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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 |  | |
| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5242 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes  Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 81 of 229 07 May 2015 at 2:35pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
Not surprisingly, part of the problem seems to be the issue of what is a word, that hoary question that always seems to keep popping up. I like to work with the definition that Paul Nation and fellow researchers use, i.e. a word family whereby all inflected forms are reduced to a sole member. For the purposes of the discussion here, I am talking about the numbers of different word families. This obviously has enormous implications for word-counting because the number of word-families in a text is considerably less than the number of raw words --or tokens in Paul Nation's terminology -- in a text. This concept of word family completely discards the relevance of meaning and multi-word units such as idioms and phrasal verbs. But we also know that many words, especially the most frequent ones, have multiple meanings or contextual uses. To say that "get" is one word in English may be fine for word-counting but we all know that this verb is probably used in dozens of ways. The problem we are confronted with here is that it is difficult to understand what people mean when they give a figure for words learned. I have used a rather crude metric: how many entries (flashcards, notes, whatever) in some record-keeping system. Since so few people seem to have methodically written down the "words" as they encountered them, we have to resort to roundabout methods of estimating the number of words learned. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| AlexTG Diglot Senior Member Australia Joined 4450 days ago 178 posts - 354 votes Speaks: English*, French Studies: Latin, German, Spanish, Japanese | Message 82 of 229 07 May 2015 at 2:43pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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Ok so I'll just throw out some guesstimates based on what I've seen about average
number of words known (passively) by different levels of readers. English is my native language. None the less I feel like I might have learnt about two new words a week. That would make about 500 words over the last 5 years. In 2010 I had a fuzzy level of French where I could read novels extensively but hazily or with a dictionary have to check maybe 5 words per 250 word page, that would put me at a vocab of about 8,000 I think? I would now have a vocab similar to an average French 18 year old, probably higher because of my wide reading in academic and high literature. So that would put me at let's say 24, 000? So 16,000 over the last 5 years. Latin, Spanish, German and Japanese I started since 2010, so I just need to guess how many words I know. Latin: Really uncertain here, Latin feels so different to modern European languages in terms of word count. I'll guess 4,000 though, I still struggle with extensive reading. Spanish: I can get by pretty well, maybe I check a word per page on a literary novel. Which should match to 10,000 words maybe? German: Still very much in development, let's go for 4,000. Japanese: About 3,000 probably, including some words I only know if given furigana and some I only know if given kanji (know as in the meaning, maybe not the reading) So that adds up to 37,500 over the last 5 years, which gets me 7500 per year. So from previous comments it seems I've overestimated massively somewhere... Oh well, was worth a shot. Edited by AlexTG on 07 May 2015 at 3:26pm 2 persons have 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 83 of 229 07 May 2015 at 3:11pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
When I said words, I meant words (consisting of one or more characters). In fact, the words I studied used only ~3k unique characters in Mandarin, and ~2.5k in Japanese (IIRC). 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 84 of 229 07 May 2015 at 3:46pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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Here's me breaking up Chinese into words. Just based on my feeling, probably affected by how English words are delineated.
在 語言學 中，單詞（word，又 稱 為 詞、詞語）是 能 獨立 運用 並 含有 語義 內容 或 語用 內容（即 具有 表 面 含義 或 實際 含義）的 最 小 單 位。單詞 的 集合 稱 為 詞彙、術語， 例如：所有 中文 單詞 統稱 為「中文 詞彙」，醫學 上 專用 的 詞 統稱 為 「醫學 術語」等。詞典 是 為 詞語 提供 音韻、詞義 解釋、例句、用法 等等 的 工具 書，有的 詞典 只 修錄 特殊 領域 的 詞彙。 人 腦 像 電腦 一樣 有 RAM 的，意思 是 指 其實 我們 人 的 腦袋 並 不 能 同時 處理 太 多 的 資訊。作 一 個 比喻，其實 人 在 每 一 秒 有 大概 二百萬 的 訊息 投 向 我 們 身 上，你 猜 在 這 二百萬 當中 ，人 能 處理 多少？只 是 可憐 的 一百三十八！ Edited by smallwhite on 07 May 2015 at 3:52pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| gio_gogo Newbie United Kingdom Joined 3423 days ago 4 posts - 5 votes Speaks: English | Message 85 of 229 07 May 2015 at 5:15pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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I know about 4400 characters. What I have noticed is that the majority of characters can be used as words and as Wikipedia states a character almost always corresponds to a single syllable that is also a morpheme.
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| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6409 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 86 of 229 07 May 2015 at 5:31pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
Or we focus on narrower contexts. To watch football, work with spam or read about linguistics, you need a small but specific set of vocab. Also, language is often reduntant, and with experience your Sprachgefühl tells you what this or that word can plausibly mean. I honestly get bored when I understand 98%. I love the element of mystery that my own lack of knowledge causes. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| daegga Tetraglot Senior Member Austria lang-8.com/553301 Joined 4333 days ago 1076 posts - 1792 votes Speaks: German*, EnglishC2, Swedish, Norwegian Studies: Danish, French, Finnish, Icelandic | Message 87 of 229 07 May 2015 at 5:46pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
For me this has an extreme effect in Icelandic. I can read it fluently, but I make up my own story on the go. The general structure of the story is the same as the author intended, but the details differ vastly. In other languages a low amount of known vocabulary results in gibberish though. Intercomprehension is a weird thing. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| robarb Nonaglot Senior Member United States languagenpluson Joined 4871 days ago 361 posts - 921 votes Speaks: Portuguese, English*, German, Italian, Spanish, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, French Studies: Mandarin, Danish, Russian, Norwegian, Cantonese, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Greek, Latin, Nepali, Modern Hebrew | Message 88 of 229 08 May 2015 at 5:31am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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I don't think the fact that Mandarin and Cantonese are written in Chinese characters has much to do with the
difficulty in segmenting those languages into words. After all, they are also spoken languages. Words are a feature of the language, not its written form per se. It's true that Chinese languages are written without spaces. But several alphabetic languages are/were also written without spaces (Thai, Ancient Greek, Classical Latin). The trickier thing about Chinese languages is that they are so full of compound words. For example, one of the words segmented by smallwhite, 多少 "how much," is formed by concatenating two morphemes (syllables, characters) that are also independent words 多 "much" and 少 "little." This is extremely common, and it leads to the situation where a sequence of characters can be segmented in several different ways that all satisfy the condition that each piece is a possible standalone word. Edited by robarb on 08 May 2015 at 5:32am 3 persons have voted this message useful |
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