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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 129 of 229 12 May 2015 at 7:20am | IP Logged | ||||||||
To be serious here for a minute, as I've said before, the Spanish expert I mentioned said that the active vocabulary of a very cultivated native speaker was around 5000 different words. Since I hardly call myself a cultivated native speaker of English, I think that my active vocabulary in English, as defined as the words I've used in the past 12 months as around 2500 different words. I would think that my target Spanish active vocabulary is around that. Again, as I pointed out, all 45 Spanish e-mails that I've written required less than a total of 500 different words. I even think it's closer to 300. I'd be curious to see how these outlandish figures for active vocabulary are defined. 1 person has 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 130 of 229 12 May 2015 at 7:33am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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I highly recommend the article quoted as the source of the figure for a vocabulary of 20000 active words for a
native English speaker. Here is an interesting passage: What is the difference between an active and a passive vocabulary? Simply put, an active vocabulary is comprised of words that you can recall and use in a sentence yourself. A passive vocabulary, on the other hand, is a vocabulary that you can recognize and know the definition of words, but are not able to use yourself. Now, here’s where it gets interesting: although an average adult native English speaker has an active vocabulary of about 20,000 words, the Reading Teachers Book of Lists claims that the first 25 words are used in 33% of everyday writing, the first 100 words appear in 50% of adult and student writing, and the first 1,000 words are used in 89% of every day writing! Of course, as we progressively move to a higher percentage, the number of words starts to dramatically increase (especially after 95% of comprehension), but it has been said that a vocabulary of just 3000 words provides coverage for around 95% of common texts (such as news items, blogs, etc.). Liu Na and Nation (1985) have shown that this is the rough amount of words necessary before we can efficiently learn from context with unsimplified text. As pointed out, 3000 words gives you 95% coverage of common texts. That's pretty much in line with what I suspect my active vocabulary is in English. 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 131 of 229 12 May 2015 at 7:39am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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For the record, on this thread alone-- on a single topic-- s_allard has used the following 44 uncommon or
unusual words:
In addition to this, despite the relatively narrow topic, he's also used the following "off-topic" words:
And he's used these rare words as examples, but not in running sentences:
Now, I don't know how many unique words a typical native speaker uses, but to speak in the style of s_allard you seem to need quite a few more than the bare minimum! Of course, the quoted estimate of 20,000 is of words the person knows how to use, not the number they have used in the past 12 months. Unless you're a very prolific writer/talker, those numbers are going to be very different. I don't know whether English is s_allard's primary language, but if it is, and he's half as loquacious offline as he is here, but about all sorts of things other than just vocabulary, then I would guess that he's used many more than 2500 different words over the past year. And I'm quite sure that he knows how to use a lot more. Conclusion: You may be able to get by in English with few words, but if you want to express yourself in a manner similar to the way s_allard does here, but on a wider variety of topics, without running into vocabulary gaps too often, you are going to need to know how to use several thousand different words. Edited by robarb on 12 May 2015 at 7:42am 6 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6515 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 132 of 229 12 May 2015 at 8:02am | IP Logged | ||||||||
The simple explanation is that I don't feel comfortable with Serbian yet - I still need a dictionary (and sometimes a grammar or a peek at my green sheets). I do feel reasonably at home in languages like Spanish, French and German, which I speak and where I can read most books without a dictionary. My Russian and my (Modern) Greek both hover right below the 10.000 word mark, and I don't claim to speak them, nor to feel comfortable reading them. But in a pinch I can do it. The funny thing about percentages is that they vary surprisingly little with different dictionary sizes. I don't own a really big Serbian dictionary, and I haven't counted words in Croatian where I do own some reasonably comprehensive dictionaries. But from other languages I know that you have to use really enormous dictionaries of more than 100.000 headwords before the percentages go drastically down. The reason is that many of the supposedly rare and difficult words in a normal-sized dictionary are international loanwords or variations on something known, so even a count based on a modest dictionary with just 15.000 words will give a good assessment of the percentage you would get with a dictionary of something like 30.000 or 40.000 words. And inversely, you won't find that you know all the words in a micro dictionary (unless you have learnt it by heart of course, which I don't do). But I know that I know more words in Low German than there are in my lousy dictionary with just 5000 words - otherwise I couldn't read the stuff. As for my active vocabulary I can't give trustworthy estimates because being able to use a word is much more vague and fluctuating than being aware of its meaning. But I did an English wordcount based on my multiconfused log - resulting in two corpora of around 36-37.000 words each. And as far as I remember I had only used some 7.000 words (the true numbers are hidden somewhere in this thread) - with an overlap of maybe half the words. But I could probably rattle off several hundred African bird names in English if I wanted to boost the numbers. So to make to point once again: my active vocabulary in Serbian is not nearly as big as the numbers for my passive vocabulary suggest. The weaker a language is, the smaller the percentages of active words out of all known words. Right now I would guess my passive Serbian vocabulary is somewhere between 5.000 and 10.000 words based on the 'feel' of my reading experiences - which by the way haven't included much fine literature, but most of the articles in Wikipedia on paleontology and much of the stuff on zoology and history (and therefore I would find it easier to write an article about ammonites in Serbian than to have a discussion about kid rearing or electricity bills). But I doubt that I could muster 2000 active words. Edited by Iversen on 12 May 2015 at 8:22am 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 133 of 229 12 May 2015 at 8:34am | IP Logged | ||||||||
This a great post because it confirms, albeit unwittingly I think, exactly my point. According to this poster I've used only 44 uncommon words plus 15 other "off-topic" words. I'll exclude the rare words used as examples. That's only 59 words. What is my active vocabulary for this thread? How many different words have I used here? This is the really significant statistic. Let's be really generous and say I used 300 different words in the thread here. What has thrown the poster off here is that fact that 44 words could be considered rare. Therefore, and this is the major fallacy, I can also use many other words that are less common. That may be true but the fact remains that I only used around 300 different words in this thread. Are my other posts here at HTLAL very different? It depends on the topic, of course, but I don't think that my writing style is fundamentally different. But I also use English for other topics such as when meeting physicists in bakery shops. So, if I throw in the other words I have used in the last 12 months, that's exactly how I arrive at the figure of around 2500 different words. What the heck, I'll even bump that up to 3000. That's a very large figure for actual usage. If people really paid attention to their output, they would see that this figure is not outlandish at all. Edited by s_allard on 12 May 2015 at 8:40am 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 134 of 229 12 May 2015 at 9:32am | IP Logged | ||||||||
I ran the corpus of your writing in this thread through a unique-word counter, and it came up with 1767 unique words. I sampled 100 of them and found that 92 of them were genuine English words (eliminating things like Wikipedia, HTLAL, or 2500). Therefore, I estimate that you used about 1626 unique word-forms on this thread. That's not lemmatized, so you could reduce the numbers somewhat. How many different forms per lemma do you suppose you've used on the thread, on average? In this little text of mine above, I've used three words with lemmas that you haven't used on the thread: "unique", "corpus," and "genuine." And in your last post, you've added an additional six: "generous", "fallacy", "unwitting", "confirm", "heck", and "bump." That tells me we've hardly come close to exhausting the words that are relevant in the context. If we had a bigger corpus of your output, we might be able to find the point at which new unique words begin to become infrequent. As it is, you are well above 300 and introducing several new ones with each additional post. In fact, due to the limited range of subject matter, we haven't even begun to see the active vocabulary that you're capable of, and, yes, use. Here are some words you haven't written on this thread: tall, million, brother, bottom, water, phone, computer, walk, blue, yellow, green, fish, bird Now those are some pretty common words, huh? The point is, on top of the not 300 but 1000-odd words you've used on this thread, there are several hundred words like "water" that are extremely common, but weren't relevant here. Not quantum physics, but water. If people really recorded large enough samples of their output, they would see that each additional conversation adds a few unique words, and the additions don't dry up until you get to a really high number, and even then, there is a little kick every time a topic is introduced that hasn't been used before. And, though as you say, you don't have to, I am sure that you could use some words that you normally don't if an unusual conversation topic came up. You know the words and you know how to use them, even if your probability of actually saying them in a given year is not that high. This number of words that you know how to use is what most people call the "active vocabulary." One can start speaking when the number is small, well under a thousand. But you, s_allard, have well over 3000 English words in that set (unless you really can't talk about the things that you say you rarely or never talk about. But I doubt that). Anyway, factual disagreement aside, 8000/year is overkill. If you're getting even 2000, you should be able to use a s_allard's-English worth of words in a few short years. But not one year. Edited by robarb on 12 May 2015 at 9:44am 6 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 135 of 229 12 May 2015 at 10:11am | IP Logged | ||||||||
Obviously, they're defining what a word is differently. Maybe we can use algebra instead... ** The average active vocabulary of an adult English speaker is around 100X. ** The active vocabulary of a very cultivated native speaker is around 142X. (Ratio inspired by this article about SAT scores). ** The active vocabulary of a typical university student is around 43X. (1500 divided by 5000, per post 89). ** s_allard thinks his active English vocabulary is 71X. (2500 per him, divided by 5000 from him, times 142X) ** s_allard wants his active Spanish vocabulary to be 71X. (to be the same as the figure above, per him) ** s_allard thinks he used 9X words in his 45 Spanish emails. (300 per him, divided by 5000 from him, times 142X) ** s_allard thinks he used 9X words in this thread. (300 per him, divided by 5000 from him, times 142X) It seems easier to see whether figures seem reasonable. Edited by smallwhite on 12 May 2015 at 11:18am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| smallwhite Pentaglot Senior Member Australia Joined 5120 days ago 537 posts - 1045 votes Speaks: Cantonese*, English, Mandarin, French, Spanish | Message 136 of 229 12 May 2015 at 10:29am | IP Logged | ||||||||
In post 105, s_allard took the first page of Harry Potter I, and estimated that the computer wordcount of 366 words could be reduced to 240 word families. If we use the same ratio, then 1767 lemmas become 1159 word families. So, what s_allard estimates to be 300 words turns out to be 1159 word families. The ratio is 1:3.9. Edited by smallwhite on 12 May 2015 at 10:33am 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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