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

[coldrainwater]

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 definitely should have made it more clear how I and perhaps many other US natives recognize Fresno. When I said Fresno to a few of my coworkers today, they immediately responded with California, which is what I figured might happen. They definitely did not associate it with ash (or know ash as a tree). I can't verify, but I expect I made the association reviewing a visual bilingual dictionary, which tends to have that type of encyclopedic content. You are right about the fiction though. I read quite a lot of it in Spanish and could have seen the word then.

It is all past speculation, but I believe I first understood what cufflinks were in English in my 20's and I distinctly recall not being able to define vegan until I went to college around 2000 (and met my first WholeFoods). I think much of it with me is just a matter of how strong my native language word association is. If it is too weak, I won't recall words like cufflinks so well in Spanish either (or at all which was the case in this thread).

[Iversen]

I remember Fresno as a place name (the 'raisin' town of California), but I did not know that it also meant something. But even though this is a special case (because it involves a placename) it opens up for another problem: when do you know enough about the words you DO know?

When I do wordlists I learn one og maybe two core meanings for each headword on the list, and in most cases its other uses are derived from this core meaning. It is quite possible that there are homonymes which I have to skip for reasons of space, but even then it will be easier to add one more interpretation of a word when you already know it from its core meaning(s). Some words have so many uses that that it would take many hours to list them all, let alone memorize them, so here you either have to do a special study of such a word or just learn a fraction of the available information about it. And I would normally go for the second option: learn a few meanings and maybe a few fixed expressions with the word and then - crossed fingers - hope that the other meanings and some more expressions can be picked up later. The most important thing with a new word is to get it registrated in your brain, and then you can leave the details for later.

[seito]

Personally, I knew all of those words from daily life. There certainly were some words I learned in college, but they were domain-specific terms.

That being said, I think looking up every word you don't know is just a habit, not something you need to keep doing. As a native speaker, I think the last time I tried to look anything up was when reading Master and Commander. I gave up when I realized none of the words were in the Kindle dictionary. I got to that point by a combination of daily life and reading a lot. If you're not living in an English-speaking country, you won't have the daily life option, but you don't necessarily need those daily life words if you aren't encountering them anyway.

[StringerBell]

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?

1) I think there is a huge range when talking about "native speaker" vocabulary. I have advanced degrees and have always been a voracious reader - I also regularly read scientific, medical, mathematical journals. I consider myself to have a pretty good size vocabulary but I still regularly come across unknown words in my native language, and I almost always look them up in a dictionary.

I have relatives who read nothing more than trashy daily newspapers and keep talk shows on all day. They have a limited vocabulary and never really have the occasion to come across new words. We are both native speakers, but there is a huge gulf between the number of words we know. So I don't think that "vocabulary level of a native speaker" can really be defined, it's not a static number.

2) I am looking up words constantly, even in my native language. I find that when I don't take a moment to do this, I don't learn or remember the meaning of the word later on.

[Lisa]

We seem to be talking about "enough" (which of course always depends on "for what purpose"), but really, I wonder about the "know". What does it mean to know a word? In my toastmasters meeting, we have a word for the day (today two: abscond and banal), and usually whoever uses them uses them incorrectly. Being able to recite a definition doesn't mean you can use a word correctly which is what I would expect if you "know" it.

In my spanish reading, I've e.g. learned the words badger, beech, and merlon (somewhat unintentionally), but I didn't know what these are in any real sense (some kind of mammal, some kind of tree, something you find on old castles). Being able to come up with an equivalent word in a different language is not really knowing, is it?

Knowing a word is a scale... I could say previously, I had maybe a 20%, 30% and 0% knowledge of these words, and now I am at 30%, %30 and 70%. But how useful is merlon, since if I use it, it's almost definitely not going to be understood by anyone?

And then, you can be able to use a word (know it?) and not be able to come up with a pithy definition, I "know" the words banal and plebiscite... but when I needed to come up with a definition to write out, I hemmed and hawed and we looked it up.

[SCMT]

What does it mean to know a word? In my toastmasters meeting, we have a word for the day (today two: abscond and banal), and usually whoever uses them uses them incorrectly. Being able to recite a definition doesn't mean you can use a word correctly which is what I would expect if you "know" it.

This type of banal exercise is usually enough to inspire me to abscond with the punchbowl.

[magsnus]

I look up words and expressions in my native language all the time so the questions could be rephrased as when do you stop learning. Which I hope is never.

[AnthonyLauder]

Native speakers know tens of thousands of words, but hundreds of thousands of collocations. Learning the collocations is the greater challenge.

[Speakeasy]

Native speakers know tens of thousands of words, but hundreds of thousands of collocations. Learning the collocations is the greater challenge.

Thank you very much for this, I had never come across the term “collocation” before, duh! I take this as a indication that I should consider membership in the English Club (um, er, assuming they'll accept me):

EnglishClub.JPG

EnglishClub.com
https://www.englishclub.com/vocabulary/collocations.htm

[tarvos]

Even interpreters don't know every word in their native tongue, and it's their job. They make massive vocabulary lists around specialized topics. They learn collocations. And they're supposed to be fluent or native speakers of those languages.

I'm pretty sure nobody denies I speak Spanish. You'd be silly.