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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 |  | |
| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5220 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes  Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 25 of 350 28 April 2015 at 6:14am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
I hate to be picky here but I'm still stumbling over this question of the counting of words, and particularly the high-frequency polysemic words. Let's take the example of a very common French verb, faire. I imagine that an SRS entry would probably translate this as "to do, make". To say that you know how to use faire well means two sets of skills. First, you have to know the conjugated forms and in what syntactic contexts to use them, i.e. tenses, moods, number, agreements, pronominal, impersonal and irregular forms. Faire is also used as an auxiliary verb. Second, you have to know the many different meanings or uses of this verb. The Reverso online French-English dictionary has over 100 lines devote to this verb (I ran out of patience trying to count all the entries). For purposes of SRSing, how many entries or cards are needed? One or 125? I can understand that knowing that faire is "to do, to make" allows one to recognize the verb when one sees it. But is that enough to truly understand, and more importantly, spontaneously use common phrases such as: Je n'aime pas l'hiver mais je m'y suis fait. 'I don't like winter but I got used to it' Il a fallu que je fasse faire un nouveau costume. 'I had to have a new suit made' Cela ne se fait pas ici. 'We don't do this here.' We know for example that around 15 verbs in French account for something like 50% of all verbs in spoken French. Just two verbs, être and avoir alone account for over 10% of all French verbs occurrences. This means that these two verbs appear in many forms and meanings. More generally speaking, we know that the first 1000 words in French (and presumably in Spanish and English) cover around 93% of the words in a spoken or written corpus. What this means is that a relatively small number of words take up a disproportionate role in the language. So, it's not a matter of learning 8000 words in French or Spanish but more like 1000 words in great depth and 7000 words that are rarely used. So, the issue isn't really about how many words one can SRS in a year at 22 minutes a day, but more what one can do with these words at the end of a year. Are we to believe that such a learner has a mastery of the 8000 most common words in French after a year? Edited by s_allard on 28 April 2015 at 6:15am 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| tarvos Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member China likeapolyglot.wordpr Joined 4497 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 26 of 350 28 April 2015 at 7:53am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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making a suit isn't really hard to guess, since faire un costume uses the same verb.
With a bit of imagination, you know it's the same. There are higher level idiomatics of course, like the ubiquitous "s'en faire" but you can learn these as you go. Yes, faire is used for a lot of things but that is why you want to learn it first. And honestly, for the first month or so, learning the passé composé, futur proche, and présent of faire is more than enough. After that I'd include the imparfait/futur/conditionnel, then the subjonctif. That's after maybe 3 months of learning or so. The rest you can forget about. You will see the passé simple in writing but you don't need to use it actively unless you're a writer. Edited by tarvos on 29 April 2015 at 8:36am 4 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| chaotic_thought Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 3332 days ago 129 posts - 274 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Dutch, French | Message 27 of 350 28 April 2015 at 11:37am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
I've seen people write something like this on flashcards, but personally it doesn't work for me at all. Trying to learn a list of possible translations into another language such as (do, make, etc.) is not only uninteresting, it will never be a complete list because good translators translate the message, not the vocabulary used. Just learn the main idea of the phrase you learned. If you want to remember them then write a few concrete examples on your flashcards: faire la vaisselle / wash the dishes faire un film / shoot a film quel est le comédien qui fait le comte / which comedian is the Count faire du tennis / play tennis They are not "words" per se, they are 4 different lexical items. 4 different situations where I heard "faire" doing something diffferent in each message and I wanted to remember them. Add these as 4 different flashcards, and you can add more as needed if you find more interesting usages of the word "faire". Write whatever you want on the other side of the cards to help you remember what function the word was playing in each message. The particular translation you use or in fact whether you use a translation at all doesn't matter. Also no need to pay attention to conjugations here. Just use the same tense from the source text you learnt the word from. Edited by chaotic_thought on 28 April 2015 at 11:44am 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5220 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 28 of 350 28 April 2015 at 1:41pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
This is an answer to my question of how many cards or SRS entries one needs to make for the verb faire. Here we have an entry for every different use of the word. In fact, we are looking at entire phrases on the flashcards and not single words. Personally, I've found single word SRS entries basically useless. It is the context that gives meaning. The point here is that in essence faire is not really one word but a large series of lexical items having the same superficial form. What is also true, and I agree with tavros here, is that within the forms of faire, certain are more common or important by others. By the way, I think that tavros meant the passé simple when referring to a past tense used nearly only in writing. Tavros also mentions guessing the meaning of faire in a certain context. This is certainly what we do a lot when we see high-frequency words. When we see Ce costume vous fait très bien. we can guess from the surrounding words that faire here means something like "to fit". So, we would translate this something like "This outfit fits you well." This guessing allows us to read or hear faire in various contexts and follow along more or less well enough. The real problem arises when we want to use the word actively. Guessing is very risky here. You certainly don't want to guess the conjugation. And if you are at a C1 level or above, you have to demonstrate the ability to articulate entire sentences fluently and idiomatically with the right form and meaning. I certainly don't want to transform this thread into a discussion of French grammar. I simply want to draw attention to the fact that the notion of learning vocabulary as an exercise in counting words is fraught with difficulties. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| tarvos Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member China likeapolyglot.wordpr Joined 4497 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 29 of 350 28 April 2015 at 2:08pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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At C1 it is impossible to guess the conjugation of faire. Trust me, I can recite "faire"
off the top of my head, every major tense except the passé simple and subjonctif du imparfait. And I would recognise the former. If you're still worrying about faire at C1... you're not C1. And at A2 I wouldn't mind guessing the more complex tenses at all. At B1 I would expect people to know everything but regularly botch the subjunctive. 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6493 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 30 of 350 28 April 2015 at 3:43pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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chaotic-thought seems to favour the idea that you should learn expressions rather than words. I have the opposite opinion, namely that you first and foremost should learn words, and then the expressions will fall as ripe fruit in your turban when you meet them. The point is that it is easier to learn variations on something you already know than it is to learn things from scratch - and learning expressions as if they were words would in fact be the same thing as learning a language with enormously AND numerous words.
My advice is certainly not to ignore the expressions, but to learn each and every word in each and every expression before or together with the expression. The philosophical aspect in this is that you should be conscious of the things people actually say in their languages. Maybe you say "play tennis", but in French you apparently DO tennis. Which is quite interesting .. and certainly worth learning. Noticing the such literal meanings will in itself help you to remember them, and as an added bonus you will learn something interesting about different ways to think about the world. Just coupling full expressions in two languages because they are used in similar situations can't give you that insight. And now you may object that you do see how the foreign expressions are put together. Yes, but only because you know all the individual words in these concrete examples. And that is why learning individual words is valuable. If you didn't already know "faire" based on some core meaning then such examples would just serve to confuse you. Edited by Iversen on 29 April 2015 at 5:46pm 5 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| iguanamon Pentaglot Senior Member Virgin Islands Speaks: Ladino Joined 5052 days ago 2237 posts - 6731 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Portuguese, Haitian Creole, Creole (French) | Message 31 of 350 28 April 2015 at 3:43pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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Back to the original topic.
Smallwhite's success is undeniable. To what extent this process of srs'ing the top x000 number of words is replicable across a wide range of learners is a bit more problematic. Each of us has our own individual learning style. Some rely heavily on srs. Some, like myself, don't even use it at all. I learn vocabulary through context and exposure early on to native materials (caveat- I have yet to learn a non indo-european language). So, how do we account for the discrepancy since we have both managed to learn languages on our own? To what extent smallwhite had English in the mix growing up as a native Cantonese speaker I don't know, but I suspect that it was probably around at an early age in smallwhite's life. In my life, I never heard a word uttered in a language other than English amongst my family, my friends, my town or at my school until I took Spanish in high school. Until I learned Spanish to a high level as an adult, I had no idea how languages work. After I learned Portuguese too, it started to become an epiphany to me. So, does bilingualism or early exposure help make one better in language learning? That's not to discount smallwhite's abilities but it is possible that it has a positive effect. In my years on the forum I have seen quite a few people rely heavily (too heavily) on srs and bomb out entirely on reading, speaking and language production. This kind of learning, for someone who has yet to learn one second language to a high level (a raw beginner), tends to lead them to look at the language as a "thing" to be studied and not so much as a means of communication. These learners tend to stay "within the box"- course -> anki, more course -> more anki. Manipulation and pattern recognition outside of this box tends to be limited. I can see, and have seen, where someone who either has a bilingual background or has learned at least one second language to a high level can take this srs heavy approach and jump-start a language. I think it's because they know that vocabulary isn't "all there is" and it's not all they do all the time. When raw beginners (the term meaning those who have yet to learn a second language to a high level) see a success story involving an srs heavy approach at the beginning, of course they are inspired to try the same (everyone wants to reach their goal faster) but their results are most often not the same because they have yet to gain the experience and knowledge of how languages work. Those who do have that experience and knowledge are better prepared to take advantage of (and more efficient with) an srs heavy vocabulary learning approach. At least that's my opinion. I am not advocating that raw beginner learners never use srs (I just don't like srs for myself) in their menu but that it be a part of a well balanced approach. Smallwhite, I admire your talent and please forgive me and correct me if I have made statements contrary to what you have done. If I have misconstrued your experience, I apologize. I am not a linguist nor a second language acquisition expert. My theory may be hogwash. Edited by iguanamon on 28 April 2015 at 3:55pm 4 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6387 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 32 of 350 28 April 2015 at 3:50pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
How do you decide when to stop? Do you strengthen that last layer when you're done with most of the deck?
I think that's extremely relevant. A language needs time to grow in your head. 5 persons have voted this message useful |
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