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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 89 of 229 09 May 2015 at 3:12pm | IP Logged | |||||
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At this moment I am attending the annual convention of the Quebec association of teachers of Spanish.
Interestingly, there is not one presentation on vocabulary size or word counting. But the inaugural conference was entitled El léxico y la escritura: bases de la enseñanza/aprendizaje del español. This, I felt, was up my alley. The talk turned out to be of little interest to me but I did pick up a few nuggets of wisdom. I learned that the latest edition of the DRAE or the Dictionary of the Royal Spanish Academy contains 94000 entries. However, since Spanish is spoken in over 20 countries there are thousands of local words that are not in this dictionary. I also learned that, according to this researcher, a highly educated speaker of Spanish has an active vocabulary of 5000 words and a typical university student an active vocabulary of 1500 words. This last figure was a bit of a shocker to me but I'm not totally surprised. I wonder what the figure would be for a young uneducated speaker. What I find interesting in all this is how small this figures for active vocabulary are relative to the lexicon of the language. The highly educated speaker uses around 5% of the available words in the language and the student 1.5%. I got into trouble here at HTLAL by suggesting that with 300 words one could start speaking French decently. That was like waving a red flag in front of a bull. I've been dogged ever since by the accusation that I what I meant was there was no need to learn more than 300 words in French. Similarly, I proposed the existence of a kernel of vocabulary and grammar structures of around 500 items that could constitute the basis of an effective learning strategy for a certain kind of discourse performance. Needless to say, I've also been ragged regularly about this. But the plain truth is that while a large vocabulary is probably good to have, one only has to observe native speakers to observe that the ability to speak a language fluently and correctly does not require a lot of words. What it does require is the ability to use the words well. The classic problem of many advanced learners of a foreign language is that they are able to (or claim to be able) to speak about complex topics with a large vocabulary but cannot hold a fast-paced informal conversation with native speakers. I also see very advanced speakers making many small but significant mistakes of grammar and usage when writing. Sure, these may be small mistakes but a native speaker would never make them, and people such as academics and journalists who have to write professionally don't want any mistakes at all. And even then mistakes do sneak by. For all these reasons and since I'm interested in actually speaking and writing the language, I don't really see the point of counting words at all besides some use as a means of self-encouragement. Plus, it seems that the discussion here has really been about passive vocabulary. This is learning words to, at best, recognize them not really use them. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| patrickwilken Senior Member Germany radiant-flux.net Joined 4345 days ago 1546 posts - 3200 votes Studies: German | Message 90 of 229 09 May 2015 at 3:30pm | IP Logged | |||||
Sure. I think I was quite explicit that I was counting passive vocabulary. But who is claiming to count active vocabulary? I don't really see how that is feasible in any simple way. On the other hand, unless Spanish is completely different from English, I very much doubt a university student would get by with a *passive* vocabulary of 1500 words. I know for a fact that I can't read a decent newspaper with such a small vocabulary without huge holes in my understanding. It may not matter to you whether you can effectively engage in native materials like books, newspapers and films (is that really true?), in which case having a vocabulary in the 5000-10000 word range may simply not matter to you. After all if all you want to do is speak a smaller vocabulary is probably sufficient. But I can assure you if you do want to read a newspaper like El Pais or perhaps authors like Cervantes etc then a vocabulary larger than 300 words will come in useful. As others have pointed out on numerous occasions, having a larger vocabulary is also useful for understanding what people say back to you. Edited by patrickwilken on 09 May 2015 at 3:32pm 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| patrickwilken Senior Member Germany radiant-flux.net Joined 4345 days ago 1546 posts - 3200 votes Studies: German | Message 91 of 229 09 May 2015 at 3:45pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Kanji
I was reading an interesting article this morning in the current issue of the German newspaper die Zeit (story not online yet) that there is a public competition (kanji kentei) in Japan each March to test Kanji knowledge. I know nothing about Japanese, but according to this article there are about 15000 Kanji symbols, and very few people know more than a few thousand. In the latest round of testing 741377 people participated and only 85 knew more than 6000 characters. According to the article, Yasuhiro Takeda, who works for a government department studying developments in Japanese language, and is involved in developing a core word list that every student should master (currently 2136 Kanji) knows by his own estimate only 5000 Kanji. I don't quite get this. If people on HTLAL are learning in the 1000s of words per year, why is it so difficult to learn Kanji? Are characters just much harder to learn than words? Or is it that you really need to know far fewer Kanji? Or is this test much more rigorous than our own self estimates? Edited by patrickwilken on 09 May 2015 at 3:49pm 1 person has 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 92 of 229 09 May 2015 at 4:05pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Kanji, Hanzi and Hanja are morphemes, not words. The more you know, the easier they get to
learn; but the rarer a character... the more rarely you'll need/see/use them. And if you don't "review" something, you forget it. Edited by Ezy Ryder on 09 May 2015 at 4:08pm 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5242 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 93 of 229 09 May 2015 at 5:06pm | IP Logged | |||||
This discussions boils down once again to a basic difference not so much in understanding the contrast between passive and active vocabulary as in what you want to do. If you want to read a wide range of literature and newspapers, you obviously need a wide passive vocabulary. If you just need to chitchat with someone on the bus, you need a small active vocabulary and probably a small passive vocabulary as well. As I pointed out, and we see here once again, people accuse me of saying that all one needs is a 300-word vocabulary. It's all a matter of what you want or need to do. As for active vocabulary not being feasible to measure when compared to passive vocabulary. (By the way, I should point out that for the Spanish students, we were talking about active not passive vocabulary. ) Active vocabulary is very easy to measure. We just have to take a sample of written or oral output. For example, looking at around 100 of my posts here at HTLAL I think I have an active writing vocabulary in English of around 1500 different words. If I throw in some words from my other writing, I think a have a total working vocabulary of around 2000 words. On the other hand, measuring passive vocabulary is the real challenge. All these figures bandied around here, and in most of the studies by Paul Nation and colleagues, are not based on the actual observation or testing of active vocabulary but on studies of word coverage of texts or transcriptions of recordings such as television shows. Let's say you count all the different word families of 100 novels in English from the 1800 to 2015. You'll probably get a huge figure like 50000 words or more. If you want to recognize or "understand" every single word of all these novels you will need a passive vocabulary of this size. This is what is meant by 100% text coverage. But 30000 words may give you 96% coverage and 20000 words 94% etc. But let's say you just want to read one Harry Potter book. In this case, you may only need 6000 different words. The same sort of methodology can be applied to films, academic writing, newspapers, etc. This is how we get those figures about the size of (passive) vocabulary necessary to understand a given genre of language output. There is no real measurement of how many words people really understand. This is looking at what people need to know in order to understand. It's also interesting to look at vocabulary tests, of which there are a number on the Internet. One finds that after asking less than 20 questions, the program is able to tell you how many thousands of words you know. I won't go into the methodology of how this is done but obviously the really accurate but unfeasible way of assessing vocabulary size would be to ask a question for every word. If you get 16578 right answers then that is your vocabulary size. Since this can't be done, all the tests resort to sampling based on bands of words grouped by decreasing frequency. So, if you can correctly answer a question for a word of a certain band you are assumed to know all the words in the band. It's more complicated than this but the idea is that with very few questions, we can get a rough estimate of how many words you supposedly know. I personally think this is all hogwash and that these test results are meaningless. Again, I come back to my mantra and what I believe is the foundation of the CEFR language performance model: it's not what you say or think you know that is important, it's what you can do with your knowledge. If you can talk in a sophisticated manner with 1000 different words, that's great. If you need 3000 different words, that's great too. It's the impact on the listener that counts. If you cram 400 different words into a 500-word essay, good for you, but that does necessarily make the essay better than the one that only uses 200 different words. In fact, maybe all those different words may end up making you sound pedantic and pretentious. It all depends on your ability to use the words well. Edited by s_allard on 09 May 2015 at 5:09pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| 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 94 of 229 09 May 2015 at 5:09pm | IP Logged | |||||
Well, I kinda said I did. By active, I mean the words I theoretically can recall and use. My active vocabulary is growing along with the passive one, but since I'm not in an immersion situation and not focusing on one language, the gap is probably larger than yours, and the passive vocabulary grows much faster. My estimate was that my active vocab per year is in the lower part of the 5000-8000 range, across all my languages. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| 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 95 of 229 09 May 2015 at 5:21pm | IP Logged | |||||
At the very least, the results are meaningful if you take the same test multiple times. The correlation to how much one reads is also remarkable (Patrick has posted the link many times). Also, being at C2 implies being able to cope with the A1-C1 tasks too. Do you think the same kernel of 500 or even 1500 words is enough for all six levels? I've asked several times and I'll repeat, does the C2 kernel also imply taking classes at B1, B2, C1 first? Because I still think that a low B1 learner can master the kernel and pass C2 speaking, but they won't actually be C2. 1 person has 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 96 of 229 09 May 2015 at 6:51pm | IP Logged | |||||
1.Many Japanese words are written phonetically, without any kanji. 2.Most kanji are used to write multiple words. Kanji can stand alone to represent words, or they can be a part of a word alongside phonetic writing. Generally, several words regarding different aspects of a common concept share a single kanji. As a result, the number of kanji in common use is far, far smaller than the number of words. Someone who acquires their vocabulary by memorizing arbitrary associations could presumably learn many thousands of kanji, but after the first few thousand they would be so obscure as to not be encountered in actual reading. With words, on the other hand, even after 20, 30, 40,000 there are still more words to be found that aren't so obscure. Edited by robarb on 09 May 2015 at 6:52pm 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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