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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 |  | |
| 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 281 of 350 25 May 2015 at 8:19pm | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||
I am. I would say a frequency order is a good one though. And there aren't really many "useless" words among the top 10k most common ones (it depends on the corpus the list was based on). 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6399 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 282 of 350 25 May 2015 at 8:54pm | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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Yeah, the Finnish 10k list I used had some words that you only see in the Bible nowadays.
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| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5232 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 283 of 350 25 May 2015 at 11:09pm | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||
I was curious to see how this would work. Say I'm studying German at the local Goethe Institut. If I understand this idea correctly, at some point in my German studies, I decide to bulk up my vocabulary in order to attack native materials. So I want to learn the 10000 most common words in German. Learn here means that given the English word I can respond with the target word. I will be learning 50 new words a day for 200 days for a total of 10000. Taking a 10000-word list on the Internet, I copied the last 50 words after removing a few proper names. And using Google Translate I added the translations. Völlig 'completely' landesweit 'nationwide' Abschreibungen 'depreciation' dominieren 'dominate' bittere 'bitter' versetzen 'move' detaillierte 'detailed' abgehalten 'held' Chemiker 'chemist' einsam 'lonely' Blau 'blue' Anregung 'stimulation' Kameraden 'comrades' Kooperationen 'collaborations' Zusatz 'additive' geschrumpft 'shrivelled' stundenlang 'hours' unweit 'not far from' Illusionen 'illusions' körperlichen 'physical' bemühte 'sought' finanzieller 'financial' klares 'clear' einsparen 'reduce' Anführer 'leader' Überwindung 'overcoming' Fliegen 'flying' bedrohte 'threatened' vorläufige 'preliminary' Vorbilder 'models' betonten 'stressed' verfügte decreed Extremisten 'extremists' bloßen 'naked' berät 'advises' gemerkt 'noticed' verwehrt 'denied' Hütte cottage nebst 'together with' Theorien 'theories' Angeblich 'supposedly' Kaufhaus 'department store' Atlantik 'Atlantic' Tief 'low' Hertha 'Hertha' ausgewählte 'selected' gängigen 'current' leuchtet 'lights' Berufe 'Professions' Bezirken 'districts' This particular list gives me word forms not word families. I also notice that there are no indications of type of word (adjective, adverb, etc), gender or case. Neither is there any indication how the words are actually used. As can also be seen this list is a hodge-podge of all kinds of words with no connection between them. There are a couple of cognates or loanwords that should facilitate learning. Using an SRS or an Excel spreadsheet, I want to earn or memorize these 50 words today, 50 more tomorrow and every day for six months. Plus, of course, I have to maintain my knowledge of the previous learned words. Given these 10000 words I should be able to read any modern German novel without having to lookup too many words. Sounds good but is it that simple? First of all, memorizing 10000 words like these is an enormous challenge. In my opinion it's a jumble of mismatched words. I know there are some memory techniques. Maybe iversen has something up his sleeve, but I just don't see how I could memorize 50 new words and maintain all the others day after day. Six months on of all this, I start reading my first novel in German. Let's take something easy like a Harry Potter in German and let's say there are 3000 word families that this novel. What are the chances that all these word families are in the 10000 word forms that I've learned? I don't know but it's far from certain. We know that around 1000 words from our list are sure to be in the book because they are the high-frequency words. After that, it's quite likely that some Harry Potter words will not be in my list. So, I'd better keep that dictionary handy after all. Then, there is the issue of understanding the words I've learned when I see them in entire sentences. I'll certainly recognize them but how well I will be able to interpret them in context? That we don't know. There's probably a bit of caricature in my depiction of how this whole idea works. I still see a lot of energy being spent on learning words that are useless for the task at hand, i.e. reading the Harry Potter book. To me it just makes more sense to pick up the damn book and learn the words I need hic et nunc, 2 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 284 of 350 25 May 2015 at 11:53pm | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||
It has been estimated that between the age of 2 and 5 a child learns between 7500-20000 words. This means they learn 7-18 words per day, and they don't forget them. You telling us you aren't as smart as the average 5 year old child? Oh, and they can't read Harry Potter either, it is above their reading level. 2 persons have 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 285 of 350 25 May 2015 at 11:57pm | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||
If you want to read, it's better to go German->base language.
You'd be much better off with a word family, or even lemma list. Otherwise, words with more common inflections are at a disfavour. Plus, you won't have 10k lemmata, or word families.
That's a good thing.
That's what SRS is for, reviewing, i.e., it will make sure you review the words you are most likely to have forgotten.
Well, the list you mentioned doesn't actually have 10k word families, nor lemmata, so...
Mnemonics. Simple as that. Let me give you an example: auswählen - to choose, select, pick. "With such tap water, it's better to choose to drink aus a well (pronounced with a German accent)." I bet someone who actually studies German could come up with a much, much better mnemonic. As for "maintain[ing] all the others day after day," leave that to your SRS and (later or not) input.
I'm not sure if only a thousand word families from a list of 10k most common of them would appear, but any way, you don't need a 100% coverage. 98%, or in some cases even as low as 95% text coverage may be enough. And even if it won't completely eliminate dictionary look ups, it still should make the whole experience smoother, and more pleasant.
You can easily check, by trying to read, while looking words up only from the definitions of words from the list. And trust me, you don't need to have a deep understanding of every single word.
The only languages I can think of, that some people learn just to read one book, are Biblical Hebrew and Greek, Sanskrit (was it?) and the Arabic used in Qur'an (I think). You won't see all 10k word families in your first book. So what? They won't go away unless you stop reviewing them (and Anki reviews calm down once you stop adding cards for a while). You can also try to start reading and/or listening before finishing memorizing all words... Edited by Ezy Ryder on 26 May 2015 at 12:07am 5 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| daegga Tetraglot Senior Member Austria lang-8.com/553301 Joined 4323 days ago 1076 posts - 1792 votes Speaks: German*, EnglishC2, Swedish, Norwegian Studies: Danish, French, Finnish, Icelandic | Message 286 of 350 26 May 2015 at 12:17am | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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In this digital age, the more logical thing to do would be to base your frequency list upon your own corpus of books you know you will want to read. At least for the bigger languages there are freely available tools for tokenization, lemmatization and POS-tagging.
The problem with frequency lists found online is that they are often based on newspaper corpora. You'll get a lot of political and financial terms, while your typical fantasy and sci-fi vocabulary will be lacking. edit: Only relevant if you want to SRS beyond the most common 2000-3000 words. Edited by daegga on 26 May 2015 at 12:21am 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6505 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map | Message 287 of 350 26 May 2015 at 1:07am | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||
50 words or more words a day is totally feasible. Personally I shift between languages so it wouldn't be 50 words in the same language day after day, but during a dictionary based 'campaign' I do get through several thousand headwords within a fairly short time (from a couple of weeks to a month or so). And because of the association techniques I wrote about on the preceding page those 2-3.000 words would drag at least twice as many headwords along with them and make them comprehensible. I haven't ever tried to memorize 8000 or 10000 general headwords during one campaign - that would take too much time away from other learning routines, and I would feel that one language had monopolished my time in an unacceptable way. But over a couple of years I would expect to learn at least 8-10000 words, partly from reading stuff which my first few thousands of words made accessible, partly from more intensive study with wordlists. Repetition rounds can of course include more words per session than the original three-column rounds (i.e. target, base, target language, using groups of 5-7 words). My preferred format for repetitions has become two columns (base and target language). For languages where I already feel I have a secure footing I may actually start out with just these two columns, and then the daily intake can of course become larger. I have just checked my lists from my latest Spanish campaign. Here each column is around 35 words high, and I can see that I in five consecutive days filled 4, 5, 3, 5½ and 5½ columns - all in all around 800 headwords. How 'robust' are then these words? It would be difficult to devise a test setup where I got the chance to see them all in genuine texts, and remembering the meaning from a list without a context is harder than guessing/remembering their meaning in a realistic setting. But actually I did control tests instead of normal repetition rounds for these Spanish words so here I know the answer. I hid the Danish translations and copied the Spanish words to new sheets, one block after the other, and if (and only if) I was in doubt about the meaning of a word I checked it by sliding down the cover over the Danish translations so that I could transfer the relevant translations to my control sheet (same technique as with Serbian the year before), leaving this space empty for all the known words. Afterwards I just had to count the translations and and calculate the percentages. Therefore I know that one or max. two days after the original lists I was in doubt about some 20-25 % of the words. Now several months later I have perused a few columns again, and the percentage now would be higher, but not dramatically so - maybe some 30-35%. And as I already saw with my Serbian statistics the 'late' loss would include both words I remembered at the control round and words which were lost already then- mostly words which aren't absolutely essential. I'm not worried about the loss of maybe a third of the words I memorized earlier this year - after all, in a concrete context many of the apparently lost words would be guessable, and that's a more realistic test. Edited by Iversen on 26 May 2015 at 9:21am 5 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 288 of 350 26 May 2015 at 5:23am | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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What is the alternative to trying to learn an unstructured list of word families? By the way, I don't believe children
learn from wordlists. As a matter of fact, I'll do what people do spontaneously; learn the vocabulary naturally, in context. So, after a couple of months of formal training, I attack that Harry Potter in my target language. It might be tough going for the first 50 pages but I should soon start to get the hang it. By the end of the book, I'll have 3000 words of structured, comprehensible and contextualized vocabulary with lots of idioms and collocations. I may have an Anki deck of 500 cards for things I want to revisit. The rest of the stuff I know well enough. And by then I've started talking a bit and even writing using mental images of phrases I've seen in the book. Then I start my next book. If it's a Harry Potter, I probably have a leg up; if not I choose something I find interesting. As a matter of fact I look at my Lustige Taschenbuch Donald Duck book that's lying around. I decide to read it because it is full of little dialogs that I'll want to imitate because speaking is a priority. Right on the very first page, I read: - Wir wollen dich nich stören. - Na schön! Sagt schön, was es gibt! This I like because I think I can use this dialog right away in my class by changing the pronouns around. On nearly every page I see things that I can use right away. And the images are great for helping me understand the dialogs. On page 11, I read: - Oh! Der Briefträger! - Tag, Donald! Nanu, wie sehen Sie denn aus! Ist das en Karnavalskostum? 254 pages of this stuff plus the Harry Potter should give be enough vocabulary to get a feel for some simple fiction and for the spoken language. Now on to some non-fiction that I can handle. Maybe a science book for children. I see on Amazon a book Physik für Kids by by Friedrich Holst. That should do the trick. I can browse through the contents. It looks pretty interesting and has lots of practical experiments. It should give me some technical vocabulary and a good feel for non-fiction writing. After these three books, how large is my passive vocabulary? Who knows? Who cares? My vocabulary is a reflection of my input. The more input the more vocabulary. And above all, I'm not trying to memorize a list of words completely out of context even though I can try to make all kinds of associations. Why force myself to learn thousands of words for no immediate use -- OK, I won't call these words useless -- when I can spend my time more enjoyably seeing how the words are used. I still don't see the point of learning words that are of no use to me. Sure, they may be useful in the future, but I'll learn them when I need them. I don't own a dog. I never have. My neighbour, Pierre, is a dog lover and I meet him regularly with his dog. I know the names of about six or eight types of dogs. The funny thing is that I know the names but I probably couldn't really identify the dogs. I just know their names. Pierre is very different. He can probably name 30 types of dogs. He knows all about dog diseases, personalities, food and history. He knows many of the neighbourhood dogs by name. He obviously has a large dog-related vocabulary that I don't have. Is this a problem for me? Certainly not. Should I learn a lot of dog vocabulary just in case I meet a dog owner? No. Frankly I think this would be a waste of time. The day I buy a dog I'll start learning how to talk about dogs. In the meantime I have other things to do besides studying dog vocabulary. For that reason why study 10000 words when 5000 are all I need for the time being? The day I need more I'll learn more. Plus reading or listening to the language is a helluva lot more fun than learning a jumble of words. Edited by s_allard on 26 May 2015 at 6:02am 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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