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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 |  | |
| luke Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 6998 days ago 3133 posts - 4351 votes  Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Esperanto, French | Message 249 of 350 22 May 2015 at 4:02pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
That's what starts the arguments. The number of words that "one" (a single individual) uses in the oral production part of a CEFR exam is weakly correlative to the number of words that one, (meaning a typical individual) actually needs to have facility with in order to pass the exam. You may also consider your frequent use of the word "all". The lack of precision with which you frequently use it pours petrol on debates. Edited by luke on 23 May 2015 at 12:48am 4 persons have 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 250 of 350 22 May 2015 at 4:34pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
That's your personal preference. We've had plenty of threads about what impresses us. Remember that there's not always an option of switching to a stronger language. In Europe, you can go to Malta with 300 impeccable words of Italian and switch to English when needed (and I wish I had done that, but by failing to set the limits for your approach you ended up not being taken seriously). But if you go to Italy with 300 words of Italian, English speakers will be hit-and-miss. And life would not be fun if that one time when you can't find anyone who speaks English wasn't the one when you need it most. 2 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 251 of 350 22 May 2015 at 5:21pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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Looking at immigrants, there probably is a reason why they automatically go for quantity instead of quality. It facilitates communication more than grammatical accuracy. No need to impress as long as you still struggle to survive. Edited by daegga on 22 May 2015 at 5:23pm 5 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| iguanamon Pentaglot Senior Member Virgin Islands Speaks: Ladino Joined 5055 days ago 2237 posts - 6731 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Portuguese, Haitian Creole, Creole (French) | Message 252 of 350 22 May 2015 at 5:41pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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I don't believe s_allard is saying that 300 words is the end-game here. (As an aside s_allard, why not start a log and expand on your methods in greater detail. I would be interested in reading such a log and I believe you would find that it would be well received.) I believe, and correct me if I'm wrong, s_allard, that you are saying that with a mastery of the core kernel of a language, whatever arbitrary number under a 1,000 words that may be, it allows a learner to have a solid foundation that is much easier to build upon.
I see this as a worthy goal that I wish I was able to do. This is what a lot of courses try to do in their approach to teaching. Myself, I am just not patient enough to take the time to do that before I will want to take the language out for a spin around the block. Though I don't like to make mistakes, I do. I make a lot of mistakes in the beginning. I don't mind making them because I learn from them. I actually learn more from my mistakes. Neither am I patient enough to make massive explicit vocabulary learning (whether up front or along the way) a part of my routine. You might as well force me to watch grass grow. Sit me down with a good text and audio course (in one) and I am going to want to do Pimsleur too. Give me three volumes of Pimsleur and I am going to want to work in a good textbook course as well. Give me both and then I am going to get on twitter and also find a comprehensible, parallel text. After a good spell of this, I will add in native speed audio which will transition to just native speed audio plus a course and speaking. While doing all this, I will be acquiring vocabulary and grammar and it will be mine (me personally, ymmv), in a way that it wouldn't be for me with just formal study and flashcards. For me it's about fun and using it to communicate with people and interact with the language where it lives and breathes. Take away those aspects from me and force me to load up vocabulary after Michael Thomas (How on Earth do MT fans get past the annoying students and MT himself to learn? Aaaargh!) and I won't enjoy the process. I'd find that not to my liking at all and would quit well before gaining the benefits. Sit me down and force me to master a core of Russian before I am allowed to venture out on my own and I would be bored to tears with quitting being the same result. That's just me and how I do things. We are all different and others see the value in their approaches for themselves. My voice is just one in the chorus of language learning. Edited by iguanamon on 22 May 2015 at 11:44pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5223 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 253 of 350 22 May 2015 at 6:03pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
I agree with nearly all of this post except for one point. The debate isn't over small versus large vocabulary. In my opinion, the debate is how does one acquire the adequate vocabulary for the task at hand. I believe in starting small and expanding as necessary. Others believe, if I'm correctly stating their position, in memorizing a large set of words to be able to deal with a wide range of situations. If we look at the concrete example in this post of the (Italian) tourist not understanding the reply to their question, is this because of lack of vocabulary? Not necessarily so. If one has poor overall command of the language, as this seemed to be the case, it was probably more than just vocabulary. But it is true that a language learner will be very often confronted with unknown words. This also happens to native speakers every day. I'm always learning new words or meanings in French, English and Spanish. Vocabulary grows with knowledge. This is exactly how our native vocabulary expands. Spontaneously and naturally. Two days ago, I had never heard of Rembrandt lighting. Now, after talking with a photographer I know what it means. Otherwise, I could have looked the word up in a dictionary. Isn't that what dictionaries are for? Maybe I don't understand something but what I don't get is this idea of spending a lot of time memorizing a long list of words prior to having any need for these words. I don't do this in my native language, why should I do this in another language? As I have pointed out, I'm not talking about a structured approach to systematically learning thematically- organized vocabulary. This is a technique that I think can be effective. For example, I enjoy leafing through visual dictionaries. But here we are talking about long lists of words often sorted by frequency. Edited by s_allard on 22 May 2015 at 7:18pm 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 254 of 350 22 May 2015 at 6:31pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
I'm not saying one has to learn everything upfront, and shouldn't even touch native content before reaching 100% text coverage. I've been reading a forum for learners of Japanese. For a number of them, it is the only foreign language they're interested in learning. I've actually seen some of them saying things like "I've learnt 22k words, and I found 200- something 'unknown' words in a 300-something-page-long book. I think my next goal will be 28k words." Not only that, for some of them, "unknown" means "not studied." No matter if they could guess it even without a context or not. I was astonished by such perfectionism, too. I'm not saying you need to first memorize every word that you may happen to see once or twice in your life. I'm just saying it is a viable strategy to learn enough, so that you can figure out such words out of context, or their morphemes, while reading or listening. Lastly, basing one's approach on how we learn our native languages isn't necessarily the best idea. Not for all, at least. Edited by Ezy Ryder on 22 May 2015 at 6:35pm 2 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 255 of 350 22 May 2015 at 8:00pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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I believe that if you study a language for 20-50 years, then you'll learn every bit of vocabulary you'll ever need, and what few you don't know immediately you'll figure out form context.
Speaking only for myself, I read for vocabulary, I study lists for vocabulary, and I read grammar books, listen to podcasts, listen to lessons, read textbooks, watch films, just about everything you'd think of in order for me to learn my languages. One of the reasons I liked smallwhites method of cramming vocabulary is my frustration with my own Italian and French progress. At the moment I've tested at or slightly under C1 in reading in French and I'm probably about the same in Italian (perhaps a little better) but this doesn't stop me being frustrated when I have to stop and lookup words. Even in a popup dictionary this is (for me) an unacceptable delay. I'm a voracious reader in English and I can count the number of times I've used the English dictionary this year on one finger. I can normally figure out the word from context and this is what I always attempt first. I also attempt to figure words out via context in French or Italian as well, but less likely to succeed. As a consequence of this thread I've started "cramming" words in Italian and I'm not a beginner. I've not bothered with the 1000 most common words, I know those, I'm studying the 2000-8000 most common words because they are the ones I come across the least. My reasoning is, by increasing my coverage of the words I have a better chance of recognising it when I'm reading. I feel if the word is used in a manner which isn't consistent with the definition I learnt for the word, I'll be able to determine the 2nd meaning based on context, and my pre-existing knowledge of the 1st definition. I'm not a believer in the small is good philosophy of vocabulary, I feel the more words I know, the better. Even if I don't know the "exact" usage of the word in every case at least knowing A definition of the word is more likely to help me determine THE definition in the current context. Also there is a good chance the definition I learned for the word is the correct definition in the current context. I don't believe native speakers "run into new words everyday", I certainly don't. Having worked for a photographic company, I knew what Rembrandt lighting was already. I do run into new words, but not daily, certainly not as frequently as in my target languages. 2 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 256 of 350 22 May 2015 at 8:21pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
No, your posts really do confuse me. I'm not trying to insult you. You continue to talk about "kernel" language, and we only need 300 words, but then in another post you tell me learning lists of words is bad because I don't know all the definitions. So I'm extrapolating that if each word has 5 meanings in your 300 word core, then your core has magically expanded to 1500 words.
I participated in that debate. I believe you are talking about this thread. Experimenting with French word frequency. I searched the thread for this CEFR examination question you speak of, but couldn't find it. Perhaps you mean a different thread? If you could please link to it I would like to refresh my memory.
Once again you have decided to focus on verbs, and as I continue to point out, and EMK so brilliantly refuted your claims in the thread linked to above your theory would work if it wasn't for nouns. Without nouns you're are handicapped because nouns are too subject-specific and the distribution of nouns is too flat. You can know all the verbs in the world, but if you need to catch a train and you don't know the nouns, train, train station, etc. then you're out of luck. You say you can just "rework as necessary" but we then come back to the argument that you don't know what conversations you'll have in the future. If someone comes into your cheese shop and wants to talk about trains, or chickens, or thermoelectric dynamic systems, or Boyles law, or the latest craze in t-shirts you are again out of luck. You can increase your chances of having a non-cheese conversation in a cheese shop using your recycled verbs if you've memorised A LOT of nouns. Just because you've prepared a list of 300-1500 words you will always speak on, it doesn't mean the native will talk about that, they might pick something else to speak of. I'm not trying to have a go at you, or insult you, but you seem very determined to push your agenda. Perhaps, if you would please start a log, determine the 300 Mandarin words you'll learn, then skype with smallwhite she can evaluate your method and see if 300 words are enough to have a conversation about a topic which you don't pick. Or Polish, or Russia, or any language you care to pick 300 words in. 4 persons have voted this message useful |
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