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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 5232 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes  Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 33 of 229 01 May 2015 at 1:14pm | IP Logged | ||
When I saw my name used in vain not once but thrice, I wondered what I'd done to provoke such ire. I'd never heard of the Simple English Wikipedia until this post. Out of curiosity, I did go to the Simple English Wikipedia page to see what this is about. Alas, I have to report that Simple English has nothing to do with my concept of the language kernel. So, as flattering or unflattering as may have been the intent, the poster is kindly asked to refrain from attributing to me things I have not done. That said, what is being referred to here in this rather snarky post is the fact that some months ago in another thread I advanced the idea that for purposes of preparing for the C2-level CEFR speaking examination, a useful strategy would be to concentrate on the key grammatical and lexical structures that are common in high-quality samples of speeches by native speakers. I took a series of TED talks in Spanish as approximations of C2 level discourses, counted the different words used, broke them down into four categories: nouns, adjectives, verbs and connecting words. I came to the conclusion that there was a set or kernel of around 450 words that were widespread enough in all the samples as to provide a good foundation for an approach to learning how to speak like a TEDtalker. It goes without saying that this kernel has to be supplemented with whatever technical, slangy, rare and obscure terms are needed for the particular subject at hand. It should be pointed out that the emphasis in all this is on structures rather than words. The idea is that building a discourse in a language requires the mastery of a series of building blocks that have to be put together seamlessly in real-time. Although we are working with lists of words, it is important to keep in mind that these words are in fact just the tips of icebergs of use and meaning. For example, we paid special attention to connecting words that serve to bind the other units into sentences or units of discourse. I have defined such a kernel for French and Spanish. Colleagues of mine have worked on German, Russian and Polish for the C2 exams. The point of all this is that rather than learning vocabulary willy nilly a more strategic approach is to concentrate on mastering the essential structures that you are absolutely guaranteed to use and then expand your knowledge as needed. This is all there is to this idea of the language kernel. This has nothing to do with the silly drivel alluded to by another nasty piece of work. Edited by s_allard on 01 May 2015 at 1:17pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5232 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 34 of 229 01 May 2015 at 1:55pm | IP Logged | ||
There are some goods points here. If speaking the target language is not important, then productive vocabulary is not important. However, this does not mean that quality is less important than size. We're still talking about the quality of understanding. I have always said: vocabulary expands according to need. The more and wider you read the more your vocabulary will increase. Using SRS or some form of list is a great idea for keeping track of words used and for memorizing forms. Just so that people don't get the idea that I'm against word lists or SRS, I'll briefly explain what I do for Spanish. And I'm certainly not suggesting that this is any way better than anything that has been proposed here. Pretty much like everybody, when I'm reading or listening and I come across something interesting I make note of the entire phrase or sentence. This can be in a text file or a notebook. I do a bit of research on the form to see how it works and what it is related to. I decide if this is something I want to keep for my working vocabulary or just let go by because it is not very common. If it's a keeper, I'll put it into one of my Anki decks. I have decks for different themes or specific problems areas. For example, the Spanish imperfect subjunctive is a major challenge for me; so I have a deck just for that. I also have a deck for prepositions and a deck for common idioms. There's something called C2 phrases that contain great examples that I want to learn by heart. No entry is just a single word. I may highlight a single word but it is always accompanied by a complete example. There is usually no translation unless the example is really obtuse. What I do not have is a long list of single words and their translation. This doesn't work for me. What I also have is what I call a To Use list. This is simply a text file of things that I make a point of deliberately using in my writing or speaking. Since I write a page or two every week, I keep referring to this list for ideas of words or phrases to incorporate in my writing style. With the help of my tutor I go over what works and what doesn't. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| robarb Nonaglot Senior Member United States languagenpluson Joined 4861 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 35 of 229 01 May 2015 at 4:59pm | IP Logged | ||
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As discussed above, it's hard to count. But in the past 5 years I've added languages with thousands of cognates
coming for free (Dutch, Swedish, Danish, Norwegian), plus everything I know in Cantonese, Japanese, and Korean. I can't remember if I started Esperanto before or after 5 years ago, but either way I've added a good number of words in it. Add to that any incremental vocabulary increase I've made in the languages I already knew, and I think it adds up to over 8001. Of course, most of that is stuff like wetenschap/vetenskap/videnskab/vitenskap for someone who already knew German Wissenschaft. If you only counted non-obvious new words that I would have to memorize or learn from scratch, the number would be far, far smaller. But it turns out that if you learn a lot of languages around the world, the overall amount of loanwords and cognates is enough to grow your vocabulary more quickly than a new learner usually can. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5232 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 36 of 229 03 May 2015 at 6:38am | IP Logged | ||
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Ignoring the usual twaddle that contributes nothing to the thread, I want to come back to this idea of what it is
to know a word. I think this might be of some relevance to the subject of measuring the number of words one acquires over the years. Considering that nobody keeps track of the words that they learn in their native language, one can wonder why it is of any use to do so in a foreign language. What happens is that when learning a foreign language, we tend to keep records of the words we learn and use tools like flashcards that are countable. Therefore we have some statistics that we can compile into nice little tables. But at the same time we must admit that many people --I'm one of them--do not give a hoot about these numbers at all because we consider them of little value. The interesting thing about this debate is that all parties agree that vocabulary is important and that bigger is generally better than smaller. Increasing one's vocabulary, i.e. acquiring new words, is a very important process in learning a new language. If there is so much agreement, what is there to debate? Isn't acquiring new words just a matter of making lists of words that we read or hear? Or maybe just using a frequency dictionary or copying an existing Anki stack?. As I have stated earlier, much of the problem lies in the idea of "knowing" a word. I'll use a specific example. Here are a wordlist and a sentence in Spanish: A) artista, haber, lo, seguir, ser, siempre, un, y B) He sido siempre un artista y sigo siéndolo. The words in A are simply a lemmatized and alphabetical list of the words in B. Some people would argue that when we read B we are necessarily processing the words in A. In fact, if we want to look up the words of B in a Spanish dictionary, we have to look up the words from A. So, one common approach to learning Spanish or any language is to learn lists or flashcard decks of words like A. If necessary, words can be given a short translation that manifests some central or key meaning. The idea is that these words make up the building blocks of the language and when combined with the appropriate study of grammar will allow us to understand and produce sentences like B. In my opinion this is not really a bad idea. Many of us do something like this of some sorts. I think wordlists are useful mnemonic devices for remembering words. The problem arises when we think that just knowing words means knowing how to speak the language. In other words, knowing the words of A will automatically give us the skill to spontaneously produce B. This is certainly not the case. While B is built from the words in A, the forms and their order depend on knowledge of grammar, semantic and stylistic constraints that are not in list A. The real problem is how to go from A to B. To say that you know the verb ser in Spanish because you can conjugate in in all tenses tells us very little about your ability to use ser properly. This is why learning to write well in the target language is extremely challenging, not for lack of words but for lack of the skills to put the words together in a manner that approaches what a native speaker would write. Most language learners are aware of this problem and end up using some sort of combination of words and sentences. I take the extreme view that learning isolated words is useless because a word is not a unit of meaning, despite all appearances. Everything is context. No context, no meaning. Therefore, I would be in favour of lists of sentences like B instead of lists like A. That said, and as I have stated many times, I do believe that wordlists can be used for purposes of memorization and personal benchmarking. I use wordlists broken down by functional category to remind me of what I need to know. For example, it could be a list of the 100 most important verbs that I have to master. The list isn't telling me how to use the verbs; it's there to remind me of what I have to review in depth. In conclusion, counting words maybe fun for those who are statistically-inclined but I tend to think that it is a waste of time. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5232 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 37 of 229 03 May 2015 at 8:15am | IP Logged | ||
I know that this post was meant to be something other than a contribution to the thread but it does give me an opportunity to revisit an old theme that has some relevance to the current theme. Those who followed the discussion back then will recall that at the time we were looking at strategies for preparing the C2 speaking examination. In most test situations, the exam includes reading an article, giving a short oral summary of the article and then engaging in a debate with one or two examiners over aspects of the article. My position back then was that of paramount importance at the C2 level of speaking performance were grammatical accuracy, fluency, sophisticated vocabulary, idioms and the ability to play with words and make fine distinctions. I also advanced that all of this does not require the actual use of a huge vocabulary. In fact, I suggested that a 30 minute discussion would probably not require the candidate to use more than 500 different word families. Furthermore, I went so far as to suggest that one could elaborate a small number of high-frequent lexical items and grammatical structures that would be typical of the C2 oral examination. The closest approximation of the C2-level discourse I suggested was the TEDtalks available in many languages and often with subtitles. I then went on to look at a series of TEDtalks in Spanish and eventually came up with what I called the C2 oral Spanish kernel. Keeping in mind what it was designed for, this kernel represents nevertheless a very sophisticated speaking style in Spanish. Does that mean that our C2 speakers who tries to buy a SIM card instead of giving a TEDtalk is completely stymied or, as our poster delightfully put it, "screwed". I seriously doubt this because buying a SIM card is not particularly difficult. I'll be the first to admit ordering a SIM card and lecturing on some technical detail are quite different. Edit: The first line was edited to attenuate some remarks, in accordance with a request from the moderator. Edited by s_allard on 04 May 2015 at 4:29am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6399 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 38 of 229 03 May 2015 at 4:22pm | IP Logged | ||
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Are you assuming that the C2 kernel user has already taken classes at B1, B2 and C1? Major grammar work and C2 kernel can let even a low B1 student pass C2 speaking, but they will fail comprehension (unless they speak a related language, cough cough). And needless to say they won't be truly a C2 if they can't cope with the B1-C1 tasks.
1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| robarb Nonaglot Senior Member United States languagenpluson Joined 4861 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 39 of 229 03 May 2015 at 7:05pm | IP Logged | ||
Sure they do. It's a cornerstone of research in children's language acquisition. It's also relevant to education. There's meaningful discussion about how useful vocabulary measurement is in tracking academic progress or predicting performance in classes or standardized tests. And some people are just curious about how big their vocabulary is. There are lots of sites on the Internet that cater to word-counters. But maybe it works better in the native language than in foreign language, because accent, grammatical competence and fluency should all be at "native level" in the native language, so you shouldn't get quite as many extreme cases where inability to function coexists with high vocabulary or vice versa. I think we all agree that number of words is a poor overall summary measure of one's linguistic level. (That's why we have CEFR). None of us counters are arguing, by any stretch, that a learner with 15000 words is necessarily a better user of the language than one with 10000. At the very least, a learner with 15000 words is probably a stronger comprehender than that same learner was when she had only 10000 words. And yet, we like tracking words. Some of us enjoy it. It is neither completely useless, nor a good measure of language ability. It's like musicians talking to each other about how many different pieces they can play... interesting, but don't read into it claims that we aren't making. Edited by robarb on 03 May 2015 at 7:06pm 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| 1e4e6 Octoglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4092 days ago 1013 posts - 1588 votes Speaks: English*, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Norwegian, Dutch, Swedish, Italian Studies: German, Danish, Russian, Catalan | Message 40 of 229 03 May 2015 at 9:09pm | IP Logged | ||
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I personally never have counted words in my foreign languages, but I was spurred to do
so during primary school, and during secondary school composition classes. I vaguely remember in primary school how we had spelling tests of new words, so we counted each week's new set of words to our "repertoire" I suppose. So it was more like counting both the vocaulary and learning how to spell them properly. Although I never really remembered how many were learnt, I do remember some sort of counting process. For those that do oit, counting their L2 words probably gives a sense of what level the vocabulary is. But I do find personally (no actual statistics, just from experience), that counting words in English, especially by native Anglophones seem to be quite more widespread than in other languages. I think that those spelling competitionsthat they do in North America operate on some system of counting how many vocabulary words they know so that they can perform. There is probably one of the few places where people would regularly ask each other, "How many words do you know?" as part of a common greeting. Or those that do things like advanced English composition tests, I remember classmates counting words sometimes as part of their learning. Edited by 1e4e6 on 04 May 2015 at 1:26am 1 person has voted this message useful |
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