How much time studying vocabulary? (Learning Techniques, Methods & Strategies) Language Learning Forum

How much time studying vocabulary?
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Language Learning Forum : Learning Techniques, Methods & Strategies

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Jeffers
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Message 121 of 350

17 May 2015 at 10:37am | IP Logged

AlexTG wrote:

Jeffers wrote:

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.

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).

I didn't actually refer to smallwhite or her method in this post. Rdearman was usefully taking the conversation further and I responded to his post. People are making a lot of assumptions about the "smallwhite method" and what it is. Smallwhite's ideas are quite interesting, but as far as I'm aware she is not the subject of this thread.

smallwhite wrote:

Jeffers wrote:

I just don't think taking a frequency list and cramming 8000 words is efficient.

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.

I wasn't writing about you, smallwhite, I was responding to rdearman's post. I didn't even mention you in the post.

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smallwhite
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Message 122 of 350

17 May 2015 at 10:58am | IP Logged

Ezy Ryder wrote:

Some people here seem to think words in the
8k frequency range must be seldom used/seen. I beg to differ.

Jeffers wrote:

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?

Jeffers wrote:

What is the liklihood of a word in the 7-8k range appearing in a single randomly chosen book?

On the 8000th word being a rare word.

Indeed some people have assumed the 8000th word to be rare.

Well, first of all, please take a minute to VISUALISE the process: you have a word list in front of you off which you shall choose 10 easiest words to memorise. The list goes,
dog ........ der Hund.
eczema herpeticum ........ der XXXXX.
You see the English translation of the word, you have the choice whether or not to learn the German word. If you think "the word dog looks useful, I own a dog", then learn "der Hund". If you think "I'll never need the word eczema herpeticum, I don't even know what it is in English", then simply don't learn "der XXXXX". It's up to you. Which 8000 words to learn is totally up to you.

And secondly, it really doesn't have to be 8000 words, especially since our definition of "word" varies so greatly. It's actually X words. I can't sort my 8k words by frequency, but here's 20 of them, randomly picked by Excel:
to listen to music ....... die Musik hören
to be right ....... recht haben
to close the door ....... die Tür zumachen
bartender m ....... der Barmann
garden hose ....... der Gartenschlauch
yellow card ....... die gelbe Karte
coloured pencil ....... der Buntstift
radiology ....... die Radiologie
ticket counter ....... der Fahrkartenschalter
appearance ....... der Anschein
chest (body) ....... die Brust
ant ....... die Ameise
purchase ....... der Kauf
to pull a tooth ....... einen Zahn ziehen
American m ....... der Amerikaner
comb ....... der Kamm
site, place ....... die Stätte
fairness ....... die Fairness
in written form ....... schriftlich
disk ....... die Diskette

The word "radiology" is relatively rare, but my cousin works in radiology and we last talked in February, so the word feels relevant to me and I'm happy with it. The other words I don't think are rare or useless.

I have goals when I learn a language, and that includes a certain number of words. Some people don't set goals or don't quantify them, of course.

Edited by smallwhite on 17 May 2015 at 11:22am
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patrickwilken
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Message 123 of 350

17 May 2015 at 11:01am | IP Logged

Jeffers wrote:

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.

I started reading Harry Potter when I was in the 3000-word range using a Kindle and pop-up dictionary. From there I have just continued to read and build up vocabulary. After a couple of years (after I think my vocabulary was >8000) I stopped using a dictionary altogether and could just pickup books and read for pleasure working out meanings from context.

I have nothing against people cramming words, but I personally think that learning 8000-13000 words means you'll spend a lot of time cramming instead of learning both grammar and vocabulary naturally from reading.

Another problem with SRS is that you are always learn a simplified sense of a word. You really need to see it in context many times to get a good feel for meaning. Sometimes this is not so important, but there are lots of words that simply don't translate so easily.

The 8000-word goal is also too broad in a sense. When I looked at frequency lists for German lots of the words I saw even in the +2000 range that were useless to me (football terminology (sorry Serpent!) political, economic expressions etc). It's actually very hard to work out which words are useful though. I think it's much easier to read narrowly at first and learn the words you need as you go and build up your vocabulary by stages (HP, then crime novels, then politics section of newspapers etc). In that fashion by the time you've learned 8000 words, you've probably learned a lot of words even in the 15000 word range, and the words you've learned are useful to you.

Edited by patrickwilken on 17 May 2015 at 11:04am
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smallwhite
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Message 124 of 350

17 May 2015 at 11:34am | IP Logged

To provide data to aid discussion.

A best estimate of the time I spent doing what I did was: 9 minutes per day answering cards. That assumes I added 8000 cards over the 2nd, 3rd and 4th months of my studies, and spent 2 seconds answering each card.

In the 5-year-poll thread I mentioned if I typed words from my vocab book with audio, a session of about 15 minutes gives me about 20 learned words. These were straightforward textbooky words like "oven" and "coffee".

Edited by smallwhite on 17 May 2015 at 11:40am
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rdearman
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Message 125 of 350

17 May 2015 at 1:27pm | IP Logged

Jeffers wrote:

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?

Actually it isn't! I did a DB search on the Italian Lexicon I have found that the 8000th word you'd learn would be ELETTRONICA. English cognate, so I'll not bother to explain the meaning. I think the chance of encountering the word ELETTRONICA is pretty damn good. So I ran this query again on the lexicon which EMK was exploring for French and the result; prier (pray or request)

I think you'll agree the chance of finding the word prier in a French book isn't out of the question. The reason they are the most common words, and they give you 90% coverage, is because they are likely to be in books. Now after the 8000 word mark the chance of it being in a book drops off significantly I agree. I would also argue for an intermediate level person, smallwhites method (I'm only referring to the way she uses a spreadsheet to review efficiently rather than ANKI, when I say this) for memorisation could be used up for the first 20,000 words of the common lexicon.

In French this would take you to soupçonner (suspect, which I have seen in a lot of the French books I've been reading) and BISONTE (Bison) in Italian.

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rdearman
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Message 126 of 350

17 May 2015 at 1:34pm | IP Logged

patrickwilken wrote:

I have nothing against people cramming words, but I personally think that learning 8000-13000 words means you'll spend a lot of time cramming instead of learning both grammar and vocabulary naturally from reading.

Another problem with SRS is that you are always learn a simplified sense of a word. You really need to see it in context many times to get a good feel for meaning. Sometimes this is not so important, but there are lots of words that simply don't translate so easily.

The 8000-word goal is also too broad in a sense. When I looked at frequency lists for German lots of the words I saw even in the +2000 range that were useless to me (football terminology (sorry Serpent!) political, economic expressions etc). It's actually very hard to work out which words are useful though. I think it's much easier to read narrowly at first and learn the words you need as you go and build up your vocabulary by stages (HP, then crime novels, then politics section of newspapers etc). In that fashion by the time you've learned 8000 words, you've probably learned a lot of words even in the 15000 word range, and the words you've learned are useful to you.

I said if you spent only 15 minutes studying your vocabulary, you could spend the rest of your study hour learning grammar, or memorising irregular word forms, or reading, or watching TV. I've never suggested that learning vocabulary is 100% of the time to spend on language learning. I'm suggesting that you need words, so get them in quick. I'm also saying that after you've crammed 8k words, you can easily start reading these same book in context. As smallwhite said, pick your words carefully if you don't think they are relevant.

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jeff_lindqvist
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Message 127 of 350

17 May 2015 at 1:38pm | IP Logged

Jeffers wrote:

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?

Of course it would be more time-efficient to only learn the 1743 words, but I'm positive that someone who knows more words will struggle less with the text (and possibly enjoy the the book more). However, I don't think many will learn several thousands of words up-front, nor choose Alice in Wonderland as their first reading material.
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patrickwilken
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Message 128 of 350

17 May 2015 at 1:57pm | IP Logged

rdearman wrote:

Sure. My mistake for jumping in halfway through the thread.

I guess my gut feeling is that drilling 8000+ words isn't as efficient as simply reading.

I am also really not convinced that L2 Word --> L1 Word lists are the best strategy for learning vocabulary. I think it's much easier to learn words within context sentences, so something like this, where the question is a sentence with the relevant word bolded, and the answer is simply an approximate meaning of the word.

Q. Ein ramponierter Umzugslaster fuhr heran und spuckte eine Reihe von reisemüden vile und rusalki aus, die Laufmaschen in den Strümpfen und verschmiertes Make-up auf den erschöpften Gesichtern hatten.

A. battered

These are very easy to generate using a program like Readlang from books as you read. The advantage is that you you are constantly being exposed to grammar and words you already know are being reinforced at the same time. You also learn the words declined in context, which I find more effective, than learning the words in some sort of pure form.

My impression is learning words this way is about twice as fast as simple word lists, as the context makes it much easier to learn. You can of course have multiple sentences for a single word so that you learn nuances in meaning as you go.

Using this I was able basically learn about two-thirds of all the vocabulary I didn't know in a book (American Gods by Neil Gaiman) - 2000 words - in about 7 weeks.

Edited by patrickwilken on 17 May 2015 at 3:15pm

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