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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 |  | |
| 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 57 of 229 06 May 2015 at 6:31am | IP Logged | |||||
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English and French are not a typical case because they're not that close genetically.
Also, at least for me it's simply easier* to learn words from several languages than from just one. My max per language might have been 3000 in Finnish; I've probably done 3000 in Finnish+English too, and it wasn't until I added several Romance languages and German that I made the 5000-8000 range. You need opportunities to see your full potential. *note the comparative. I didn't say it's easy to learn 5k words per year. I devote my whole life to language learning. 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 58 of 229 06 May 2015 at 8:36am | IP Logged | |||||
8000 words sounds crazy. I am not doubting some people might manage this, but still it's pretty amazing. Still for German I guess I seem to be learning about 3000-4000 words per year, which is about 8 words/day. Then again I live in Berlin, read 10000 pages of novels/year, and watch something like 300-400 films/year. This sounds like a lot, but if you consider that my film watching and book reading only accounts for about four hours per day, then I guess those who are much more focussed could double this rate. Now that I am in the 98% range for understanding novels, I wondered if my acquisition rate would decrease, as the unknown words become lower frequency. However, even at 98% understanding, that implies I still don't know 5 words/page, and as I can comfortably read +200 pages a week, that implies that I am potentially exposed to 1000 new words per week (assuming no repetitions). Of course, there are repetitions, which makes it more likely I will learn some words over others. If I only learn about 60 of the 1000 unknown words per week I will continue to learn +3000 words/year. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| smallwhite Pentaglot Senior Member Australia Joined 5120 days ago 537 posts - 1045 votes Speaks: Cantonese*, English, Mandarin, French, Spanish | Message 59 of 229 06 May 2015 at 10:06am | IP Logged | |||||
Can I say that your figures show that by exposure alone and no or little SRS or other deliberate memorisation, one learns about 3000-4000 words per year spending about 4 hours per day? Is that what you're doing? (PS. How long have you been learning German for, to reach your current "98% range for understanding novels")? 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 60 of 229 06 May 2015 at 11:23am | IP Logged | |||||
I did do SRS for a hour-a-day for the first year, which certainly seemed to help; though would never use the sort of cards I used again (many simply L1 word <-> L2 words). I do live in Berlin, and am married to a German, but we speak English/German and while I use German outside the home as much as possible, I don't feel I get very much by way of vocabulary this way (unless I go to the doctor or talk with our midwife - most of time my German is completely under-utilised ordering coffee and the like). The four hour figure is a guesstimate, to cover about 30 pages of reading and one movie per day. Since I stopped SRS and relied on reading/listening my vocabulary has greatly improved. About 6-9 months ago (about a year after stopping SRS) I realized that I was easily understanding +99% of most films. Then a few months ago I realized that I didn't need a pop-up dictionary any longer for reading books, and in the last month I realized that I could read articles in die Zeit (a fairly advanced newspaper, which previously gave me a lot of difficulty) without a dictionary. It's not that I don't have holes in my understanding - there are lots! - it's just that they are mostly relatively inconsequential and seem to be filling up fairly naturally from exposure. I guess the growth in vocabulary from about 5000 to 10000 words is probably the most dramatic as it's the difference between struggling and finding it fairly easy to access native materials fairly easily - now I assume it's just going to be years of filling in gaps. Anyway vocabulary acquisition simply from exposure to native materials seems to be quite effective for me, and if I were to learn a new language I would only use SRS to jump-start things to learn the first 3000 or so most common words. 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 61 of 229 06 May 2015 at 12:31pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Thanks, patrickwilken. I looked at your log, too, and I think you've been learning for about 3 years. I'll use your experience as reference.
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| patrickwilken Senior Member Germany radiant-flux.net Joined 4345 days ago 1546 posts - 3200 votes Studies: German | Message 62 of 229 06 May 2015 at 12:42pm | IP Logged | |||||
I'll have been learning German for three years on June 10 2015. The vocab guesstimate comes from November 2014. So that would suggest 3100 words/year, but I didn't very little reading for the first few months and did do SRS for the first year so it's hard to really know how quickly I picked vocabulary. I'll probably test myself again at the end of the year to see how much progress I have made - though I may not be able to measure a significant difference over 12 months as I would almost have to double my vocabulary range (7500 to 13500) to go from 98% to 99% understanding and there may be too much noise in the measurements to really show anything. Edited by patrickwilken on 06 May 2015 at 12:45pm 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 63 of 229 06 May 2015 at 2:47pm | IP Logged | |||||
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One of the interesting things about this debate is seeing how we define things like learning words and how we go
about tracking the number of words we learn. Not everybody agrees with me, but I make a big distinction between learning to recognize words, or receptive/passive vocabulary, and learning to use words, or productive/active vocabulary. They serve different functions and are both important. I'm particularly interested in productive vocabulary because I want to actually write and speak the languages that I'm learning. I also believe that using the words requires a different kind of knowledge than just being able to recognize them. Using this receptive/productive distinction, I would say that I learn or am exposed to thousands of new words in Spanish every year but during the same period I incorporate into my working vocabulary, i.e. words I will have used, about 200 - 300 items as I have defined in a previous post. As has been demonstrated, living in an immersion environment can change these figures radically because there are so many more opportunities to hear and speak the language. This is a far cry from the situation of many of us where we have to rely on the internet and recordings as sources of examples and we have little interaction with native speakers. The other question is how do people actually go about keeping track of words learned. I'm sure everybody here uses some kind of paper or electronic notebook in order to record things of interest. Many people use or have used SRS. But how many people systematically keep a record of all the words learned in the last five years? Let's say that such a record-keeping system would consist of a combination of flashcards and entries in a notebook or a wordlist. At 8000 words a year, that means making 22 entries day in day out for 365 days. After 5 years, are there people with 40000 flashcards or entries in their notebook? I don't doubt that this is possible, but it is a huge undertaking, especially when one considers all the effort involved in actually learning a word. What I'm seeing in the thread here is various ways of estimating vocabulary acquisition by indirect methods. I suspect that this is what most people do. 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 64 of 229 06 May 2015 at 2:50pm | IP Logged | |||||
Sure. For me that's all that's necessary. Unlike you I am mostly interested in my receptive language skills. Having a rough estimate of my vocab comprehension in books is a useful benchmark for my progress. Ones benchmark for what counts as vocabulary acquisition varies depending on whether you count passive or active use. When I am counting the number of words I know in a book I am not only NOT considering whether I could actively use the words, but also NOT whether I could correctly reproduce either the gender, or even the plural form of the word (though I would need to be able recognise the plural form). So of course my estimated rate of vocab acquisition is going to be much higher than someone who was only counting their ability to actively use their vocabulary (such as when you use SRS cards to estimate vocabulary levels). I also assume that my rate of vocabulary acquisition is a lot higher than some people as I am learning a language closely related to my L1 with lots of useful cognates. I assume that I'd learn far fewer words/year if I was learning Russian and even fewer if I was learning something truly foreign to my L1, like Arabic, Japanese or Mandarin. Edited by patrickwilken on 06 May 2015 at 3:09pm 1 person has voted this message useful |
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