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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 |  | |
| Rhian Moderator France Joined 6299 days ago 265 posts - 288 votes  Speaks: English* Personal Language Map | Message 41 of 229 04 May 2015 at 1:21am | IP Logged | |||||
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Three reports about this thread in less than twelve hours? If you are old enough to participate in this forum then you
are old enough to keep your unpleasant words to yourself. If you can't avoid making it personal then don't post. Tarvos your post has been deleted as it was purely for inflammation and contributed nothing to the discussion. S_allard I would appreciate if you would revisit your last post in this thread and edit out the phrases such as "the nasty piece of work here" or I will. Could we all please get back on track? The discussion was raising some interesting points. 4 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 42 of 229 04 May 2015 at 4:52am | IP Logged | |||||
Let me rephrase what I wrote: Since nobody or very few people count the number of words they themselves are learning in their native language, one can wonder why do so in a foreign language. I am not talking about researchers and educators interested in the language skills of children. Neither am I talking about dictionary- makers who have a professional interest in counting the words entering the language. I'm talking about people of any age counting the number of words they learn over a given period. Has anybody here done this for their native language? Are there people who have counted or even estimated how many words they learned last year? I would be really curious to hear from HTLALers who keep track of the words they learn in their own language. I have never heard of anything like this. On the other hand, it is certainly true that we are continuously being exposed to new words. Every time I read the Guardian newspaper from Britain, I meet at least a dozen words that I've never met in my life before. Many of these words are Briticisms or references to events, people and places in Great Britain. Most I don't bother working on because I will never have the occasion to use them. Edited by s_allard on 04 May 2015 at 4:58am 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| chaotic_thought Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 3344 days ago 129 posts - 274 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Dutch, French | Message 43 of 229 04 May 2015 at 2:47pm | IP Logged | |||||
Probably for goal setting or to measure progress. I do this in the beginning stages, but then later on I find it more useful to count practice hours (e.g. 4 hours practiced per week for one year is about 200 hours). 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Jeffers Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4711 days ago 2151 posts - 3960 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Hindi, Ancient Greek, French, Sanskrit, German | Message 44 of 229 04 May 2015 at 4:41pm | IP Logged | |||||
This is a specious argument. How many things do people do when learning a foreign language that they don't when learning their own? The list is probably endless, so why exclude counting vocabulary? Has anyone done Pimsleur in their own language? Has anyone found a language partner to practice their native tongue? How many adults use children's books in their own language because adult books are too advanced (other than adults learning to read). How many people search the net for podcasts with transcripts so they can improve their listening comprehension in their own language? How many shadow audio in their own language? In fact, I think learning vocabulary is one activity that someone might actually do in their own language. There are books available for adult English speakers to improve their English vocabulary. It's not inconceivable that the people who buy these books might make flashcards, and it would then be quite likely that they would be able to say, "I learnt X words this year." 4 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| patrickwilken Senior Member Germany radiant-flux.net Joined 4335 days ago 1546 posts - 3200 votes Studies: German | Message 45 of 229 04 May 2015 at 6:30pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I'm only learning one language (German) mostly by immersion (i.e., lots of reading/listening - some talking - no writing).
A few months ago I counted the number of unknown words I didn't know in 10 standard German novels, and found that I knew about 98%. Assuming word frequencies in German are similar to English, this would suggest I know about 7000-8000 word groups after about 2.5 years of study. Anyway that's a total guesstimate, but it sort of clear from my own understandings of movies and books that I am not in the 3000 range and not in the 10000 range either, so it's not totally bad either. If anyone wants to try the same thing: pick a number of novels and go through the first 1000 pages and count all the words you don't know. I counted 10 novels and the results were remarkably consistent. It's much easier if you have ebooks as you can cut and paste the text into a word processor and just delete all the words you know. 3 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 46 of 229 04 May 2015 at 7:30pm | IP Logged | |||||
I agree with Jeffers that we do things when learning a foreign language that we don't necessarily do when learning our own language. And, true, nothing prevents you from using foreign language learning techniques in one's own language. Yes, there are many books on improving one's vocabulary. Plus, think of the huge number of books on grammar and writing in one's native language. But that is not the thrust of my argument. I'm simply saying that very few people --I would even say nobody-- counts or keeps track of the words they learn in their own language. I'm sure we all learn new words regularly. How many did we learn last year? 125 or 300 or 1245? Why do we not keep track of the words we learn? The answer is pretty simple: it's useless information. It's not worth the effort. Our vocabulary expands and contracts according to use and need. I can name only about 10 kinds of flowers in French. My neighbour who is an avid gardener can name at least 50 kinds of flowers and plants. So what? The day I decide to become a gardener I will start learning the necessary names. I fully understand the fact that when learning a foreign language we write down words as we meet them. So, we can count things: how many flash cards we have, the entries in our notebooks, the wordlists we make, etc. But how important is it to know an exact number? I understand the idea of benchmarking. I may want to study 20 flashcards a day or 500 a week or go down my 5000-word list in two months. Or, as some people have pointed out, I may want to see what percentage of words I know on a page. All that is useful. But, to come back to my original question, why is it important to keep track of how many words learnt? For example, what's the value of knowing that you learned 1500 words in French last year? Of course, there's another question that I won't even get into here and that's the question of what have you done with the words learned. Have you ever used them? Are they just things you come across from time to time? I see no difference between encountering all kinds of new words in a novel in my native language and same thing in a foreign language. The only difference is that in my native language I will make a mental note of the new word and retain it for the rest of the novel. I may or may not ever see it again. But with a foreign language novel I'll probably write the word down in a list. In both cases, the numbers are not important. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| luke Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 7007 days ago 3133 posts - 4351 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Esperanto, French | Message 47 of 229 04 May 2015 at 10:51pm | IP Logged | |||||
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The number of words learnt is helpful for gauging progress during the long road to language mastery. It's not
necessary, but it can be helpful if you wonder, "am I making any progress"? That sounds silly, but if one thinks about someone who wants to lose 100 pounds. You drop 40 pounds and people notice. If you drop the rest of the 60 pounds over the next 6 years, you will primarily get comments from people who haven't seen in a while. But if you know, "I'm losing a pound about a month", for the other weight, you know you're headed in right direction. Other than a signpost of progress and curiosity, the thread was given birth because it's interesting to find those individuals who do much better than average. It's also nice to know, if you are average, that you're doing okay. The difference with unknown or fuzzy words in our native language, they are generally rare words in the compass of our experience. If one decides to read 18th century high brow literature, one could decide, "may as well try a technique that foreign language learner use to see if it helps". If you're really looking for an answer to your question about how many words we learn in our native language per year, it's about 1000 when we are school/learning and reading environment. Someone may produce the graphic that we had floating around here some time back. The researchers were trying to corelate reading and age and vocabulary. It was very interesting. Spoiler Alert! People who read more generally have larger vocabularies. This holds true throughout the school years and most of the rest of life as well. 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 48 of 229 05 May 2015 at 4:51am | IP Logged | |||||
Yes. And there are good reasons to think that the % coverage is more meaningful than the number of words known. You can track your vocabulary coverage approaching 100% for particular types of materials, rather than your vocabulary size going off slowly toward infinity. This is what Alexander Arguelles does on his website when he reports his reading vocabulary in his languages, and he specifically claims that he knows no clearer way to articulate how much he knows in them. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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