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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 193 of 229 14 May 2015 at 3:30pm | IP Logged | |||||
The question of what to put on an SRS card is quite different from whether to count words in terms of word forms or word families. You put on the SRS what you want to memorize, whatever word or words that takes. But for counting words in a text, the distinction between word form and word family is fundamental. First of all, this determines the number of words we are talking about. For example, am, is, are, was, were, been, be represent seven word forms (I've excluded the compound forms) but only one word family. This is very important for heavily inflected languages like French where, for example, fais, fait, faisons, faites, font, faisais, faisait, fasions, faisiez, fasaient, ferai, feras, fera, ferons, ferez, feront, etc. are all word forms of the word family faire. The difference between number of word forms and number of word families can be enormous. In French, as you can see the difference is much greater than in English. So, are we talking about 8000 word forms or word families? But for Paul Nation et al this distinction goes much deeper than just the manner of counting words. The concept of word family suggests the idea that the speaker stores a basic or generic form of the word and a set of rules, called the grammar, that determine how the word is actually used in various contexts. So, a 300-word-family set in French could easily generate 1200 word forms. This creates some interesting problems. For example, two words can have the same form but belong to different families. "that" can be a pronoun, a conjunction, an adjective and a determiner. One could have four different word families for "that". In French, there is something similar with "ce" that can have a number of different very different functional roles. 1 person has 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 194 of 229 14 May 2015 at 3:34pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Well the meaning may be obvious but the other direction, creating the adjective when you
know only the verb, is not. I think another wall we are running into is clearly tied to previous discussion on what it means to learn a word. Understanding whole family (word family, not mine) is easy. Correctly deriving and using the words, not so much. 2 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 195 of 229 14 May 2015 at 3:55pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I agree with Cavesa's post just above, and I think the question of how you might interpret "learn" is thornier than the question of "word". A whole spectrum of meanings apply to "learn" from simply being able to recognize a word, to being able to use it in a variety of contexts spontaneously. That and the fact that I may be sharp with a word one day and totally forget it the next. Meh...
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| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5242 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 196 of 229 14 May 2015 at 4:31pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Defining what "learning" a word is certainly thorny. Thornier than defining a word, I'm not sure about that. Actually,
I think learning is relatively easy to specify. There are basically three stages of learning a word: 1. Learn to recognize, i.e. I've seen it before somewhere. 2. Learn to understand, i.e. I think I know what it means. 3. Learn to use, i.e. I feel confident that I know how to use this word properly. There are probably some variations on these points. For example, I would add a fourth item. "Have actually used this word properly." to emphasize that there is learning through doing. But that maybe technically falls under using rather than learning. Edited by s_allard on 14 May 2015 at 8:10pm 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 197 of 229 14 May 2015 at 5:07pm | IP Logged | |||||
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The stages are nice but what about related languages? Unusual contexts? Words you've drilled and can reproduce but somehow fail to understand? Words that you can recall with a little hesitation while speaking but have no time to identify/remember/decipher while listening?
@smallwhite one thing here is that monolingual English speakers are some of the least experienced language learners. (is it a language learning forum? are most members learning English or other languages too?) Imagine a fitness or weight-lifting forum. Would you recommend a newbie to begin with lifting 100kg? Is it dismissive to assume they can't do that? 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| patrickwilken Senior Member Germany radiant-flux.net Joined 4345 days ago 1546 posts - 3200 votes Studies: German | Message 198 of 229 14 May 2015 at 5:20pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I would divide learning into: (1) knowing the word in context; (2) being able to talk about the word in isolation if prompted (meaning, grammatical facts); (3) being able to actively use the word without being prompted; (4) actively using the word in a given lexicon.
Note: Some people conflate 3 and 4, you can measure the number of words some group uses (4) but that doesn't necessarily tell you which words can can actively use if needed (3). Some of the tension between s_allard and others on this discussion is that he favors 4, while most other people are interested in 3 (or perhaps 1 or 2). So when s_allard says that Spanish university students have a +5000 word lexicon, he is referring to 4, and other's object by referring to 3. Of course if you just want to read newspapers like me, 1 is plenty good enough. 1 is passive knowledge of a word, 3 and 4 active knowledge; 2 is perhaps somewhere between passive and active as you won't necessarily be able to use the word without prompting. The problem with the original survey is that we are all using different meanings of learn. Edited by patrickwilken on 14 May 2015 at 5:40pm 2 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 199 of 229 14 May 2015 at 5:49pm | IP Logged | |||||
I believe that on both occasions, I was answering polls about flashcards, and got asked about them.
You are saying that I'm going around hurting people. The issue at hand is very straightforward, we don't need analogies if that's the type I'm going to get. Look, I see two stances we can take regarding this newbie thing. Stance one it is my responsibility to protect newbies because they are fragile, or stance two newbies do not need my protection because they are not ignorant or because I simply do not owe anyone anything. Both stances are valid, I suppose, but you chose to take stance one, while I am of stance two but I decided to do whatever you prefer because I wanted to please you. So I don't need analogies like that. I have asked you to simply tell me what you want me to do. In fact you are just guessing what newbies need. Maybe we can start a poll and ask newbies, 。 I need protection 。 I don't need protection 。 I don't know 。 I don't care For once, there's enough space to include all the options we need. Edited by smallwhite on 14 May 2015 at 5:54pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
 meramarina Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5779 days ago 1341 posts - 2303 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: German, Italian, French Personal Language Map | Message 200 of 229 14 May 2015 at 6:58pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Let's try to stay on topic since this thread is getting so long. Why not start a new thread to discuss the newbie
question? It's a good one and probably deserves its own discussion. 4 persons have voted this message useful |
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