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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 5038 days ago 881 posts - 1812 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: Italian, French, Mandarin | Message 225 of 350 19 May 2015 at 10:23pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
I'm learning Mandarin. I cannot read Chinese. Period, end of conversation. Until I know about 3000 characters I'm not going to be able to read Mandarin. You can go on about how I'm going to learn all these words by reading, but lets face it, until I get a baseline amount of 3000 Hanzi characters in my brain I cannot read. I cannot read for nuances, or new words or increasing vocabulary. I have to memorise the character from a list, and that list is the list of the most common characters. Now I and all the other learners of Mandarin or Japanese could try to learn characters via reading, by struggling through paragraph by paragraph looking up each word and trying to remember the sound of the character and the stroke order. Because I can't look it up in a dictionary unless I know the stroke number of the character. Chinese dictionaries aren't in alphabetical order, they are in stroke order. So even looking up the word in a dictionary is a pain in the proverbial. You cannot "sound out" the word from the spelling, you either know the character or you do not. No, I do not enjoy trying to memorise 3000-4000 characters from SRS and lists, but I'm doing it. I have to do it if I want to read. I have to know how they sound if I want to write them on a computer, because I have to know the PinYin in order to type them in. So not only do I have to know what word this squiggle represents, I have to know what it sounds like, with no clues from letters. So if your goal is to learn Mandarin then actually, yes, you do need to master 3000-4000 characters/vocabulary. And it don't matter one whit if you think it isn't a helpful attitude, you have to do it if you want to learn Mandarin. So the goal is to learn words/characters. Because you'll never get good at Mandarin, or read Mandarin if you haven't memorised a large baseline of characters/words. I'm not saying you cannot learn all the words (or characters) via reading. I'm saying it is suboptimal. It is not the most efficient use of your time. At no point in this thread have I said that I enjoy reading lists, I have not said the only thing you need to do is learn vocabulary (this is in fact the third time I have typed that statement in). I have not said you shouldn't read. I'm saying that memorisation of words or characters from a list is more efficient than reading from a book. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| rdearman Senior Member United Kingdom rdearman.orgRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5038 days ago 881 posts - 1812 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Italian, French, Mandarin | Message 226 of 350 19 May 2015 at 10:39pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Edited out my frustration. I apologise.
Edited by rdearman on 19 May 2015 at 10:56pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Ezy Ryder Diglot Senior Member Poland youtube.com/user/Kat Joined 4151 days ago 284 posts - 387 votes Speaks: Polish*, English Studies: Mandarin, Japanese | Message 227 of 350 19 May 2015 at 10:39pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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I think the "learn only the things you've encountered so far" approach is the result of a
negative attitude. It's the "one can never truly master x" attitude. I learn Chinese so that I get to a stage at which I speak/know it, and don't need to study it any more, just as I speak/know English and I don't really study it any more. If everything goes right, I could be in Taiwan as soon as September. I don't want to spend years acquiring stuff as I go along. I want to learn what I might need, so that I can acquire it, and then "know" it. So that I can enjoy knowing the language. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5232 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 228 of 350 19 May 2015 at 10:41pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
I can't really comment on the specifics of learning characters for Chinese or Japanese but I can sympathize with this argument of having a baseline of a certain number of words or characters in a language. When I broached the subject of a language kernel some months ago here at HTLAL, all hell broke loose and I thought I was going to be frogmarched out the forum. What I said in a nutshell was that for a certain style of speaking in Spanish one could define a set of around 450- 500 key words and grammatical concepts that should be studied explicitly or upfront in order to master that speaking style. The list was broken down into various functional categories. For example, there were around 60 key verbs that you have to know inside out. I would certainly encourage an advanced learner to concentrate on studying these words in a very disciplined fashion. Does this correspond to the idea of a baseline of Chinese characters? I don't know. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| rdearman Senior Member United Kingdom rdearman.orgRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5038 days ago 881 posts - 1812 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Italian, French, Mandarin | Message 229 of 350 19 May 2015 at 10:42pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
The point is even native speakers don't know all the words that might be used, so learning any word is useful. EDITED out my bad manners. Edited by rdearman on 19 May 2015 at 10:56pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5232 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 230 of 350 19 May 2015 at 11:24pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
For those who are not off on a wild-goose chase of obscure and useless words, thought might be given to working on that neglected subject of a frequency list of grammatical structures. I know that the thread here is on time spent studying vocabulary but I believe that vocabulary and grammar are intertwined and often inseparable. When we talk about words in context, we are talking about grammatical and semantic surroundings. Just as we try to define lists of high-frequency words for strategic learning, I think it's useful to combine such lists with inventory or list of rules for putting words together. Of course, the emphasis here is on the functional or grammar words that are always on the top of word frequency lists. Then verb forms occupy a large part. As for adjectives and nouns there are often issues of morphological inflection. So, instead of wasting time on memorizing rare and obscure words - that I would call useless - time would be better spent on mastering grammatical concepts that will maker a bigger difference in language performance and demonstrate true mastery of the language. For example, in a language like French, everyone knows that grammatical gender agreement is one of the most difficult things to master. Improper gender morphology inflection is the number one indicator of imperfect knowledge. Obviously, that is something to work on relentlessly. But within the grammatical gender construct there are two interesting subcategories. There are words that are spelled the same but are distinguished by different genders. We have for example, le tour and la tour, la manche and le manche plus many others. Then we have a small category of words that are of one gender in the singular and another gender in the plus. For example, un amour and les amours (feminine), un orgue and les orgues (feminine). So, in addition to getting all the regular gender markings right, which is a already a big challenge, mastering these two small subcategories of gender complexities is the sign of a great speaker of French. The learner attempting to use rare words and then tripping on grammatical gender will usually provoke great amusement among native speakers. Edit: I have removed a first paragraph that was in response to comments that have been since removed. Edited by s_allard on 20 May 2015 at 12:13am 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| rdearman Senior Member United Kingdom rdearman.orgRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5038 days ago 881 posts - 1812 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Italian, French, Mandarin | Message 231 of 350 20 May 2015 at 12:50am | IP Logged | ||||||||
Exactly! If you spend less time doing vocabulary by using an efficient method then you have more time to spend on grammar studies and other language nuances like learning irregular verb usage. I'm glad you've agreed with me. Thank you. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| dampingwire Bilingual Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4467 days ago 1185 posts - 1513 votes Speaks: English*, Italian*, French Studies: Japanese | Message 232 of 350 20 May 2015 at 1:13am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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I almost hesitate to admit that I use Anki to memorise words. I've not grabbed the words at random,
they're either used in one or other of the textbooks (or, now, native books) that I use or they came from one of the wordlists that people have compiled for the JLPT. So almost all the words I'm learning are words that I have come into contact with and will come into contact with again (when I review the textbook or book at a later date). 1 person has voted this message useful |
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