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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 169 of 229 13 May 2015 at 3:45pm | IP Logged | |||||
I know this post was meant as an insult but I'll take it as a compliment. The great Oscar Wilde once wrote: The only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about. Rest assured. I won't talk about my concept of the language kernel. That's old hat and, I believe, well substantiated. I want to talk about the other end of the vocabulary spectrum: acquiring specialized words. Probably the classic argument in favour of acquiring a large vocabulary is the idea that the learner cannot know in advance what subjects or topics they will be exposed to. For example, you might be able to speak fluently with just 300 different words but suppose your interlocutor uses a word that you don't know. Therefore, it is important to learn vast numbers of words just in case you need them. Most of the time this idea is discussed in the context of reading literary texts. Someone will claim that they want to read great literature from the 19th century to the present day. Well that obviously requires a huge vocabulary. What has been much less discussed is the importance of technical and scientific vocabulary. I personally think that this is more challenging than literary vocabulary because precision and clarity are paramount. It's difficult to fudge. How do you prepare for all the possible topics that you could ever meet? The reality is that you can't. Take for example the world of sports. Do you attempt to systematically learn the vocabulary of American football, European football, rugby, tennis, cricket, golf, basketball, handball, etc.? What about science and technology? Obviously, the whole thing is limitless. The fundamental idea here is that you can't talk about a subject unless you know its terminology. This is a false argument, as we only know too well from our native languages. We all have observed that every branch or domain of knowledge has a specialized terminology used by its practitioners. Plumbers, lawyers, engineers, physicists, musicians, tennis players, for example, all use a certain vocabulary when talking among themselves. Most people here have a job or an area of study with the associated terminology. We don't expect people outside the field to talk like experts in the field. We accept the fact that when talking to outsiders we have to adapt our language in order to make ourselves understood. By the same token, the learner or the outsider has to make a mental an intellectual effort to learn new words and concepts in order to acquire new knowledge. There has to be a form of linguistic accommodation. The key idea is learning how to learn specialized vocabulary. Now the really interesting observation here is that much specialized terminology is simply ordinary words used in specialized ways. In other words, if you have a solid mastery of the kernel of the language, you probably have all the resources to approach a technical subject from a layman's perspective. Here's the thing. Since you probably have many of the required words, you must explore how they are used, preferably by asking for guidance. For example, you have never played tennis in your life and you end up sitting next to a professional tennis player in a train, what do you do? You can totally avoid talking about tennis. But I think you can ask intelligent questions and learn about tennis without boring the other person to death. I'm assuming here of course that the person wants to talk to you. Similarly, if you meet a neuroscientist specializing in cognitive aspects of aging, you can have an intelligent conversation on something like Alzheimer's disease even though you may know nothing about neuroscience to begin with. You learn as you go along. This is exactly what we do in our native language.The reason we can do this spontaneously is that we have a solid grasp of how our language works and we know how to expand our knowledge on the spot. For example, with formal education we have learned how to use the system of prefixes and suffixes that make up the derivational system of a language. We may even know enough latin to be able to deal with some medical terminology. This is not to say that one should not be interested in many things. Reading widely is certainly a good thing but you can't be expected to know everything about everything. Edited by s_allard on 13 May 2015 at 3:54pm 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 170 of 229 13 May 2015 at 4:11pm | IP Logged | |||||
Not necessarily. Vocabulary *can* be counted, and whatever method you use, you'll be learning vocabulary. To play s_allard's advocate, it's far more common to focus so much on the vocab that you ignore the grammar than vice versa. And Anki/SRS can show you your progress, so that's a killer combination for efficiency but also for burnout. Of course I agree that we should be able to discuss this or that aspect of learning without pointing out that you should do other things too, and I'm tired of what happens in every vocabulary thread. But there is indeed a legitimate issue here, the concern about intimidating new learners by numbers like 8000 words in a year or even less. As far as I can tell, what people question is your claim that this is doable for anyone. Which comes across like the "light reading" scene: 
(Also, if you really follow the full LR method according to siomotteikiru's principles, you don't really need anything else to get conversational) Edited by Serpent on 13 May 2015 at 4:13pm 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Cavesa Triglot Senior Member Czech Republic Joined 4821 days ago 3277 posts - 6779 votes Speaks: Czech*, FrenchC2, EnglishC1 Studies: Spanish, German, Italian | Message 171 of 229 13 May 2015 at 4:19pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I wasn't saying word families but words. If you don't count related words (such as an
adjective and a substantive and a verb from the same root) as separate words but as families, it is different of course. And as I was asking, you could get totally different and much lower numbers if you take into account that very similar words with the same meaning that happen to be in Spanish and French are in fact one family, not two. And I think I mentioned in the post I was speaking about mainstream languages only, I hope that didn't get lost in the process of shortening my post. I am not experienced when it comes to totally different languages, so I cannot (and do not dare to) speak about them. If the part got lost, sorry about that, it was my oversight. As I open my favourite dictionary (Le robert micro with 30 000 words), it still keeps words from the same family as separate entries. That is how my understanding of what are individual words (that are counted for the purposes such as this thread's estimates) was formed. That is the base of my guess of a few thousand words, I never said a few thousand families. And I think the importance of learning individual words in the families might be a bit underestimated. Learning the proper adjective formed from a verb, that is a new piece of knowledge as well as there are usually a few incorrect options you could think of as well. And one more mistake I made with my estimate: The numbers are bound to be different in various stages of learning. Beginners learn tons of new words while someone in the advanced plateau working slowly towards the C levels just learns fewer. That is a serious mistake, sorry about that. I agree with smallwhite that some "arguments" are simply weird in the thread, such as accusing people of making vocabulary the only thing a learner should study. But the numbers, no matter how imprecise, are a good artificial structure in the mess, a way to orient a learner in a way "how far on my path I might be right now". The more that the theory of 300 words being the base and everything more just an unnecessary bonus, that is nonsense. You just need several thousand words and it is a long path. 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 172 of 229 13 May 2015 at 4:34pm | IP Logged | |||||
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You certainly mentioned that, but the conclusion sounded like it's meant to apply to all languages. And I agree about learning each individual word in the family. Unlike Jeffers I also counted words, not families.
2 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 173 of 229 13 May 2015 at 4:39pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I see that many people are legitimately concerned that newbies here at HTLAL may be discouraged by the
magnitude of the task ahead of them and especially by all this talk about the thousands of words they have to learn. I totally agree. Even I get discouraged when I read that people are learning 8000 words a year. Well, I have the solution. It's called Allard's 300-word formula for instant language learning success. Let me tell you how it works. OK, people, don't get excited. It's only a joke. 3 persons have 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 174 of 229 13 May 2015 at 4:47pm | IP Logged | |||||
*Raises hand* ahhh... hello! I want to be not just B2 but C2 and not work hard, any advice would be welcomed with appreciation. Oh! And how to play a guitar without practice, I want to know that too. 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 175 of 229 13 May 2015 at 4:52pm | IP Logged | |||||
Well it depends how you define work I guess. I don't find reading books, chatting with people, watching movies really work at all, let alone hard. Once you get past a certain point (B1? B2?) language learning is simply living in the language, not much more I think. The idea that learning vocabulary and grammar are really separate activities is interesting. That's true if you mostly just do grammar drills and mostly just learn individual words with flash cards or word lists. If on the other hand you mostly learn a language via immersion (i.e., via talking, reading, listening) there is no distinction between grammar and vocabulary learning: Every sentence is both a grammar and a word lesson. The main advantage of counting words is that they are easy to count. I am sure my grammar learning is following my vocabulary learning relatively closely. Edited by patrickwilken on 13 May 2015 at 4:59pm 4 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 176 of 229 13 May 2015 at 5:05pm | IP Logged | |||||
I wouldn't protect newbies like that, but I don't mind HTLAL doing that. So what do you prefer I do in the future? Say, * share my SRS tips but not mentioned that I once did 8000 cards in 4 months, or * not share my SRS tips, or * mention 8000 but mention also that it is not doable for anyone, or * participate less in threads on vocabulary, and more in threads on grammar, or... ... I don't know. What do you think? 1 person has voted this message useful |
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