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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 217 of 350 19 May 2015 at 6:32pm | IP Logged | |||||
But you sir, are not a beginner. Like s_allard you continue to focus on adjectives and verbs. But as EMK so admirably showed in his analysis of French word frequency. that in French anyway 260 verbs will give you 90% coverage of most text. While the top 2000 nouns only get you 84% coverage of nouns in running text. I would like to quote EMK who wrote in this thread: One thing really stands out here: Nouns are just brutal. They may only make up 15% of a typical text, but you need far more nouns than anything else. Seeing this, I'm actually prepared to believe that if you didn't count the nouns, you could construct a 250–500 word beginner vocabulary that would take you surprisingly far. But then you need to add over a thousand nouns to get any kind of reasonable coverage. Nouns generally don't have "shades of meaning" like verbs or adjectives. Nouns generally tend to stand for a singular physical object. So I think it is something a beginner can concentrate on quickly and efficiently. In your sentence the noun, "hungry" didn't change. You could be gradually/quickly/unmistakeable getting/becoming/feeling hungry. But hungry didn't change. Yes there are 1000's of those sorts of examples which you need to learn from using the language. But there are hundreds of thousands of names/nouns/etc which do not require nuances of context. The meaning of these words will not change, they are not nuanced, and they are rare, you're not going to see them in a typical English book, so you can learn them now in case it ever comes up. dapifer decastyle decastich epiploce sciolist scolion epopt wanion 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| patrickwilken Senior Member Germany radiant-flux.net Joined 4326 days ago 1546 posts - 3200 votes Studies: German | Message 218 of 350 19 May 2015 at 7:03pm | IP Logged | |||||
I just don't really get where we are going with this argument. I agree that learning something like 2000-3000 words can give you a useful head-up to learning a language. And from the numbers you are quoting for EMK that's pretty much the range we are talking about isn't it? I personally think it's a waste of time learning 8000 words up front before starting to read, but people are of course welcome to do that if it makes them happy. Everyone has their own path up the mountain. I do disagree that nouns are brutal. I love nouns. I find them extremely easy to learn compared to adjectives/adverbs/verbs, whether you have word lists or if you see them embedded within text. Perhaps because it's easy to form a quick mental image of them. Yes there are a lot of them, but you pick them up pretty quickly whatever you do. One problem I have with simple frequency lists that has been mentioned by others is that they are a fairly blunt instrument. Once you get past a certain point (say 2000-3000 words) all words are pretty rare. Word lists are completely dependent on the corpus they are derived from and I think are inappropriate for learners as they are too-broad/a-bad-match to the texts the learner is reading. Compare an 8000-word-list vocabulary against an 8000-word vocabulary generated from reading. The 8000-vocabulary from word lists just contains the 8000 most common words from some general corpus (the one for German I saw was generated from newspapers). The 8000-word vocabulary I gained from reading books is really well matched for the sorts of texts I read. I know lots of words that are very lower frequency in the general corpus, but relatively common in the texts I read, and haven't wasted time learning lots of other words that are useless to me at my particular stage of learning. Edited by patrickwilken on 19 May 2015 at 7:15pm 4 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 219 of 350 19 May 2015 at 8:45pm | IP Logged | |||||
I haven't said you need to learn 8000 words before you start reading. I think you should get a book on day one and start trying to read. In fact I have a Mandarin book and I've just struggled past the first 2 paragraphs. I said if you want to learn 8000 words, or 2000, or 150, or 10, it is more efficient to learn them from a list than from a book. You're a native English speaker right? So if you want to increase your English vocabulary you can either read hundreds of books in the hope of catching the odd rare word (because for a native speaker reading a book it would be a very rare word you didn't passively know) or you can get some of those advanced vocabulary lists and learn the off. In fact most publishers encourage authors to publish books a BELOW an 8th grade reading level. So for beginners or very advanced students reading is suboptimal for learning unknown words. Lets say Professor X has 200 books and he scans them in and parses all the words and generates a list of the 500 rarest words in this collection of books. He gives you all the books, and gives me the list of 500 words. He tells us in 2 weeks time he will test us both on the 500 rarest words in these books. Will you have read all 200 books in 14 days? Because I would have reviewed his list of words and looked up all the definitions 14 times before we both take his test. In addition if I have to then go back and read the books, I already know the definition of the rarest words in the books. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| chaotic_thought Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 3335 days ago 129 posts - 274 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Dutch, French | Message 220 of 350 19 May 2015 at 9:20pm | IP Logged | |||||
If you have an eidetic memory, or if you actively enjoy reading lists of 500 words, go right ahead and do that as part of your language training. But complaining that "reading normal texts is slow" or taking the attitude that you can't wait in order to master 10000 vocabulary words or whatnot is not a helpful attitude for language learning in general. At the end of the day overall language skill is a process that must be improved through deliberate practice. The goal is not to learn words, it's to get good at the language. Learning words is a CONSEQUENCE of gaining language skill; learning lots of words is not the skill itself. For example, I forget words in my native language all the time and never found it to be problematic. That's what dictionaries and encyclopedias are for. 4 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 221 of 350 19 May 2015 at 9:26pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Do you mean to say memorizing words cannot cause your level to increase? Saying that learning
words is not the skill itself, is like saying the knowledge required to pass a driving license exam is not the skill itself, and therefore you should acquire it while driving. Well, getting tickets may make the rules you break easier to remember, I guess... EDIT: I also disagree with the bit about language skill improvement requiring deliberate practice. I have spent a negligible amount on my English the last seven years, yet I see it improve (my accent, vocabulary, etc.). Edited by Ezy Ryder on 19 May 2015 at 9:30pm 2 persons have 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 222 of 350 19 May 2015 at 10:11pm | IP Logged | |||||
I must thank our poster here because the addition of the chinese characters makes this list very useful. Here we can see how a Chinese-speaking student could use this list by studying it diligently every day. Now, let's try to read the first paragraph of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone after having learned all the words on this list: Mr. and Mrs. Dursley, of number four, Privet Drive, were proud to say that they were perfectly normal, thank you very much. They were the last people you'd expect to be involved in anything strange or mysterious, because they just didn't hold with such nonsense. One word, "in", from the list is in the first paragraph. I can't tell if the Chinese translation corresponds to the English but let's assume that it does. So, for the time being, we can say we have memorized the other words for nothing, Let's try another text and see if we are luckier. Here is something from today's Guardian newspaper: Some 40 years ago, in 1974, when I was a twentysomething from London, I made the move up north to Liverpool 8, an area of the city that was notorious for its poverty, planning blight and vandalism. My future husband, David, was living there as a student. He was very concerned that, despite all that was being written and photographed about the area, where tight-knit communities were being pulled apart by redevelopment, its people were being forgotten. In this second example, not one word from the list is in the text. I have memorized those words for nothing. Not very efficient so far. But I do have 25 English words in my head that I may use some day. Of course, it should be said that if one had a list of 2500 words or 5000 or 10000 there is a much better chance that some words will be found in those samples. So, in order to read those samples with good text coverage, one would be well advised to learn as many words as possible. Will knowing the 10000 most common words in English be enough to cover both samples? Will I really be able to understand the samples with 10000 word pairs in my head? Maybe yes, maybe no. Memorizing a list that I described as higgledy-piggledy is no mean feat. There is no rime nor reason to this sequence of words. A list of 10000 words like that would tax many a brain, certainly mine. Now, some bright person might say: "Suppose we made a list of all the important words in each sample, wouldn't that be useful? Learn these words and then breeze through the samples." Here I actually agree. Instead of learning 10000 words, 8000 of which for nothing, we would work on just the 2000 that are actually used here. Not at bad idea. We just have to find somebody who will do the work and provide us with that list. Instead of all this here is what I would do. Actually, this is what I've done in every language and this what I'm doing with Polish. I make vocabulary notes or lists as I go along, whether it's in notebooks or in Anki. From the second sample, I make the following notes: 1. Some 40 years ago (I like the construction) 2. twentysomething (a way of saying around the age of 20) 3. I made the move up north (see how up is used here) 4. notorious (note the pejorative connotation compared to the French notoire) 5. planning blight (interesting word blight) 6. he was concerned that (note very different use of concerned from French concerné) 7. despite all that was being written and photographed (note construction with despite and verb form here "was being written" when compared to French. May be a form of pseudo-passive. Must talk to tutor about this.) 8. tight-knit (interesting adjective formation here of adjective+-+past participle. Like "old-fashioned"?) 9. its people were being forgotten (note use of passive construction here and continuous verb form) That's the beginning of my list that I'll add to as I keep reading. From time to time, I'll revisit this list to refresh my memory or maybe make corrections or clarifications. A key point here is that I'm not clogging up my brain with a lot of lexical litter in the vague hope that I will use it some day. I call that vocabulary hoarding. "Keep it, you never know when it might come in handy." I don't see the efficiency of wasting time memorizing useless stuff when that same time could be better spent learning what needs to be learnt here and now. Edited by s_allard on 20 May 2015 at 12:57pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| chaotic_thought Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 3335 days ago 129 posts - 274 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Dutch, French | Message 223 of 350 19 May 2015 at 10:16pm | IP Logged | |||||
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A weakness of putting all your emphasis on frequency lists and vocabulary lists is that it ignores what words are actually needed to understand sentences. For example, I found the following sentence on Wikipedia:
Lupinus texensis, the Texas bluebonnet, is a species of lupine endemic to Texas. This sentence actually contains 12 unique words. It turns out that I don't know the meaning of half of them: LUPINUS TEXENSIS TEXAS BLUEBONNET LUPINE ENDEMIC Does the fact that I don't know 50% of the words in this sentence prevent me from understanding its meaning? Should I write down these 6 words on flashcards and study translations of these words into other languages in order to understand the meaning of the sentence? This kind of "vocabulary = language" assumption totally ignores the function of words in real sentences. You have to consider what words you actually need to understand something. Let's see if we can figure out what these words mean just by an understanding of how the language works: L--- t---, the T--- b---, is a species of l--- e--- to Texas. First of all, notice that the unknown word TEXAS can be learned from context the first time it is seen, so we have already learned this word by the time it takes to reach the end of the sentence. But what IS a 'Texas'? How do I talk about a 'Texas' in my L1? You may ask yourself these questions, but the answers don't have any bearing on your ability to understand this sentence. Notice that we could replace 'Texas' with 'Rivendell' and it doesn't matter in the slightest. (A), the (B), is a species of (C) ((D) to) Texas. From this structure we can already detect from a basic understanding of how the language works that A and B are synonyms. Also, the new term B contains "Texas", so its name must be related to Texas (whatever that is!). In fact, we also know that we can replace it with a new symbol if we want without changing the meaning of the sentence: (A), the Texas (B'), is a species of (C) ((D) to) Texas. Because of the phrase "... is a species of (C)" we also know that A, B and B' are related to the new term C in a particular way. The phrase "...(D) to Texas" may require some guessing, because we haven't heard the verb "(D) to (PLACE-NAME)" before, but I'm confident that we are not far off in assuming that it means that the A and B terms are somehow located in whatever place that "T---" word refers to. So at the end of this sentence, we have learned 50% of the words just by reading the sentence once. Do we know all of the words with "100% familiarity"?? No, but we don't need that. We just need to understand this sentence. By the way, the above analysis is what I call "understanding a sentence" and it's what you are training to be able to do automatically. 4 persons have 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 224 of 350 19 May 2015 at 10:23pm | IP Logged | |||||
Am I reading this right? I can hardly believe my eyes. Are learners of English being encouraged to learn dapifer, decastyle, etc. "in case it (sic) ever comes up." If this is not tongue-in-cheek, I think there is no point debating any more. I rest my case. This says it all. 3 persons have voted this message useful |
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