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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 105 of 229 10 May 2015 at 5:36am | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
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I think that everybody here would agree that the number one way of acquiring vocabulary in a foreign language
is through reading. The major problem with learning exclusively through books is that we end up sounding like books and often have difficulty with the informal spoken language which is best learned by interacting with native speakers. But we have to make do with what we've got. Some people here seem to believe that one should learn words in advance. But which ones? It obviously depends on what one wants to read. Maybe you want to read the wonderful 19th century works of the great Jules Verne in the original French. Or perhaps the 19th century novels of Charles Dickens. For the really courageous, how about the 17th century masterpiece Don Quijote by Cervantes. This particular work is very well known but few people have actually read it in Spanish because it is very difficult. But instead of going back in time, you may be interested in something more modern. A good choice would be the Harry Potter series. This is an outstanding example of fiction aimed at a young audience, around 12 to 18 years old, more or less. What words do you need to know in advance in order to enjoy a Harry Potter book? I certainly don't know. I figure that if I have a solid foundation in English, I'll just pick up the words as I go along. That's what dictionaries are for. By the time I get past the first 50 pages, I will probably have adapted to the author's writing style and seen most of the words I need to learn. Then I can sail through all the Harry Potter books. One of the reasons for so much argument about this word-counting business here is the fact that few people have actually tried the exercise of counting words using a serious methodology like that of Paul Nation. I highly recommend people try it just a bit to see how complicated and complex the matter really is. Just to give a small taste of what's involved, I suggest we have a quick look at the first page of Harry Potter and the Philosophical Stone, as follows: Mr. and Mrs. Dursley, of number four, Privet Drive, were proud to say that they were perfectly normal, thank you very much. They were the last people you'd expect to be involved in anything strange or mysterious, because they just didn't hold with such nonsense. Mr. Dursley was the director of a firm called Grunnings, which made drills. He was a big, beefy man with hardly any neck, although he did have a very large mustache. Mrs. Dursley was thin and blonde and had nearly twice the usual amount of neck, which came in very useful as she spent so much of her time craning over garden fences, spying on the neighbors. The Dursleys had a small son called Dudley and in their opinion there was no finer boy anywhere. The Dursleys had everything they wanted, but they also had a secret, and their greatest fear was that somebody would discover it. They didn't think they could bear it if anyone found out about the Potters. Mrs. Potter was Mrs. Dursley's sister, but they hadn't met for several years; in fact, Mrs. Dursley pretended she didn't have a sister, because her sister and her good-for-nothing husband were as unDursleyish as it was possible to be. The Dursleys shuddered to think what the neighbors would say if the Potters arrived in the street. The Dursleys knew that the Potters had a small son, too, but they had never even seen him. This boy was another good reason for keeping the Potters away; they didn't want Dudley mixing with a child like that. When Mr. and Mrs. Dursley woke up on the dull, gray Tuesday our story starts, there was nothing about the cloudy sky outside to suggest that strange and mysterious things would soon be happening all over the country. Mr. Dursley hummed as he picked out his most boring tie for work, and Mrs. Dursley gossiped away happily as she wrestled a screaming Dudley into his high chair. None of them noticed a large, tawny owl flutter past the window. At half past eight, Mr. Dursley picked up his briefcase, pecked Mrs. Dursley on the cheek, and tried to kiss Dudley good-bye but missed, Microsoft words says there are 366 words on this page. Paul Nation calls them the tokens or running words, defined as anything between two blank spaces. The first question is what to do about the proper nouns ( Mr Dursley, Potter, etc.). We eliminate them because we are interested in general English, but must remember that they are essential to the story. We now have 326 words. One problem area is what to do about the contractions such as "didn't, hadn't, you'd". MS Office considers them one word but maybe we should separate them into distinct words. We have five such contractions that are now expanded into 10 words. So our running word count is now 331. But there are still some problems. MS Word thinks that "good-for-nothing" is one word. It would seem to make sense to break it up into three words although it could be argued that it's really one unit. Let's break it up into three. Our running word count is now 333. But we have a more serious problem. What to do about the phrasal verbs where a verb and a preposition make a distinct unit? We have "came in, woke up, picked out, gossiped away, picked up". Let's split them. The word count now goes to 338 words. The next step is to count what Paul Nation calls the word forms. These are all the forms of a same word. Here is the example of the most common verb in English: was (9), were(3), be (2) Here we have three word forms. The next step is to lemmatize these word forms and reduce them to the generic form that Paul Nation calls word families. The three word forms above become one word family : be. Typically, all the verbs are reduced to their infinitive form, all plurals to their singular form, comparatives to their base form. Here there is a major problem with the verb "have". This is both a distinct verb (e.g. The Dursley's had a small son…) and an auxiliary (e.g. ..they hadn't met for several years). Let's say that it's one word. It's the same problem with "do". In most the occurrences here "do" is only a negation marker (e.g. …didn't hold). But there is one occurrence where "do" is an emphasis marker (e.g. …although he did have a very large mustache). There are a couple of areas where there are some idiomatic expressions that pose a problem. The very first sentence ends with "…, thank you very much". We'll treat these as having four words but it's clear that, like the phrasal verbs above, it's all one unit of meaning. In the following sentence we have "… they just didn't hold with such nonsense" where "to hold with" means "to believe in." I haven't done all the math but I estimate that the page could be reduced to something like 240 word families. Then we could put the words in decreasing numeric order. What we notice is that the grammar or function words are at the top of the list. These are words like "the, a, be, have, that, they, he, their, his, her," etc., and then the many words that appear only once on this page. This would constitute the passive vocabulary list that one would learn in advance or as one goes along. The problem with learning lists of words is the lack of context. A list of 240 words tells us nothing about how the words are used. For example, it doesn't tell us what "thank you very much" means at the end of the first sentence. Since this post is now too long, I won't go into the problems of calculating understanding and particularly the varying importance of words. Some words like nouns are essential for understanding sentences and the whole text whereas many words, like adjectives, are much less important. The point of all this is to show that the best way to learn vocabulary is to learn in context and not waste time counting words. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||
| tarvos Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member China likeapolyglot.wordpr Joined 4519 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 106 of 229 10 May 2015 at 6:03am | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
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Of course you need to learn words in context and pick up these idioms, but they're not
the only thing you need to do. Vocabulary is not an either/or scenario. You can be greedy here... By the way, I would rather my vocabulary expand with useand need, but not contract... that would be awful. Edited by tarvos on 10 May 2015 at 6:03am 4 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 107 of 229 10 May 2015 at 6:30am | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
I agree that reading is the number one way of acquiring vocabulary, but certainly not all do. We have some advocates of memorization here.
Whoa there! Who said anyone was learning exclusively through books? Once I'm at an intermediate level and can handle books, most of my vocabulary is built by reading books, but I actually spend a lot of time listening to podcasts containing mostly formal but spontaneous language. Podcast listening doesn't do a great deal for my vocabulary, but those speakers are what I try to match with my spoken output, not the books I read.
It's not that you learn the words in advance, and then read the books. You read the books and learn as many words as you can along the way. Then, when you read other books, you have more known words "in advance." Eventually I would like to be able to understand not just Harry Potter, but any novel or popular nonfiction book written in the past 100 years, any formal interviews and conversation, technical writing and lecturing in my areas of expertise and interest, any films and TV shows, and any informal conversation that native speakers from a different community would be expected to understand. That's my ultimate goal, and it takes a lot of words to reach it. Of course, I'm only partially there in languages other than my native one. That's OK, but the closer I am, the better. s_allard, I don't know what you are trying to accomplish, but you can rest assured that we all know learning a large number of words is not the key to mastering output. We also know very well by now that you don't care about passive vocabulary. And that you think counting words is useless. Now, maybe counting words is imprecise enough to be useless--that's a valid thing to discuss on this thread. But knowing a lot of words is certainly not useless. If you don't care about it, you should post once here saying so and then create some threads about stuff you do care about. 8 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||
| tarvos Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member China likeapolyglot.wordpr Joined 4519 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 108 of 229 10 May 2015 at 7:22am | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
I think you need to do both. Memorization is more important when you can't sledgehammer your way through a text using brute force (read: extensive reading). Then memorizing the individual words à la Iversen is the thing to do, because you can't guess what an idiom or set phrase may mean if you don't know its constituent words (ok, the meaning may be hilariously different, but odds are there is some logic behind the expression). Reading is killer when you're at the 2000-3000 word stage where you can break through most simple stuff with a kernel, but everytime someone says something more complex than "I live in China because I'm a teacher" you give up. That barrier can only be breached through lots of reading and a few memorization techniques to mop up any stray vocab you may encounter. I don't think you can either/or this approach. As for output it's a different story and you will always only use a small chunk of the tools at your disposal. That doesn't mean you don't need the rest; you may not think SIM card is directly useful, but the word card usually is and SIM card is something everyone buys nowadays, so I'd learn SIM card. And maybe "stadium" isn't obvious either if you're not a sports fanatic, but I love football, so you can bet I will want to know "stadium" or at least "football pitch". 4 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 109 of 229 10 May 2015 at 7:38am | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
This actually makes me feel good because I feel that we are somewhat on the same page, no pun intended. Nobody is saying that knowing a lot of words is useless. Certainly not me. And I do care about passive vocabulary. What I've tried to accomplish is some serious debunking and methodology into a debate that tends to meander and ramble. Not that I expect many people to agree. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||
| rdearman Senior Member United Kingdom rdearman.orgRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5048 days ago 881 posts - 1812 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Italian, French, Mandarin | Message 110 of 229 10 May 2015 at 1:04pm | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
errr... no we are not saying the same thing. If words were survival equipment, I'd rather be overloaded with things I didn't use, than missing the one thing that kept me alive. For want of a nail the shoe was lost. For want of a shoe the horse was lost. For want of a horse the rider was lost. For want of a rider the battle was lost. For want of a battle the kingdom was lost. And all for the want of a horseshoe nail. And let's not forget the boy-scout oath to "Always be prepared." Because nobody does have a way to look into the future, adventurers, mountain climbers, survivalists, sailors, soldiers, and language learners have always tried to be prepared for the unknown. BTW, If I had the money, and I knew where you lived, I would hire a nuclear physicist to stop you in the bakery and ask you about loop quantum physics in Spanish. :D 4 persons have 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 111 of 229 10 May 2015 at 3:25pm | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
This thread is about estimating the words you learn by any means. See the first post. Besides, people vary a lot. Some don't do flash cards or word lists in the beginning but use them later on. I think emk still uses SRS in French. I see that you're a beginner in Japanese. As far as I know, you don't get that many "newspaper words" for free in it, just like in Finnish. I gave a medical example here and this applies to other semi-specialized words too.
-Learning from reading doesn't imply only books. -There's also memorization, as well as other techniques like parallel texts, LR, extensive listening. -I actually use reading mostly for activating passive vocabulary and improving my grammatical accuracy.
Not me. And believe it or not, I don't think a large vocabulary is all you need. In fact, most HTLAL'ers are not lost sheep in need of your guidance. And the newbies generally get great replies here.
This issue is quite unique to English. SLA is already too focused on English, let's not bring up phrasal verbs in every thread about vocab acquisition and use. In the grand scheme of things they're actually quite a minor issue. I've not been able to find ANY thread here asking "how do I learn phrasal verbs?" (only about specific phrasal verbs and their meaning/usage).
They are not mutually exclusive. How many things would you have wanted Jeffers to mention explicitly in the first post? That language learning is more than just vocab? That this is not a contest to find the best learners, but a thread to discuss what we consider doable/average/common? That it's useful to master a small set of vocabulary well, especially in a multilingual place like Montreal or Malta? That it's possible to know many words but struggle with speaking? This is more or less what others appear to have assumed, but somehow you always assume the opposite in any thread. Imagine someone asking "I'm going to Ireland next month, any recs for dabbling with Irish?" and someone else replying "lol dude they speak English there". Impossible on HTLAL. Edited by Serpent on 10 May 2015 at 3:34pm 6 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||
| tarvos Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member China likeapolyglot.wordpr Joined 4519 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 112 of 229 10 May 2015 at 5:48pm | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
They do, but their methods change. The parameters are absolutely not the same as for a beginner and that is as should be. That's about the same as saying "I am using the oven to cook food". Sure, but you don't always set it to 200 degrees centigrade, now do you? 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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