Vocabulary: do you ever get to a point when you know "enough" words

[EmGeeFab]

I'm working on advancing my German, which is somewhat rusty. My tutor asked me how I learn new vocabulary in my mother tongue and now I'm basically doing that in German, too.

So, I still do sometimes come across unknown words in my mother tongue, though I knew all the ones you listed. I didn't learn that "peruse" had two nearly opposite meanings until a few years ago when I took up crossword puzzles, though.

- Emily

[Lawyer&Mom]

I thought more people would know the word Awl. Or at least recognize it as a kind of tool. Since natives don’t all have the same vocabulary, it seems reasonable for you to decide which types of vocabulary are important to you. What kind of person are you in your L1 and what kind of person do you want to be in your L2? Because you can’t know it all.

[DaveAgain]

Words for e.g. common trees and plants you will probably have heard, even if you have no real botanical knowledge. My question was also: do you know these kind of words in other languages, other than English or your native one?

I changed my eReader dictionary from french>english to french only one last year. Plants and animals was a key reason I switched back (I'd started reading the Swiss Family Robison, lots of plants and animals).

I think bi-lingual people are supposed to commonly have voids in one language when it comes to details like kitchen equipment, one language always being stronger.

[lichtrausch]

I thought more people would know the word Awl. Or at least recognize it as a kind of tool.

I just learned the word a few months ago after looking up the word 锥子脸 (awl face).

A typical awl face:

[lusan]

Very good questions that I have been asking myself lately. When should I stop checking the dictionary while reading a French novel? Currently I know about 99.5 % of the words in an adult French novel. I could stop taking the unknowns into Anki. Should I? Why not? I never made either an Anki nor word list in English. I just read, read, read for love and pleasure.

In terms of English: I have lived in USA for 40+ years, read 1000's of books of all types -children, teens, academic, Philosophy, Science, literature, etc. I almost never find words that I do not know with the exception of very old ones -I never read Shakespeare and I dislike very much Garcia Marquez and Cervantes. They are, for me, so boring. - Of course, I know nothing nor I care about , trees or insects!

My point, I think, time is limited. I suspect that after reaching the 99 % read mark, it might be better to focus into listening and writing and to place reading in cruise control on the Extensive Reading hands.

By the way, yes, I know the meaning of all the words you mentioned, they belong to my active voc.

[lusan]

Words for e.g. common trees and plants you will probably have heard, even if you have no real botanical knowledge. My question was also: do you know these kind of words in other languages, other than English or your native one?

I changed my eReader dictionary from french>english to french only one last year. Plants and animals was a key reason I switched back (I'd started reading the Swiss Family Robison, lots of plants and animals).

I think bi-lingual people are supposed to commonly have voids in one language when it comes to details like kitchen equipment, one language always being stronger.

I am considering doing the same. I just got a kindle paperwhite and I am not too happy with the French-English dictionary included with the reader.

[Lawyer&Mom]

I thought more people would know the word Awl. Or at least recognize it as a kind of tool.

I just learned the word a few months ago after looking up the word 锥子脸 (awl face).

A typical awl face:

Awl face is definitely a new word for me!

[Systematiker]

I haven’t learned a new word in German in a few years now...

That said, I could at one point genuinely do everything in my academic career in German that I could do in English and spent six years in Munich getting there.

These days, having changed careers, while I have the vocabulary of an academic instructor in German, I don’t have the specialized vocabulary of my new aim. Do I have a wider vocabulary than 99% of native speakers? Absolutely. 99.9%? Probably! Is it enough? Maybe. Depends on the day and the task. But I also haven’t bothered to learn all of my new stuff in German, mostly because I’m not sure how to go about it.

Have I had to accept that other languages won’t be like that? Oh yeah, and that’s a different question entirely. Enough in another language is another story, get me?

[coldrainwater]

My question was also: do you know these kind of words in other languages, other than English or your native one?

I learned words of this nature in Spanish, my first L2. In the case of Spanish, there is an absurd amount of overlap compared to my native English. For example, the word for ash is fresno, an extremely common word that has been fully incorporated into the English language (as a city in California). When I first saw it in Spanish, it stuck permanently due to the relation mentioned. I would recognize passively the Spanish word for alder (aliso) but was unclear on the English definition. However, I have a very deep understanding of alderman in comparison. I have used an awl many times, but only recognized the word as a tool, nothing more specific. In short, my knowledge is as expected, riddled with holes on all sides and anything but whole.

In addition, cognates are so extremely common between Spanish and English that my overall answer has to be a resounding yes. The overarching positive message I would convey is that as new languages are acquired, I [intentionally] expand passive vocabulary in the long run. With related languages, differences in frequency of use on both sides have an overall positive impact on vocabulary and bring far more terms into active or near active territory when considered as a whole. Whichever language the higher frequency term is in will as a side effect help recognizing its lower frequency counterpart in the case where there are differences to begin with. Language learning feels like one big SRS for whatever I use as the source language.

That is not taking into account the direct study of dictionaries. I am a little surprised that it is not more commonly mentioned to use something like a pocketbook dictionary + maybe some specialized dictionaries as barometers. I would say if I recognize pretty much all words in a reasonably thorough dictionary of synonyms and antonyms, that is probably a very good stopping point (an indication that perhaps I have already gone overboard). After that, certainly I would continue to look up words, but I would be far pickier in what I bring into my day to day recall.

Edit: we likely should also consider that this question is posed to an overall very literate and even literary group. Many natives have a direct interest in minimizing words known. Of the original list, I could count on most to know percolate, but that might be it.

[Querneus]

rdearman and Iversen already gave you the good answers in my view, but nevertheless I'm going to chorus them:

1) Is it possible to acquire a vocabulary as large as that of a native speaker when learning a new language?
2) Do you continue to look up and learn words, also in your advanced languages?

Yes, I think so. Partly because many native speakers happen to follow a lifestyle where they don't commonly learn new words or concepts. I see nothing wrong with that really, but it seems to me it genuinely leads to smaller mental lexica. It is also the case that many speakers actually do a lot of continuous learning, but it's not in an L2 instead of their native language, so their knowledge of their native language's lexicon grows much more slowly. I think of, say, typical native speakers of Welsh or Sylheti, who tend to do most of their new learning in English (as for Welsh speakers), or English and Bengali (as for Sylheti speakers).

I learn new words in my own native Spanish all the time, and the same goes for English.

For some reason I learned "awl" last year. Then I got to think: All the tools in my basement - I don't know the English word for half of them. I do know "shoelaces" in English, but in a TV-series I watch, I recently heard the word "cufflinks" (had to look this up now). Do you know the word for "cufflinks" in other languages? If so I will be impressed. If you cook, do you know the words for "sieve", "strainer", and "colander"? Then we got words for trees and flowers and so on. Most people probably can't tell apart an "alder" and an "ash" (I had to look up these as well), but every native speaker will know these words.

Out of those words, I know off the top my head, in both Spanish and English: shoelaces (international agujetas, cordones, Salvadoran cintas), cufflinks (mancuernas), sieve (cernidor when fine as for flour, zaranda when larger for filtering maize or construction materials, criba in mathematics especially for Eratosthenes' prime number sieve), strainer and colander (both are called el colador in El Salvador).

(For cufflinks, I just checked some things online, and it seems to be that mancuernas is a regional word of Mexico and Central America. It looks like Spain prefers gemelos, and the Southern Cone uses colleras.)

However, you really kill me, in both languages, for awls and alder and ash trees. But then, I don't even know the concepts involved. What do you even use awls for, starting holes to put a nail or screw in? I admit I use a small drill to start the hole of a screw, and usually the nail itself for that of a nail... Maybe it's less efficient, but it gets it done. And then I'm one of those people who could not distinguish an oak from an elm to save my own life. I checked the words in a dictionary, and while I've come across fresno 'ash tree' before in the context of historical Spanish linguistics (it's a good example of the *ai>e change: Latin fraxinum > *[ˈfɾaisəno] > fresno, like amāvī 'I loved sb' > *[aˈmai] > amé), I don't recall ever seeing aliso 'alder'.

It's funny that coldrainwater just said fresno is "an extremely common word", since I almost never come across it outside linguistics books. It mostly has to do with the contexts we use the language in. Maybe he reads fiction works (something I very rarely do) and trees appear with some frequency there.

I don't feel too bad about that though, because although I could hardly care less about tree species, I like other stuff like linguistics, European/Chinese history and religion, and computer science, so I know jargon terms like:
* trill - la vibrante múltiple
* secundative alignment, dechticaetiative alignment - el alineamiento secundativo
* unaccusative (verb) - (el verbo) inacusativo
* suovetaurilia - la suovetaurilia
* rogatist - el/la rogatista
* 里: li, tricent - el li; and also 禮: li, (traditional translation) "rites" - el li, los "ritos"; and also 理: li, (traditional translation) "principle" - el li, el "principio"
* syncretism - el sincretismo
* metaclass - la metaclase

Most English and Spanish speakers don't need, have never needed, and have likely never seen, any of these words (except maybe syncretism, but even then only rarely).