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How many words you learn per year (avg) | ||
Tags: Poll | Vocabulary learning | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Learning Techniques, Methods & Strategies |  | |
| smallwhite Pentaglot Senior Member Australia Joined 5120 days ago 537 posts - 1045 votes  Speaks: Cantonese*, English, Mandarin, French, Spanish | Message 209 of 229 15 May 2015 at 3:45pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
With a heightened awareness of newbies, I was carefully wording my response to you, was going to say "you are bilingual like I am so you should know...", when I suddenly realised that Spanish is your first real L2. You sure know a lot for a newbie, don't you? My own experience was that cramming words upfront made reading easier (obviously) and much more pleasurable mainly because there was far less need to stop and lookup the dictionary, and secondly because a larger choice becomes accessible to you. The language I crammed was German, where pronunciation corresponds quite well with spelling, and people on the radio speak slowly and clearly, so I got the unexpected bonus of being able to understand MUCH more radio after cramming 8k words. With Swedish that probably wouldn't be the case as Swedish is spoken slurrier, usually faster and therefore harder to hear. Note though, although we like to call this "cramming", this is actually just "learning upfront". The total time spent on the 8k words, upfront vs spread over 3 years, is not necessarily different. So, this "learning upfront" is not necessarily of a lower quality than going slow. I think people just like to associate "faster" with "lower quality" for whatever reason. To illustrate the difference between learning upfront vs later, it is like you know how some textbooks begin the chapter with a word list before there's a dialogue (eg. Living Language), while others show a dialogue first, and then a word list later (eg. TY). Some educators prefer one. Some students prefer the other. I crammed German vocab upfront, I crammed French vocab at the end just before my TCF test, and both worked. In fact, L-R is listening upfront, immersion is listening and speaking upfront, Michel Thomas is speaking upfront, Assimil is listening upfront... and all work. The other methods just got lucky they weren't met with sceptism, although when they first came into the market/scene they probably had a hard time, too. Edit: Your mileage may vary, the more prejudice the more so. Edited by smallwhite on 15 May 2015 at 4:00pm 5 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| smallwhite Pentaglot Senior Member Australia Joined 5120 days ago 537 posts - 1045 votes Speaks: Cantonese*, English, Mandarin, French, Spanish | Message 210 of 229 15 May 2015 at 4:30pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Coming to think of it, learning vocab upfront is actually just like already knowing cognates. The 121st day I learned German, I understood the word "der Wind" due to cognate discount, and I understood "der Krach" because I had learned it a few weeks earlier. Same.
And cognate discounts have always been prized.
And how good were you after your first course + 56 days? Edited by smallwhite on 15 May 2015 at 4:53pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5242 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 211 of 229 15 May 2015 at 5:01pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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I like to think I choose my words relatively carefully, but I acknowledge that I'm not always clear. I do not object
to the idea of cramming a lot of words upfront. Here is what I wrote: For what it attempts to accomplish, this exercise is, in my opinion, really quite interesting. It's not about learning to speak Swedish; it's about learning a large number of words on which to build later. It may not be my cup of tea, however I think there may be something to be said for this approach. It is the polar opposite of my own idea of the language kernel but it is something to try. The only way to see if it works is to try it. I'm even giving it some thought myself for Polish. It's certainly not how I learned English or Spanish. As I have said, and I know I'm repeating myself, I don't consider this approach to be learning vocabulary. This is memorization. What I'm really curious about is the outcome, what I call the big picture, in terms of what one can do in the language. I know that people learn languages for different reasons but for many of us, like myself, communicating in the language is the end goal. This is the very reason why I like the CEFR model so much, It doesn't talk much about what you know in the language but more about what you can do in the language. In an earlier post, I gave a bucket list of 10 things I want to do in Spanish before I die. When I look at language learning strategies, it is always relative to this list. If I read that technique or strategy X allowed the learner to significantly improve a can-do skill Y that I can relate to, I'm interested in giving it a try. How will this technique improving my blog posting, my e-mail writing or my informal conversations in Spanish? On the other hand, spending a month of immersion in Mexico or Spain is pretty much guaranteed to give my Spanish a boost. We don't know what that poster ended up being able to do with the 8100 words of Swedish. I have no doubt that drilling 8000 Anki cards of French in one year is better than nothing and can be combined with other techniques. But we have so little evidence about the end results. Edited by s_allard on 15 May 2015 at 5:54pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| smallwhite Pentaglot Senior Member Australia Joined 5120 days ago 537 posts - 1045 votes Speaks: Cantonese*, English, Mandarin, French, Spanish | Message 212 of 229 15 May 2015 at 5:22pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
Me, too. I thought I answered your question of
but then you asked again
and I wondered why you seemed oblivious to what I wrote. And then I realised that I said 8k words helped me to understand what other people write and say, and that's something you're not interested in. I also realised that all this time, you've been asking about output ability in a thread about input, about passive vocabulary. So I was not the one off-topic afterall :D 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5242 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 213 of 229 15 May 2015 at 5:51pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
This idea of the cognate discount reminds me of a web site somewhere that advertises something to the effect that "You already know 10000 words of French". This is the basis of the instant language learning approach. For example, since English and German have some many words in common, learning German is a piece of cake for speakers of English. Speakers of French should have no problem learning Spanish since the vocabularies have so much in common. English and French have considerable vocabulary in common. French should be easy. Is it that easy? Is German that easy for English-speakers? Do French-speakers breeze through Spanish? I don't think so. Yes, the presence of cognates does help. There is no doubt about that. Cognates and structural resemblances are also the cause of considerable interference between languages, especially at the advanced level where it is sometimes difficult to keep languages apart. Again we come up against the same question. Knowing that der Wind and der Krach are similar to Wind and Crash in English is helpful. But the real question is: Can you use der Wind and der Krach properly in German? Now, for the question of what one can do in 56 days of learning a language, I like to think that with three hours a day, one can begin to speak quite fluently - notice that I did not say "be fluent". In CEFR terms, it would be something in the A2 range. I won't go into all the details of what I call the language kernel approach because some people here will get hopping mad and accuse me repeating myself ad nauseam. In a nutshell, instead of using the scattergun approach where you learn a bunch of words hoping some will stick, you focus on the small number of key words and grammatical structures that are the foundation of every conversation. For example, in spoken French, the one verb être represents around 5-10% of all verbs. In fact around 10 verbs make up 50% of all verbs in spoken French. So, doesn't it make sense to concentrate on using just those verbs to begin with instead of attempting to learn 500 verbs willy nilly? Using this idea and identifying some key tasks such as talking about yourself and family, asking for things, giving simple opinions, one can start speaking quite quickly. With some limitations of course. But the point is that there is no need to learn thousands of words that you may never see and certainly never use in your life before starting to use the language. The thought of learning 8000 words when starting a target language literally boggles my mind. But different strokes for different folks. Edited by s_allard on 15 May 2015 at 5:56pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Ezy Ryder Diglot Senior Member Poland youtube.com/user/Kat Joined 4161 days ago 284 posts - 387 votes Speaks: Polish*, English Studies: Mandarin, Japanese | Message 214 of 229 15 May 2015 at 6:04pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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How do you expect to be able to use words correctly, without seeing/hearing them used
correctly, a number of times, first? This in turn requires understanding (most of) the words around them. Edited by Ezy Ryder on 15 May 2015 at 6:08pm 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| smallwhite Pentaglot Senior Member Australia Joined 5120 days ago 537 posts - 1045 votes Speaks: Cantonese*, English, Mandarin, French, Spanish | Message 215 of 229 15 May 2015 at 7:00pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
You can actually PICK which 8000 to learn. And if you can't pick so many, then just learn fewer. Edited by smallwhite on 15 May 2015 at 7:01pm 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| patrickwilken Senior Member Germany radiant-flux.net Joined 4345 days ago 1546 posts - 3200 votes Studies: German | Message 216 of 229 15 May 2015 at 7:41pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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smallwhite: When you say you learnt 8000 words what does that actually mean to you? I strongly suspect you couldn't, say, use the words actively in speech. Did you find you could read and recognize all the words as you read native text?
When I had about 8000 words in German I could pick-up and easily read a book like Jurassic Park without a dictionary. Could you do the same in Swedish? I am really curious what learning words like this gave you. 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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