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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Serpent
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Message 169 of 350

18 May 2015 at 8:16pm | IP Logged

So do types combine colour and color, but keep colour and coloured separate?

Edited by Serpent on 18 May 2015 at 8:17pm
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rdearman
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Message 170 of 350

18 May 2015 at 8:24pm | IP Logged

daegga wrote:

Jeffers wrote:

I imagine rdearman's word counts count tokens (essentially, things that are spelled differently). In English this will inflate the count significantly. With a language like Italian or French the count inflation would be off the chart, because parler, parle, parles, parlons, parlez, parlent, parlions, parliez, etc, all count as separate words. Incidentally, emk had a tool to sort this out so that all the recognized forms were counted as a single word.

You mean types. Tokens is what his "total wordcount" is based on.
Sorry for nitpicking, but this mixture of terminology gets confusing very quickly and might not be as obvious as the CPU/computer case example.

Afaik emk used SnowballStemmer, which has its own problems. From rdearman's description, he probably used a manual script to do the most obvious stemming for him. This is not very accurate either, but certainly better than just counting types. But yes, the numbers seem to be slightly inflated.

Yes, I'm estimating and not using word families, but simply different spelling of the same word. Hence why I insisted we use a 50% margin of error! But the inflation of unique words, makes my other point even more dramatic. For learning new words, reading is an inefficient method. It means reading Guy De Maupassant - La Main Gauche, has only 10% unique words, and therefore you're wasting 90% of your time, if your purpose in reading is to learn new words. If you want to increase your vocabulary, you'd be better off dumping out the first 12,000-20,000 most common words and spend your time memorising them. It would be far more efficient than reading.

And so:

rdearman wrote:

for any of these French books you need a passive vocabulary ranging from 7,634 to 17,039 words.

with a 50% margin of error should be changed to: 3,817 to 8,519

s_allard wrote:

How many word families does that represent? Let's say 2/3

even with a 75% (1 in 3) margin of error: 1,908 to 4,259 it is still more than the 2000 word family grouping.

I just want to reiterate I have no objection to reading for vocabulary, I have no axe to grind about how many words are or are not required for a second language. My sole point was to say reading makes for an inefficient method for learning vocabulary, and the more vocabulary you know, the better off you are.

:)

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patrickwilken
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Message 171 of 350

18 May 2015 at 8:40pm | IP Logged

rdearman wrote:

I just want to reiterate I have no objection to reading for vocabulary, I have no axe to grind about how many words are or are not required for a second language. My sole point was to say reading makes for an inefficient method for learning vocabulary, and the more vocabulary you know, the better off you are.

I am not sure I totally buy this sort of argument.

Say I am reading a novel with 98% understanding, which implies a vocabulary in the 8000 word range. If you read a 250 page novel in a week, that implies (with 5 unknown words per page) that I am being presented with 1250 unknown words per week or 178 unknown words per day!

I would be very happy to learn say only 10% of these unknown words, which comes out at 18 per day or about 6500 per year! Of course, if your aims are more modest - say 2000-3000 words per year - this is even easier to achieve with a relatively light reading habit.

Edited by patrickwilken on 18 May 2015 at 8:44pm
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s_allard
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Message 172 of 350

18 May 2015 at 9:57pm | IP Logged

rdearman wrote:

...! But the inflation of unique words, makes my other point even more dramatic. For
learning new words, reading is an inefficient method. It means reading Guy De Maupassant - La Main Gauche,
has only 10% unique words, and therefore you're wasting 90% of your time, if your purpose in reading is to learn
new words. If you want to increase your vocabulary, you'd be better off dumping out the first 12,000-20,000
most common words and spend your time memorising them. It would be far more efficient than reading.

... My sole point was to say reading makes for an inefficient method for learning vocabulary, and the more
vocabulary you know, the better off you are.

:)

This is an interesting point: memorizing lists of words is more efficient for acquiring vocabulary than reading.
For example, memorizing the 10000 most frequent unique words in French would be more efficient than reading,
let's say, the newspaper Le monde from cover to cover every day for two months or
5 great French novels. Or in English let's say you read all the Harry Potter books.

As was said, using a list you don't waste your time rereading a bunch or words you've already seen. What's wrong
with this picture? After memorizing that 10000 word list, all you have is 10000 words in your head. The
assumption here is that memorizing these words will give you the instant ability to understand these words in
context and to use them properly when writing or speaking. This is certainly not true.

Now, if you've made it through Le monde for two months or five great novels - throw in a Marcel Proust, a Guy de
Maupassant, a Françoise Sagan, a Michel Houellebecq and a Nathalie Nothomb, what do you have? First of all, the
great enjoyment of reading wonderful literature in the original language. Secondly, and more importantly for us
here, you have gained a fantastic knowledge of the French language. Yes, you will have learned 10000 unique
words but you will also seen how those 10000 are actually used in much of their subtleties and grammatical
complexities. Whereas that vocabulary list probably does not contain a single conjugation, that reading will have
taught all the tenses and moods and how they are used. On every page you will have seen various subjunctives
and all kinds of grammatical concepts that are the foundation for expressing yourself in French.

I'm not sure I really understand this idea of using a list instead of the real language. I can see making a list as we
go along, something I think all of us do. But, are we back to the idea that one should start by learning a bunch of
words from a frequency list? I thought that idea had disappeared with the fellow who learned 8100 words of
Swedish in 56 days.

I'm just starting to dabble in Polish. Should I try to memorize the 10000 most common words in Polish before
doing anything else? I would think that just reading one comic book in Polish would get me going right away. Is
there something I don't understand?

Edited by s_allard on 18 May 2015 at 10:39pm
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Serpent
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Message 173 of 350

18 May 2015 at 10:04pm | IP Logged

I rarely agree with you but now I do.

Although smallwhite doesn't actually learn an entire frequency list, and she does read. But like you I question the idea of reading as little as possible. Specifically, the second half or third of a continuous narrative is always easier to read than the beginning. That's a valuable opportunity for consolidation.

Edited by Serpent on 18 May 2015 at 10:21pm
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patrickwilken
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Message 174 of 350

18 May 2015 at 10:12pm | IP Logged

s_allard wrote:

First of all, the
great enjoyment of reading wonderful literature in the original language. Secondly, and more importantly for us
here, you have gained a fantastic knowledge of the French language. Yes, you will have learned 10000 unique
words but you will also seen how those 10000 are actually used in much of their subtleties and grammatical
complexities. Whereas that vocabulary list probably does not contain a single conjugation, that reading will have
taught all the tenses and moods and how there are used. On every page you will have seen various subjunctives
and all kinds of grammatical concepts that are the foundation for expressing yourself in French.

Wow. So nice to completely agree with you. You read not only for vocabulary, but for grammar. And of course for the joy of immersing yourself in another language and culture.

Quote:

I'm just starting to dabble in Polish. Should I try to memorize the 10000 most common words in Polish before
doing anything else? I would think that just reading one comic book in Polish would get me going right away. Is
there something I don't understand?

You might like this from Harry Potter: The book that taught me Polish:

Quote:

When I first started to read Harry Potter, I had only been learning Polish for about a year at the University. While I did enjoy that class (mostly because of the professor) it was basically all grammar, grammar and more grammar. At the end of that year, I couldn't really speak or understand Polish normally. I started reading the first Harry Potter book in January of 2008. It took me four months to finish it. Honestly, it was extremely difficult and took a lot of commitment. But after finishing that book, I really felt like I spoke Polish. My brain was able to produce and understand Polish automatically! While the first book took me four months, I managed to read all seven Harry Potter books before the end of that year! Each book was bigger and bigger, but I managed to read each one faster and faster. I read the last book in only a couple weeks. My learning accelerated exponentially.

Edited by patrickwilken on 18 May 2015 at 10:16pm
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Ezy Ryder
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Message 175 of 350

18 May 2015 at 10:15pm | IP Logged

Seeing the new words again during reading isn't really time wasted. It's repetition,
consolidation. The problem? Seeing 1000 new words in books doesn't mean you'll remember them a
month after.
And you can only remember the meaning, if you understood it. Sometimes context is enough. But
specifically at the beginning, you'll need dictionary look ups, parallel texts*, etc. That's
slower than just having memorized these words upfront. And as Paul Nation mentions in his
research, proportion of unknown content does affect reading speed.

*About which I've completely forgotten before Serpent's reminding :)
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daegga
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Message 176 of 350

18 May 2015 at 10:15pm | IP Logged

One thing that has always bugged me when reading papers on vocabulary acquisition: why are people always comparing SRS/flashcards etc. with reading, but never (at least I'm not aware of it) compare the results with a third group, which does a combination of both (using the same time frame per day)?

Edited by daegga on 18 May 2015 at 10:17pm

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