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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 |  | |
| 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 113 of 350 17 May 2015 at 3:16am | IP Logged | ||||||||
Actually this one is very good. It breaks all the words into not only proper nouns, but also breaks out the usage of numbers which are spelled out. e.g. ventinove, etc. It also defines verbs, auxillary verbs, symbols, numerals (written and digit forms) proper nouns (names, etc), adverbs, etc, etc. I agree you could probably get better than 92% coverage, using this lexicon, because filtering out proper nouns, misspellings, etc might get you nearer to 95-98%. Especially if the list of 8000 words were reviewed and vetted by a native speaker or tutor. Of course different languages and other lexicons will have their own problems and coverage, so this example wouldn't fit everything.
Yes, I agree. But using smallwhites method makes a beginner much more efficient at approaching the 90-99% coverage range in a shorter period of time. I am constantly telling people to move on to native materials as soon as possible, and I think for a beginner this type of cramming would see them using native material faster and will a greater degree of confidence. Also her use of the spreadsheet which requires all answers to be input via the keyboard and matching the native word, not just "pattern recognition" would in my view give the beginner an additional boost in comprehension. I don't think the beginner will "speak" the language after 98% comprehension, but it should lower the amount of time required to move ahead. There are other issues with the method nobody has mentioned, like for example cramming puts things into short-term memory, so you'd have to review the spreadsheets a number of times in order to get the most benefit. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| AlexTG Diglot Senior Member Australia Joined 4431 days ago 178 posts - 354 votes Speaks: English*, French Studies: Latin, German, Spanish, Japanese | Message 114 of 350 17 May 2015 at 3:19am | IP Logged | ||||||||
But the 'smallwhite method' (as I interpret it) is essentially just a manual version of this. She chooses the words that seem 'easiest' to her and adds them to her spreadsheet. How does she recognise a word as being easy? It must surely be that she keeps seeing it while reading and basically already knows it (hence 'reviewing', not 'learning' words). 1 person has 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 115 of 350 17 May 2015 at 3:35am | IP Logged | ||||||||
Yes but this takes us back to the need for s_allards time-travelling word machine. I can't know what words I might need or even what books I want to read yet. However, like an insurance company I can use statistical probability to help me try and determine what words I might need. Not every 18 year old who passed their driving test last month is going to have an accident, however statistical probability says they are more likely to than an old fart like me. So their insurance is higher than mine. Besides I know lots of words in English that I haven't used. Anyway, that isn't my point. My point is regardless of which words you wish to review, her method is a very effective way to learn a large number of words in a short space of time. Which is what a beginner needs. But also that is the reason I was suggesting in my last post that it would be best if you could have your list of 8000 words vetted by a native speaker. That was mainly in response to Serpents question about how she might use this method to teach beginners. I'm not suggesting, nor do I think smallwhite was suggesting that knowing the words individually means you can grok it all when they are assembled as a sentence. I'm simply saying it would give a beginner one hell of a jump start when they go to read the first book. BTW, I put the script you are talking about in my Mandarin log. I did that in order to strip all the unique characters out of the book 1984 which I have in Mandarin. You'd have to change the script slightly to get word boundaries for a Romance language. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| 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 116 of 350 17 May 2015 at 3:51am | IP Logged | ||||||||
I never replied... Of course in this sense it's true. But I don't want to spend my life being bored*. I don't have such a division between hard work and enjoying the fruit of it. I start enjoying as soon as I start learning. *originally written as "life is too short for being bored", but I would do my best to avoid boredom even if I could live forever. I recently found a quote that describes my learning style perfectly: "I'd rather be confused for 10 minutes than bored for 5 seconds." Edited by Serpent on 17 May 2015 at 4:15am 2 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 117 of 350 17 May 2015 at 7:13am | IP Logged | ||||||||
I know I can just ignore Serpent's questions but I find it rude to just walk out of the conversation; I've been reading Serpent's posts for a long time and I like her, I don't want to just walk out on her. I tried twice to close the conversation by recognising a gap between us, but she wouldn't let go :( I'd love to talk about SRS or my Excel file, but I don't feel that's what Serpent's after. She's not even trying to protect newbies, as that could've been achieved by simply taking up on my offer and telling me how to phrase my future posts more carefully. I feel that she's just trying to prove me wrong (or something like that, or something not really for the good of everyone), but what have I done? I was just writing about what I did 5 years ago, was saying it worked, was quantifying the time it takes, so where is there wrong to prove and why would one want to do that? I find this pointless and I'm sick of this part. Also annoyed because she's interrogating without even knowing how the process works, she doesn't even know/remember the steps, steps that have been described in this very thread. Edited by smallwhite on 17 May 2015 at 7:23am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| smallwhite Pentaglot Senior Member Australia Joined 5101 days ago 537 posts - 1045 votes Speaks: Cantonese*, English, Mandarin, French, Spanish | Message 118 of 350 17 May 2015 at 7:52am | IP Logged | ||||||||
Can I know what people are now considering as "my method"? That sentence above scared me. That's not what I was doing; that's what Rob was doing with Swedish, but not me. 1 person has 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 119 of 350 17 May 2015 at 9:41am | IP Logged | ||||||||
I'm not speaking against learning lots of words upfront. I'm just trying to encourage people to learn more than just 8000 words at the beginning. I guess if you're studying a language very similar to one you know, you may not need to study quite as many words, but you still need to understand them. Some people here seem to think words in the 8k frequency range must be seldom used/seen. I beg to differ. When I studied 13k words in Mandarin (8k from TOCFL wordlists, the rest from native content), I not only encountered a number of them in different sources than the original, but also always found many unfamiliar words. Which suggests that understanding just 10-13k words might not be quite enough (at least for me, and I'm not even one of the "native-level or bust" kind o' people).
AFAIK long term memory is anything you remember after a minute without reviewing... Edited by Ezy Ryder on 17 May 2015 at 9:43am 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 120 of 350 17 May 2015 at 10:29am | IP Logged | ||||||||
You don't know what book you're going to read before you read it? I don't have a time machine, but I wish I had a machine which made random foreign language books appear in my house. Part of my point was that if you focus on texts that you plan to read it is possible to give youself a glimpse into the future. And it is statistics which make the 8000 word method inefficient. What is the liklihood of a word in the 7-8k range appearing in a single randomly chosen book? Vanishingly rare. What's the likelihood of this word appearing in 10 books? Still surprisingly rare. This is from was an article I read recently which looked at the use of frequency lists, and concluded that after around 2500 the words individually become too rare to be efficient to learn. Their conclusion was the students should cram the first 2500 words and then work on strategies to learn new vocabulary from the books they read, etc. Taking your insurance analogy, insurance companies do use statistics to determine that 18 year olds are more likely to crash. But if someone discovers that statistically redheads driving on a Thursday are 0.001% more likely to crash if they are travelling north on a Thursday than southbound on a Friday, they're not going to use these statistics because the likelihood of it making a difference is rare. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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