you're worried about Serpent wasting your time, smallwhite, then you don't need to respond. As long as Serpent isn't being rude to you, she's free to question you as much as she likes. This is a discussion forum after all. If, as it appears to me, you're getting tired of the discussion, then leave it alone for a while.
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| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6390 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 108 of 350 16 May 2015 at 10:34pm | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||||||||
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I'm not trying to prove you wrong, I just think it would be nice to make it more clear what the target audience of your method is. No method is perfect for everyone.
I didn't say only the 200-300 main words are useful. I wish Gunnemark had been more clear about why the words became dead weight, really. I suppose he just focused less on Romanian because he already spoke other Romance languages. Based on experience I'd think that to avoid being dead weight, words need to be used in your input and/or output. Reading individual sentences (twitter, SRS) counts as input. As for reading, you said it yourself that you know most of the words well because they keep coming up in your input. Doesn't this mean that if they didn't come up, you'd either have to drill for a year or more, or be drowned in your reviews? If not, why/how? (that's the main concern about recommending your method to beginners, really - many are already reluctant to do input) I know what purposes language learning can have besides consuming native materials. I just don't want to assume what yours are. Edited by Serpent on 16 May 2015 at 10:42pm 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||||||||
| rdearman Senior Member United Kingdom rdearman.orgRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5029 days ago 881 posts - 1812 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Italian, French, Mandarin | Message 109 of 350 16 May 2015 at 11:28pm | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||||||||
I think in an earlier portion of the thread smallwhite said her methods were only to make her learning more efficient and effective. It was me who took her methods and ran with them, because I could see they are more efficient than the way in which I have been learning vocabulary. It was also me who said these methods would be good for beginners. So I think I will give my reasons for believing "the smallwhite method" would be good for beginners. For a start I don't believe people learn enough working vocabulary from things like Michel Thomas, or Pimsleur. Certainly in my experience they weren't sufficient to get me started speaking with a native. Contrary to s_allard, I also believe the more vocabulary you have the better off you are. So in a nutshell, I think anyone who is starting to learn a language needs to try and get themselves a baseline of 3000-5000 words which they recognise and hopefully can output, either via spelling or speaking. The typical Pimsleur course would only get you about 500-1000 words of vocabulary. Now you can get this baseline via other means such as reading, etc, which smallwhite has acknowledged. But her method is efficient! With my own testing I've worked out that I only need to spend about ~15 minutes a day reviewing in order to cover ~500 words in a spreadsheet. So if I want to hit my target 5000 words then I need to review 10 sets of 500. Depending on how quickly I can retain the words I might be able to do this in 8-12 weeks? So let's use Italian as an example, since I happen to be playing around with the Italian Lessico which I downloaded from a University. In the graph below you can see that if you did manage to know 8000 words you would certainly be more than 90% percent of coverage. My example target of 5000 words in 8-12 weeks would get you into the 87-89% area. 
The actual numbers are: coverage 250 - 64.428101% 500 - 69.664160% 1000 - 75.566965% 2000 - 81.942692% 4000 - 87.738001% 8000 - 92.298783% 16000 - 95.744013% I realise just knowing or recognising a word doesn't mean you speak the language, but it would be a massive help to a beginner to be able to pickup a book and understand 80-95% of the words on a page. I realise all the arguments about word families, and which words do you review, blah, blah, blah. But my point is a fast efficient way of learning (cramming) words for 15 minutes a day, for a few weeks is a great way to do things. Also for people who aren't prone to "burnout", like smallwhite obviously isn't, then you could double or triple your "cram" time in order to shorten the time it takes to get the uplift in vocabulary. Now if a beginner were to have 8000 of the most common Italian words as defined in this lessico I have, and I broke it up into 500 word chunks, this would give them 16 spreadsheets. So if they took one spreadsheet each day and did a 15-20 minute review of these words, then moved on to the next one, over the course of a 12 week period they would have crammed these words ~5 times. So even if they only retained 50% of the words, that would give them 87.738001% coverage of the most common words. Even if you just crammed the first spreadsheet with the most common 500 until you knew them you'd get 69.664160% coverage. Now I realise you are all going to attack my math and tell me it all depends on the words you learn, or the books you read, or the physics professor who speaks to you at the bakery. But I'm just saying it wouldn't do any harm for a beginner to know 8000 words in the shortest period of time. And if you are only spending 15-20 minutes of your review hour on vocabulary, you can spend the other 40-45 minutes on grammar. I wish my tutor had given me one of these spreadsheets each week and told me to review them and know them all and tested me randomly on the batch of 500 words. I would have quickly built up a baseline of vocabulary and we'd have spend more time on grammar coverage, irregular verbs, etc. etc. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||||||||
| Ezy Ryder Diglot Senior Member Poland youtube.com/user/Kat Joined 4142 days ago 284 posts - 387 votes Speaks: Polish*, English Studies: Mandarin, Japanese | Message 110 of 350 16 May 2015 at 11:47pm | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||||||||
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90% may sound good, but most likely one will need ~98% (at least 95%).
Once you make compelling input comprehensible, extensive reading can do you a world of good. It can improve your speaking, listening, spelling... You just need to be aware it's gonna be a step, and not a method on its own. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||||||||
| daegga Tetraglot Senior Member Austria lang-8.com/553301 Joined 4314 days ago 1076 posts - 1792 votes Speaks: German*, EnglishC2, Swedish, Norwegian Studies: Danish, French, Finnish, Icelandic | Message 111 of 350 17 May 2015 at 12:19am | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||||||||
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These large scale lexicons are usually not very well filtered, so you'll have a lot of proper names and misspellings in there, which will sum up to a significant portion of the corpus. In other words - these 8000 words will probably give you quite a bit more than 92% coverage on the relevant part of the corpus. Edited by daegga on 17 May 2015 at 12:21am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||||||||
| Jeffers Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4702 days ago 2151 posts - 3960 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Hindi, Ancient Greek, French, Sanskrit, German | Message 112 of 350 17 May 2015 at 3:03am | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||||||||
I'm not going to attack your math, which I think is correct, but I am not sure that it actually wouldn't do any harm for a beginner try to know 8000 words in the shortest period of time. For a few reasons: 1. Knowing the 98% or even 100% of the words of a text doesn't mean you can understand it. When I was studying Greek, a friend of mine wrote the meaning of every word over the Greek words in our reading text. He then complained that it still made no sense to him. 2. If you learn words in, say, the 6000-8000 range they are unlikely to come up in any particular text. This means you are spending time learning words that you might actually never come across in a text. Is that efficient? 3. "Harm" is a an overused word by some language learners. I don't think that the person will suffer brain damage, and it might actually help their cognitive development. However, the potential harm would be in the time wasted on this task rather than on actually learning the language. People waste their time on a lot of things... I could be reading in one of my languages instead of writing this post. But if there is a harm to speak of, it is that someone will spend all their language study time on that word list rather than more useful activities. Of course you are recommending 15 minutes per hour reviewing the vocabulary, which is a great balance. 4. Is it really possible to learn that much vocabulary in 15 minutes per day? The numbers smallwhite was using were for reviewing vocabulary. There was a lot of discussion earlier on about SRS being for reviewing. Where is the time in those 15 minutes to learn the words first? Like you, rdearman, I do believe that a large vocabulary is helpful. I just don't think taking a frequency list and cramming 8000 words is efficient. I've quoted this article by Paul Nation a few times on this thread. Here's an interesting fact about some of the books he studies. To get 98% coverage of Alice in Wonderland, you would need to learn the 5000 most frequent words in English. However, Alice in Wonderland only has 1743 different words! If you were planning to read Alice, would it be more efficient to learn the 5000 words or the 1743 words? A much more efficient method would be to take a text you want to read, and feed it into text analysis software, making a list of the 98% most common words in that text. Then you could study the list before reading the text. When you are done, take the next text you want to read and analyse the vocabulary, learning the 98% most common words in that text minus the words you already learned for the previous text. Using a method like this the learner would have smaller sets of vocabulary to learn. But more importantly, the words learnt would appear in the texts read so they would be reinforced. Conversely, you would never waste time cramming a word which you wouldn't come across. Doing something like this, it will take you a lot longer to learn 8000 words, but you will retain them better, you will understand the words in a more nuanced way by having seen them in use, and you will have practiced much more of the language by actually reading it. Overall, I think it would be more efficient. Now if only I had software which would do this with my ebooks and feed the vocab into Anki or something. One of these days I'll get around to scripting it myself! Edited by Jeffers on 17 May 2015 at 3:08am 6 persons have voted this message useful |
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