|
 |
How much time studying vocabulary? | ||
Tags: Time to learn | Vocabulary learning | ||
Share with:
| ||
 Language Learning Forum : Learning Techniques, Methods & Strategies |  | |
| tarvos Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member China likeapolyglot.wordpr Joined 4500 days ago 5310 posts - 9399 votes  Speaks: Dutch*, English, Swedish, French, Russian, German, Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Afrikaans Studies: Greek, Modern Hebrew, Spanish, Portuguese, Czech, Korean, Esperanto, Finnish | Message 265 of 350 24 May 2015 at 2:04pm | IP Logged | |||||
|
But the CEFR is the be all and end all of all language learning! Surely we can't just
drop it? ...right. We can. 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| patrickwilken Senior Member Germany radiant-flux.net Joined 4326 days ago 1546 posts - 3200 votes Studies: German | Message 266 of 350 24 May 2015 at 3:10pm | IP Logged | |||||
|
I am curious how much of the cognate discount allows learners to avoid learning words up front when reading native materials.
As a native English speaker learning German, I found it useful to learn about 3000 or so words before I started trying to read young adult novels. I can imagine that I would have to learn a lot less words up front if I was say learning Spanish as a native French speaker, but a lot more if I was learning Hindi or Japanese. Is that true? Do people have the impression that the number of words that you need to actively learn before you can access native materials scales with cognate distance? 3 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 267 of 350 24 May 2015 at 3:11pm | IP Logged | |||||
Of course we can drop discussion of the CFER for the moment; it's not the subject of the thread. What I really don't understand is how anyone could come to the conclusion that I have said "there is no reason to learn a larger vocabulary"? This is what I call a red herring. Why do I have to repeat what I've said in many different ways?: Neither is there probably much disagreement about the value of having lots of vocabulary. Even though I've been much maligned as the 300-word maniac, I certainly believe that the more words you know the better. That is a fundamental element of knowing a language and certainly is key to understanding and speaking. For heaven's sake, if one is having vocabulary problems reading a book, then the solution is to learn the vocabulary. The real question is what is the best way to acquire the necessary vocabulary for this book. It seems there are two schools of thought here. Some people believe that the best way to prepare oneself for reading Bombay. Maximum City by Suketu Mehta is to memorize as many words as possible in advance, let's say 10000, so as to make reading easier with less interruptions and frustration. One way to do this is to drill systematically from a wordlist in Anki, Excel or whatever platform. The other school of thought - my position - says that the best way to acquire vocabulary is to study it in context by dint of exposure to the language (reading and listening). Wordlists on whatever platform are to be used primarily to keep track of one's observations and for review. In other words, no pun intended, what I suggest is to jump into the book with a good dictionary and a notebook handy. Don't waste a year trying to memorize 10000 words with the hope that these words will be in the book. Learn the words in the book and then go on to the next book. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| patrickwilken Senior Member Germany radiant-flux.net Joined 4326 days ago 1546 posts - 3200 votes Studies: German | Message 268 of 350 24 May 2015 at 3:16pm | IP Logged | |||||
OK. Sure. This is exactly how I have approached things, reading simpler books as a bridge to more complex ones later. I agree entirely that pre-learning 10000 words before attempting to read is overkill. I do think that if you have the inclination that learning the approximate meanings of the first 2000-3000 most common words can be helpful (at least if you are learning a closely related language - see post above), but beyond that point you are better off expanding your vocabulary as needed. 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 269 of 350 24 May 2015 at 3:35pm | IP Logged | |||||
Just to clarify a small point here. The idea of the cognate discount is not that it allows learners to avoid learning words up front; it supposedly facilitates the learning of words in the target languages because of formal resemblances. For a passive task like reading, these resemblances give the reader an approximate clue as to meaning. Although I certainly agree that the cognate discount facilitates learning the passive skills initially, I have argued elsewhere that when it comes to the active skills, especially speaking, the same cognate discount is a cause of considerable confusion. But that's a separate debate that I don't want to raise here 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 270 of 350 24 May 2015 at 3:52pm | IP Logged | |||||
|
If the language is closely related, there's no need to learn words up front at all, you can dive straight into native materials. I've done that in Spanish and Italian, as well as Polish, Croatian and to some extent Czech. I generally began with football, LR and parallel texts/Ilya Frank's method. In Czech I've not really progressed past that stage so far, though I can browse the net at least.
I've also kinda done the same in Danish and Swedish but since I don't have the native language advantage nor any knowledge of the proto-language, the results have been far more modest. Dutch has helped me bridge the gap too. Let me note that, as I mentioned in Josquin's log, I get extremely bored by most formal learning nowadays. I also don't feel like reading Ilya Frank parallel texts of Andersen or Lindgren. These would definitely be more efficient, but I'd rather be confused for 10 minutes than bored for 5 seconds. Doviende's experience with German is also interesting. This whole thing is much easier to do when you already speak at least one language and/or understand how languages work in general. Edited by Serpent on 24 May 2015 at 4:42pm 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 271 of 350 24 May 2015 at 5:09pm | IP Logged | |||||
Can't speak for anyone else, but I got a good discount learning French after having already worked on Italian and being an English speaker. But when I started Mandarin I got ZERO discount. There is nothing that will give you any clue a character might be close to an English words. Even though some words are taken from other languages and the pronunciation might be similar, the characters have no relationship to the foreign word. It is estimated you need to know ~2000-3000 characters before you can read a newspaper and so you need to learn these up front. So while in French or Italian the first 2000 most common words I would imagine I got about 250-500 words discounted as cognates, but Mandarin I got zero. I think that a lot of the reason Mandarin is listed as difficult for an English speaker to learn is to do with the fact you have to learn everything from scratch. You have to learn read, writing, speaking and listening. In French or Italian, other than a couple of accented letters, I already knew the alphabet and I could normally "sound out" the pronunciation. So there has been for me a significant time investment in learning first pinyin, then the characters and the sounds which don't exist in a romance language. 1 person has 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 272 of 350 24 May 2015 at 5:50pm | IP Logged | |||||
According to my experience, yes. I needed to learn about 2500 words in Norwegian before approaching novels without resorting to dictionaries all the time. In Finnish I don't even want to read WITH a dictionary with this number of formally learned words, it's too much effort. After having learnt Norwegian, no up-front learning was needed for Danish and Swedish. With Icelandic it's different though, I think I would need to learn about 2000 words PLUS have the cognate discount from Nynorsk et al. Old Icelandic (more precisely: sagas) I can do with much less formally learned words, because the topic is rather narrow. Just to be clear, I didn't just SRS some list for Norwegian. I participated in a university course and drilled the vocabulary from the textbook. And I added intensive reading after about half a year (and half the number of learned words), so my learned vocabulary must have been bigger than the 2500 words at the end of my formal learning period. Even reading only 1 book can make a great difference at this low level. edit: There is a set of techniques aimed at using the cognate discount to your best advantage called "intercomprehension". This has you reading from day 1. Edited by daegga on 24 May 2015 at 6:06pm 3 persons have voted this message useful |
|  | 
Printable version
|
| Copyright 2024 FX Micheloud - All rights reserved No part of this website may be copied by any means without my written authorization. |
