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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 |  | |
| 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 137 of 229 12 May 2015 at 11:09am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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Ages ago, EMK started a thread about French word frequency and did a number of really great charts based on the data from the Université de Savoie; French Vocabulary Frequency with Lexique.
It shows that, for French at least, in order to speak/read/understand at a 99.5% level you need to know over 20,000 words, and 99% is still above 16,000 words. Also interesting to quote EMK: "One thing really stands out here: Nouns are just brutal. They may only make up 15% of a typical text, but you need far more nouns than anything else." BTW, s_allard made the same assertions in that thread, so rather than re-hash it all here, you might want to all go read the thread in it's entirety, and if you're interested in French and know a little SQLite (or just sql) EMK gave links to downloading the French Lexique for yourself. To be fair to s_allard, the chart does show in order to get 75% coverage you only need to know about 1400 words, the problem is which 1400 words do you need? 7 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| Jeffers Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4721 days ago 2151 posts - 3960 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Hindi, Ancient Greek, French, Sanskrit, German | Message 138 of 229 12 May 2015 at 1:51pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
This sentence from Robarb's post got me thinking about something I've wondered about from time to time. When I did frequency analysis of Hindi, every new text had a decent amount of new unique vocabulary items, as well as new uses of words that previously were unique in my growing corpus. So I've often wondered at what corpus size does the increase become negligible? My Hindi corpus got up to only around 150,000 words, so any new text still has new words, but if you get the base corpus up there must be a point where adding new texts has little effect on the frequency list. This might be relevant to members who read a lot, for example participants in the Super Challenge. If you read at the rate required for the SC, you are reading about 900,000 words per year (3000 pages per year * 300 words per page). At a pace like that you should soon get to the point where unseen words are a rarity. Of course it depends on the sorts of books you are reading. 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 139 of 229 12 May 2015 at 4:06pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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I admire the statistical skills of my fellow posters who are determined to prove that I have a larger vocabulary that
I claim to have. When I get around to it, I'll do some number-crunching myself. But, it my opinion, all this is is besides the point. I keep hearing all these figures and ratios flying around but nobody is telling me how they can use those numbers of words. The fundamental question is always the same: What can you do with your vocabulary? I don't want to know the size of your vocabulary. I want to see what you can do with it. In a previous post I gave a list of 10 tasks that I hope to accomplish in Spanish. One of them is to write personal and professional e-mails. It goes without saying that these e-mails should sound as natural and be error-free as possible. How many words do I need to do this? If I learn all the 5000 words of Routledge's Spanish frequency dictionary, will I be able to spontaneously write proper e-mails? I doubt it. Is the solution more words? Somebody told me I needed an active vocabulary of 20000 words. Again I doubt it. The problem isn't the number of words, it's how you put the words together. E-mail writing is not a particularly demanding literary genre, so what's the problem? It's pretty simple. The problem is how to construct a series of correct sentences that respect the conventions of the genre and convey the desired message. Easier said than done. What words do you choose? What forms do you give to these words according to rules of grammar? What order do you put the words in? What is the degree of formality? How do you open and close? Etc. I know how to do this quite well in my native language because I have read and written thousands of e-mails but in Spanish it's always challenging because I just don't have the experience. I would not dare send a professional e-mail in Spanish without having it checked by my tutor. Do most people here believe that the solution is to throw more words at the problem? I truly doubt it despite all the talk about knowing large numbers of words. I suspect that most people here would do exactly as I do and think twice about sending off a 300-word professional letter in a foreign language without running it by a native speaker. But I could be wrong. Something I find quite fascinating about all these discussions about vocabulary size is that there is not even a hint of a similar discussion about grammar size. What's that? How about trying to measure the level of your grammar skills? I'm using the word grammar in a very wide sense of rules of putting words into sentences. I believe that grammar is just as important as vocabulary. That is the wall we always run into. Words without good grammar are pretty useless. For example, I've always noticed that what trips up very advanced speakers of English or French is the small things like prepositions and verb forms. When I have written about using small vocabularies, I have always insisted on the fact that the real skill is mastering the grammar that is required to use these words well. In fact, the whole idea of a language kernel is actually based on the idea of identifying the key or core grammatical and semantic structures of a writing or speaking genre. Instead of worrying about numbers of words, people would be much better served by learning the key grammar constructs that determine how words are put together. 3 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 140 of 229 12 May 2015 at 4:25pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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If someone asked you "how many eggs do I need to bake this or that," would you answer "you
can't bake this or that with eggs only?" Grammar is at least just as useless without vocab as vocab is without grammar. 6 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| patrickwilken Senior Member Germany radiant-flux.net Joined 4345 days ago 1546 posts - 3200 votes Studies: German | Message 141 of 229 12 May 2015 at 6:26pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
Yeah. I did. I use them to read novels and advanced newspapers in my TL. 5 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| Jeffers Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4721 days ago 2151 posts - 3960 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Hindi, Ancient Greek, French, Sanskrit, German | Message 142 of 229 12 May 2015 at 6:44pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
Why do you care about my vocabulary size or what I can do with it? [EDIT: this bit of my post was meant to be cheeky banter rather than an attack, but reading it again it could be interpreted as a bit too aggresive. That's not my intention at all.]
The problem with this argument is that if I simply swap the words "grammar" and "vocabulary" you have the same problem. How much grammar do I need to write personal and professional emails? Probably not a lot. If need be I could do the whole thing in present tense. Turning to the example of ordering bread at a bakery in French, do I really need to know the preterite tense? Should I learn it on the odd chance that I will bump into an author who will engage me with literary questions? Okay, that's as ridiculous a example as the quantum physics example. But do I need to know the imperfect? I'm sure I could get away with the passé composé. Do I need to understand all of the subtle varieties of the use of être?
I could equally ask if I learn all of the grammar taught in some Spanish grammar, will I be able to spontaneously write proper e-mails? Of course not, and I doubt you would think so either. Let's look again at the more practical example of the professional letter:
I have yet to see anyone say the solution is to "throw more words at the problem". In any case, there is no doubt I would be looking for grammatical help, but I think that in reality most of the help given would be in helping me to find the appropriate word to replace the more ordinary vocabulary I would have chosen. My point is not to argue for vocabulary over grammar. I think both are equally necessary, and I would argue against either extreme. In the context of this discussion, however, you can't argue that you only need a few words for a conversation and then suggest grammar in its place. How many points of grammar do I need for a single conversation? My point is that you need both grammar and vocabulary. More importantly, you need practice and experiece with using both. I think that's probably something we can all agree on. Edited by Jeffers on 12 May 2015 at 7:58pm 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 143 of 229 12 May 2015 at 8:16pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
Now that I have a minute, I decided to revisit this issue of the size of the vocabulary of my posts in this thread. I imagine that @robarb used the Advanced Text Analyser at usingenglish.com and estimated that I used about 1626 word-forms. In the jargon of Paul Nation et al, that refers to different spellings. For example, "is, was, were, be, been, are, am, being" are considered separate words. It's not clear what happens to things like "has been, had been, have been will be". The same for "continue, continues, continued, continuing, continuous, continuously". What we are interested in is the unique word-families whereby the above forms would be reduced to some generic form such as "be" and "continue". How many word-families are in the 1626 word-forms? Looking at a sample of 519 word-forms, I see examples such as: acquire, acquiring, acquisition active, actively actual, actually advance, advanced challenge, challenging post, posts, posters, poster and many more. My estimate is that the 1626 word-forms are made up of around 813 word-families. It is true that this is a much larger number than my earlier statement that my posts used a maximum of 500 word- families. I was wrong. An intriguing question remains. If this figure of 813 word-families is derived from a sample of 20 posts, what would be the figure for all 25xx posts? One could argue that since the thread subjects differ, the word-families used to deal with the various topics will have to expand. This is true to some extent, but one could also argue that since the topics here at HTLAL revolve around a same theme and, the windbag I am, I repeat myself a lot, as many people like to point out, my vocabulary is relatively stable. I agree with this and suggest that the entire active vocabulary size for all my posts is around 1500 word- families. This is in line with what I have always said around here. I can recognize and certainly use many more words than these of course but those are the ones that I have actually used. What this also says to me is that in Spanish, there is a good chance that I only need about 1500 words to participate actively in a blog or forum. This is very encouraging but unfortunately, it's not as simple as that, for reasons that I have already outlined. If I could just figure out how to use 1500 words in Spanish properly. 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 144 of 229 12 May 2015 at 8:46pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
Jeffers has raised a couple of interesting points here, but I'll just concentrate on one point that I think highlights what this discussion is all about. Speaking about the 300-word professional letter, jeffers writes : "...there is no doubt I would be looking for grammatical help, but I think that in reality most of the help given would be in helping me to find the appropriate word to replace the more ordinary vocabulary I would have chosen." I fundamentally disagree with this idea that most of the help is in replacing the ordinary vocabulary. The number one problem is mistakes that is totally unaware of. These mistakes are of various kinds: spelling mistakes, wrong words, bad grammar, wrong tone of voice, non-respect of conventions for opening and closing of letters. A lot can go wrong besides just replacing so-called ordinary vocabulary. Since jeffers sees this as just an issue of vocabulary, the solution is replacing the supposedly poor vocabulary. My position is that vocabulary is only one part of the equation. In fact, I may have all the right words; it's just that I can't use them well. I'm not arguing for grammar over vocabulary. You need both, and on this point, jeffers and I agree. My position has always been the same in all the threads here: a very effective strategy I propose is to work on a small set of words with strong emphasis on grammar and actual speaking (where possible) and then expand the vocabulary as necessary. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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