The size of vocabulary to set as a goal.

[Cainntear]

In my experience, understanding vocabulary is *clearly* the most important component of language for *me*.

That isn't what you said before, though:

since in my experience vocabulary seems to be the biggest hurdle to attaining proficiency in any given foreign language, by far.

This is not the first time you've shifted the goalposts in a way to deflect criticism. If we misunderstand you because of what you said, that's on you, and the polite thing to do would be to acknowledge that, clarify, and even possibly apologise for the confusion.

But let me paraphrase liberally: in my experience of having learned lots of words and very little grammar, learning words is harder than learning grammar.
That's the message we're receiving, and you can hopefully see why it rings somewhat hollow.

[s_allard]

In this debate about proficiency and vocabulary size, I’m sure we all agree that more vocabulary is better than less. I myself am a vocabulary freak. I love finding the right word for the right thing. I’m always trying out my latest discoveries on my tutors who get a laugh when I come up with something unusual or rare.

At the same time I’m acutely aware that fancy vocabulary and poor grammar make me look ridiculous and pretentious. In fact, fancy vocabulary is in itself not a sign of proficiency. It only works if everything else is impeccable.

In my opinion, the hallmarks of proficiency are fluidity of speech, flawless grammar, appropriate word choice for the language register, use of idioms and figurative forms and good pronunciation. Having a conversation in the target language becomes truly an enjoyable experience when everything just flows as the words roll off your tongue and your interlocutor speaks naturally with you. And to really impress, you can drop a proverb or a popular saying in the middle of the conversation without messing up.

Of course, that’s the ideal and it takes a lot of work to get there. Right now, I’m focusing on perfecting my greetings and salutations in Spanish. This is not complicated stuff but since these are among the very first and last things that come out of my mouth, I want them to be perfect.

In all this, estimating or calculating vocabulary size is totally irrelevant. It has been said by various people here, use what you need.

[AcademiaNut]

Can you go from A0 to A2 with no verb knowledge or grammar knowledge ?

Vocabulary is about concepts, and grammar is about the ordering of those concepts. It's interesting to note that the primary task of grammar, as far as I can tell, is merely to identify which of the listed concepts are subject, verb, direct object, and indirect object, and which modifiers go with which of those items. Relative clauses and prepositional phrases are only slightly different in that they have roughly the same structure of the above but need to point to what they modify.

I had an idea today. If people would form a worldwide convention for what 3-4 positions in space stood for, then we would have much less need for grammar, maybe no need for grammar at all in face-to-face verbal communication. For example, if the head stood for subject, chest for direct object, and abdomen for indirect object, then by saying the infinitive verb first and then pointing at each position on the body while saying the (nominative form of the) noun that went with the associated subject/object would unambiguously identify the function of each spoken noun. Relative clauses, prepositional phrases, and more could be handled in an analogous manner. No more noun cases or verb conjugations or noun-adjective agreements.

In general, there is a big difference between input and output, so you're right that it makes a difference as to whether "proficiency" means proficiency in understanding (input) or proficiency in production (output). One problem I encountered at one point in my French learning is that I could produce a large variety of sentences that expressed my thoughts (output) in proper grammar, but since I was using only my own, highly limited vocabulary, as soon as I had to interpret (input) somebody else's French, spoken or in print, I was typically lost because they weren't using words from my limited vocabulary. I encountered this once with a French-writing pen pal who used the French word "car" (= "for," in English) in her letter, whereas I would have used the words "parce que." I then needed to look up that strange-looking French word (a false cognate, by the way) in my French-English dictionary.

Normally the input direction is more difficult than the output direction, whether in math, language, music, or other, because mental analysis of the input must be performed, whereas output can rely on a stored set of vocabulary and phrases that require little thought to emit. To convincingly demonstrate this, just put some sheet music in front of a dazzling rock guitarist who is improvising, or require a blabbermouth to listen to you for a while. This general principle lends credence to my belief that vocabulary is critically important because in the input direction the listener or reader must allow arbitrary input from the world at large, which requires knowledge of as many words as possible, since there are no constraints on what people in the world might write or say to you. In contrast, for the output direction, the speaker/writer needs mostly only to pull items from a limited memory, with little thought.

[AcademiaNut]

That isn't what you said before, though:

See my response to s_allard. There is no contradiction. My own experience is only one case of what everybody must experience eventually, by necessity, in the real world of virtually infinite vocabulary that needs to be processed.

[AcademiaNut]

At the same time I’m acutely aware that fancy vocabulary and poor grammar make me look ridiculous and pretentious.

Try fancy vocabulary and poor pronunciation. I had a manager/CEO like that. He was from the Middle East and was so intent on learning sophisticated English words, probably only because he read somewhere that there's a correlation between vocabulary and success, that he recited his most recent word list constantly as he walked around the office. The other CEO thought he looked ridiculous doing that. The first CEO called a friend of mine as a reference, and my friend almost hung up on the guy because he couldn't understand anything the guy was saying because of the thick accent. That's a good lesson about balance, I believe.

I didn't think I needed to point out the following fact to everyone, but I will: script, pronunciation and grammar are finite sets of knowledge that can be learned in probably only months, with good learning resources. Vocabulary, on the other hand, is effectively infinite, so it is physically impossible for any human being to *ever* master vocabulary. Therefore it is a mathematical necessity that vocabulary be the limiting factor in "learning" any natural language.



https://www.alibris.com/The-Oxford-Engl ... k/10537420

[AcademiaNut]

I've updated the script to display the word position in the frequency list (e.g. "10" means "10th most frequent word). It will show a blank if the word is not in the corpus (which again is clipped off at 10,000 words due to resource constraints on the server).

Here is a summary of my findings. My concern yesterday about the large values I was getting for mean and variance were completely unfounded, since mean is "self-adjusting" so it remains a practical size, and since variance needs to be unlimited, and since your list has a maximum size (10,000), anyway. I added a 4th example that was intended to be very sophisticated text with a high measure of sophistication, and its large mean that was produced confirmed my impression.

TEXT EXCERPTS CHOSEN:

(1) "Go, Dog. Go!"
http://iepclass.weebly.com/uploads/1/1/ ... astman.pdf
(2) "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland," Chapter IV
https://www.owleyes.org/text/alices-adv ... chapter-iv
(3) U.S. Constitution Preamble
https://constitutioncenter.org/interact ... n/preamble
(4) photonics article abstract
https:https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acsphotonics.0c01530e
----------
UNREFINED

(1a)
SUBMITTED TEXT:
Now all the dogs get out. And now look where those dogs are going! To the tree! To the tree! Up the tree! Up the tree! Up they go to the top of the tree. Why? Will they work there? Will they play there? What is up there on top of that tree? A dog party! A big dog party! Big dogs, little dogs,
RETURNED TEXT:
Now all the dogs get out. And now look where those dogs are going! To the tree! To the tree! Up the tree! Up the tree! Up they go to the top of the tree. Why? Will they work there? Will they play there? What is up there on top of that tree? A dog party! A big dog party! Big dogs, little dogs,
CALCULATOR OUTPUT:
Variance s2 = 2557945.9
Standard Deviation s = 1599.358
Count n = 64
Mean x¯¯¯ = 620
Sum of Squares SS = 161150590

(2a)
SUBMITTED TEXT:
It was the White Rabbit, trotting slowly back again, and looking anxiously about as it went, as if it had lost something; and she heard it muttering to itself, “The Duchess! The Duchess! Oh my dear paws! Oh my fur and whiskers! She'll get me executed, as sure as ferrets are ferrets! Where can I have dropped them, I wonder!” Alice guessed in a moment that it was looking for the fan and the pair of white kid gloves, and she very good-naturedly began hunting about for them, but they were nowhere to be seen—everything seemed to have changed since her swim in the pool, and the great hall, with the glass table and the little door, had vanished completely.
RETURNED TEXT:
It was the White ?????? ?????? slowly back again and looking anxiously about as it went as if it had lost something and she heard it ?????? to itself The Duchess The Duchess Oh my dear ?????? Oh my fur and ?????? ?????? get me executed as sure as ?????? are ?????? Where can I have dropped them I wonder Alice ?????? in a moment that it was looking for the fan and the pair of white kid gloves and she very good ?????? began hunting about for them but they were ?????? to be seen everything seemed to have changed since her ?????? in the pool and the great hall with the glass table and the little door had vanished ??????
CALCULATOR OUTPUT:
Variance s2 = 10967712
Standard Deviation s = 3311.7536
Count n = 122
Mean x¯¯¯ = 1860.9344
Sum of Squares SS = 1327093100

(3a)
SUBMITTED TEXT:
We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.
RETURNED TEXT:
We the People of the United States in Order to form a more perfect Union establish Justice insure domestic ?????? provide for the common defense promote the general Welfare and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity do ?????? and establish this Constitution for the United States of America
CALCULATOR OUTPUT:
Variance s2 = 4445830.1
Standard Deviation s = 2108.5137
Count n = 50
Mean x¯¯¯ = 1017.74
Sum of Squares SS = 217845670

(4a)
SUBMITTED TEXT:
We report the experimental realization of periodically perforated plasmonic metasurfaces capable of integrating several key functionalities, such as light-to-surface plasmon coupling, controllable beam-splitting, wavelength filtering and routing, high resolution differential wavelength measurement, and vectorial displacement sensing.
RETURNED TEXT:
We report the experimental realization of periodically ?????? ?????? ?????? capable of integrating several key ?????? such as light to surface ?????? coupling ?????? beam splitting wavelength filtering and routing high resolution differential wavelength measurement and ?????? displacement sensing
CALCULATOR OUTPUT:
Variance s2 = 17950831
Standard Deviation s = 4236.8421
Count n = 39
Mean x¯¯¯ = 4653.0513
Sum of Squares SS = 682131580

----------

REFINED

The types of words I filtered out of all samples were:

all articles
all conjunctions
all prepositions
all pronouns
all possessive adjectives
all auxiliary verbs

(1b)
ORIGINAL TEXT:
Now all the dogs get out. And now look where those dogs are going! To the tree! To the tree! Up the tree! Up the tree! Up they go to the top of the tree. Why? Will they work there? Will they play there? What is up there on top of that tree? A dog party! A big dog party! Big dogs, little dogs,
SUBMITTED, FILTERED TEXT:
Now all dogs get out. now look where dogs going! tree! tree! tree! tree! Up go top tree. Why? work there? play there? What is up there top tree? dog party! big dog party! Big dogs, little dogs,
RETURNED TEXT:
Now all dogs get out now look where dogs going tree tree tree tree Up go top tree Why work there play there What is up there top tree dog party big dog party Big dogs little dogs
CALCULATOR OUTPUT:
Variance s2 = 3926854
Standard Deviation s = 1981.6291
Count n = 38
Mean x¯¯¯ = 1031.5263
Sum of Squares SS = 145293600

(2b)
ORIGINAL TEXT:
It was the White Rabbit, trotting slowly back again, and looking anxiously about as it went, as if it had lost something; and she heard it muttering to itself, “The Duchess! The Duchess! Oh my dear paws! Oh my fur and whiskers! She'll get me executed, as sure as ferrets are ferrets! Where can I have dropped them, I wonder!” Alice guessed in a moment that it was looking for the fan and the pair of white kid gloves, and she very good-naturedly began hunting about for them, but they were nowhere to be seen—everything seemed to have changed since her swim in the pool, and the great hall, with the glass table and the little door, had vanished completely.
SUBMITTED, FILTERED TEXT:
was White Rabbit, trotting slowly back again, looking anxiously went, lost something; heard muttering, “Duchess! Duchess! Oh dear paws! Oh fur whiskers! get executed, sure ferrets are ferrets! Where can dropped, wonder!” Alice guessed moment looking fan pair white kid gloves, very good-naturedly began hunting, were nowhere be seen—everything seemed changed since swim pool, great hall, glass table little door, vanished completely.
RETURNED TEXT:
was White ?????? ?????? slowly back again looking anxiously went lost something heard ?????? Duchess Duchess Oh dear ?????? Oh fur ?????? get executed sure ?????? are ?????? Where can dropped wonder Alice ?????? moment looking fan pair white kid gloves very good ?????? began hunting were ?????? be seen everything seemed changed since ?????? pool great hall glass table little door vanished ??????
CALCULATOR OUTPUT:
Variance s2 = 14622024
Standard Deviation s = 3823.8755
Count n = 65
Mean x¯¯¯ = 3313.2923
Sum of Squares SS = 935809520

(3b)
ORIGINAL TEXT:
We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.
SUBMITTED, FILTERED TEXT:
People United States, order form more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide common defense, promote general Welfare, secure Blessings Liberty Posterity, do ordain establish Constitution United States America.
RETURNED TEXT:
People United States order form more perfect Union establish Justice insure domestic ?????? provide common defense promote general Welfare secure Blessings Liberty Posterity do ?????? establish Constitution United States America
CALCULATOR OUTPUT:
Variance s2 = 10642754
Standard Deviation s = 3262.3234
Count n = 30
Mean
¯
x
= 2302.7
Sum of Squares SS = 308639870

(4b)
ORIGINAL TEXT:
We report the experimental realization of periodically perforated plasmonic metasurfaces capable of integrating several key functionalities, such as light-to-surface plasmon coupling, controllable beam-splitting, wavelength filtering and routing, high resolution differential wavelength measurement, and vectorial displacement sensing.
SUBMITTED, FILTERED TEXT:
report experimental realization periodically perforated plasmonic metasurfaces capable integrating several key functionalities, light-surface plasmon coupling, controllable beam-splitting, wavelength filtering routing, high resolution differential wavelength measurement, vectorial displacement sensing.
RETURNED TEXT:
report experimental realization periodically ?????? ?????? ?????? capable integrating several key ?????? light surface ?????? coupling ?????? beam splitting wavelength filtering routing high resolution differential wavelength measurement ?????? displacement sensing
CALCULATOR OUTPUT:
Variance s2 = 14843239
Standard Deviation s = 3852.6924
Count n = 30
Mean x¯¯¯ = 6044.4333
Sum of Squares SS = 430453920
----------
UNREFINED MEANS:
(1a) 620
(2a) 1861
(3a) 1018
(4a) 4653

REFINED MEANS:
(1b) 1032
(2b) 3313
(3b) 2303
(4b) 6044

Each mean can be interpreted as the measure of "sophistication" or "unintelligibility" of that text excerpt.

Since the 4 text excerpts were ordered in what was believed to be increasing sophistication, (1) through (4), the fact that the means also usually increase in that order is strong evidence that this method of measuring text sophistication works.

In general, the more refinement that is done to the data (preprocessing to "sharpen the data"), the higher the means will be, because the filtered out words tend to be the words with high frequency, which leaves behind only words with low frequency, which means words with high values. This is why the means for the second set of 4 are larger than the first set of 4. The programmer can use any given degree of preprocessing, including none at all, as a standard of measurement. There exists some maximum value of each of these means, one that corresponds to perfect preprocessing, but that maximum would be very difficult to produce or to estimate.

High variance values (not shown in the summary) occurred in excerpts (2) and (4), especially in (2), and signal the presence of some anomaly in the consistency of sophistication of the text excerpt.

[AcademiaNut]

I persist in believing that trying to determine the optimum vocabulary size for levels of proficiency is a waste of time for language learning purposes.

"Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe."
--Abraham Lincoln

By analogy I'm sharpening my axe.

I've spent years in American public schools studying Spanish and French, and despite usually getting A's in those courses, I was barely able to speak or understand either language when I left high school. I persevered later, during my college years, for several more years, this time self-motivated instead of school requirement motivated, but still emerged with poor pronunciation, only academic knowledge of grammar, and a barely adequate vocabulary. Admittedly I was short on study time, I was studying too many languages at once, and I didn't know the best way to study language, but still, I don't want to go through that again. This time, if I go ahead with language learning again as I would like to do, I want to learn a language right, meaning with good teachers who know what the heck they're doing, good learning material, and foundations of English grammar and a phonetic alphabet already in place.

There is more. Despite what language learning books say in their titles, and despite what FSI claims, it takes a long time to learn a language, even to get to conversational level, even for Spanish, which is considered a Group 1 language, meaning one of the easiest to learn.

https://blog.thelinguist.com/how-long-s ... -language/

The most realistic estimate I've seen for reaching the level of conversational Spanish, taking into account the reality behind all the hype, is 8-12 months.

https://verbalicity.com/how-long-does-i ... n-spanish/

A working professional at my level would normally be making at least $100,000 per year, so we're talking about spending a year of time, or at least $100,000, just for me to learn Spanish. (I'm not making *anywhere* near that much money, but that's beside the point.) Is knowing how to speak Spanish worth that much time or money to me? Objectively, no, not even close, but in practice, because I'm so interested in languages, have an emotional attachment to a few of them (including Spanish), love intellectual challenges, and work so few hours per week currently, I would like to go ahead with learning Spanish anyway (and preferably 1-3 additional languages, eventually). That is why I need to determine the extent of my goals, especially with the task of tackling the effectively infinite amount of words in any given language. The higher my aspirations, the more months of time and more thousands of dollars I will be theoretically spending to reach those goals. At lot is at stake, and a 1% increase in vocabulary limitation could equate to thousands of more dollars of required investment, so careful planning is the wise thing to do, at least at my age and in my current situation. I need to put a practical limit on my aspirations so that I don't encounter my earlier problem of overambition. Your situation and the situation of other readers could be completely different, in which case this thread may be of little or no interest to you, which is fine.

[s_allard]

Go for it! I always say do whatever works for you. If learning a certain number of words a day gives you the desired results, you are certainly on the right track. So fire up Anki and let us know how it works out. Over the years we have seen in this forum and especially the old HTLAL all kinds of intriguing approaches to language learning. I remember one chap who was playing recordings on his target language during his sleep every night for a few months. We never heard about the results. But I've always kept an open mind and I believe in experimentation. In all seriousness I'm still intrigued by this idea of learning in my sleep.

[rdearman]

You are learning in your sleep. Scientists believe that is the time your brain sorts and stores data and input it receives in the day. You just aren't learning anything new.

[Cainntear]

That isn't what you said before, though:

See my response to s_allard. There is no contradiction. My own experience is only one case of what everybody must experience eventually, by necessity, in the real world of virtually infinite vocabulary that needs to be processed.

Except that you were initially talking about something you haven't experienced: attaining proficiency.

I didn't think I needed to point out the following fact to everyone, but I will: script, pronunciation and grammar are finite sets of knowledge that can be learned in probably only months, with good learning resources. Vocabulary, on the other hand, is effectively infinite, so it is physically impossible for any human being to *ever* master vocabulary. Therefore it is a mathematical necessity that vocabulary be the limiting factor in "learning" any natural language.

You are right and you are wrong.

First up, yes, (lexical) vocabulary is an infinite set and everything else (including functional vocabulary) is a finite set. If your sole criterion for difficulty is the total time needed, then lexical vocabulary is the most difficult part of language. However, as an adult-acquired multilingual, a fairly frequent traveller and a language teacher, I can tell you from observation that people in general are more likely to struggle with the acquisition of correct grammar than of correct vocabulary. I've met many more people that use perfect words in the wrong order than use perfect order with the wrong words.

Also, as I was saying before, it is pretty straightforward to acquire new vocabulary as and when you need it. If you use something every day and have to ask "what's do you call that thing?" each time, within a week it'll stick. There isn't any analogous route to learning phonology or grammar on the fly though.

It's interesting to note that the primary task of grammar, as far as I can tell, is merely to identify which of the listed concepts are subject, verb, direct object, and indirect object, and which modifiers go with which of those items.

Or, in other words, what they mean. The point of all language is to express meaning.
But you're being too reductive here, and again too superficial, and basing everything on your knowledge of English and what knowledge you have of French and Spanish, both of which are structurally very similar to English.

I had an idea today. If people would form a worldwide convention for what 3-4 positions in space stood for, then we would have much less need for grammar, maybe no need for grammar at all in face-to-face verbal communication. For example, if the head stood for subject, chest for direct object, and abdomen for indirect object, then by saying the infinitive verb first and then pointing at each position on the body while saying the (nominative form of the) noun that went with the associated subject/object would unambiguously identify the function of each spoken noun. Relative clauses, prepositional phrases, and more could be handled in an analogous manner. No more noun cases or verb conjugations or noun-adjective agreements.

It's not possible. Setting aside the obvious problem of getting everyone to agree on such a system, there's a massive problem that you're not aware of:
Not all languages have subjects and objects -- subject and object are not atomic units of meaning, but abstractions of multiple variables.

The underlying variables that all languages express are that of agency and affectedness. A language like English, French or Spanish is known as "nominative-transitive" and it prioritises "agency": it obligatorily marks who initiates the action of the verb (the subject), whereas the other major category is called "ergative-absolutive" and prioritises "affectedness": it obligatorily marks who or what is affected, changed or altered by the action.

Consider:
I shot him -- I->high agency, low affectedness; him->high affectedness, low agency
I left -- I->high agency, high affectedness

In an ergative-absolutive language, "I" would be translated differently in the two sentences. English prioritises agency, some language prioritise affectedness.

So a system would need to encode agency and affectedness as separate variables to be truly universal -- as I said in another thread, a language-independent abstract notation would require a very very deep knowledge of linguistics in all its users.


Similarly, the function of noun cases and prepositions is not atomic, and if you try to unambiguously model all the possible case meanings, you're going to have another combinatorial explosion. Hungarian's 18 don't map cleanly to Finnish's 16 or Russian's 6. English's prepositions don't map cleanly onto French, Spanish or any other language's. Then trying to map across prepositions and cases... as I said, combinatorial explosion.

I then needed to look up that strange-looking French word (a false cognate, by the way) in my French-English dictionary.

But you could. This is why learning vocabulary is easy.

Normally the input direction is more difficult than the output direction, whether in math, language, music, or other, because mental analysis of the input must be performed,

Not necessarily. Plenty of people find it easier to understand language than to speak it. First up, there may be rules/patterns/items/etc that you have not yet fully acquired but will recognise when you hear them. There is also a lot of redundant information in language and contextual cues that help you understand utterances that you could not produce yourself.

...in fact, you personally have already described having had that experience with Spanish

To convincingly demonstrate this, just put some sheet music in front of a dazzling rock guitarist who is improvising,

This is a false equivalence. Most rock guitarists can't sightread. You might as well talk about putting a book in front of an illiterate person. Even the illiterate person will understand spoken input without problems.

or require a blabbermouth to listen to you for a while.

This is another false equivalence. Replace that blabbermouth with someone who listens most of the time and speaks once an hour and the point is completely destroyed.

I persist in believing that trying to determine the optimum vocabulary size for levels of proficiency is a waste of time for language learning purposes.

"Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe."
--Abraham Lincoln

By analogy I'm sharpening my axe.

That only holds if it's a valid analogy.
What if the axe you're sharpening isn't the right type of axe for chopping down trees?
What if you're sharpening the blunt end, and not the blade?
Or what if what you're preparing for is a marathon, and what you're actually doing is polishing your shoes? Polishing your shoes won't make you faster.

I've spent years in American public schools studying Spanish and French, and despite usually getting A's in those courses, I was barely able to speak or understand either language when I left high school. I persevered later, during my college years, for several more years, this time self-motivated instead of school requirement motivated, but still emerged with poor pronunciation, only academic knowledge of grammar, and a barely adequate vocabulary. Admittedly I was short on study time, I was studying too many languages at once, and I didn't know the best way to study language, but still, I don't want to go through that again. This time, if I go ahead with language learning again as I would like to do, I want to learn a language right, meaning with good teachers who know what the heck they're doing, good learning material, and foundations of English grammar and a phonetic alphabet already in place.

Most of us here have similar stories, and we've spent a lot of time thinking about what doing it right means, and trying, and failing, and discussing what works and what doesn't.

Almost every one of us here has done massed vocabulary practice, and a fair number of us continue to do so when we're actively working on a language -- do not confuse anything said here with the suggestion that vocabulary practice is useless: it clearly isn't. What we're saying is that it isn't a magic bullet, and that raw numbers are meaningless. You yourself have said as much, as you talk about finding an "importance" value, which is great in theory, but in practice is the job for a post-doc research project, not a self-teacher. You're not just sharpening the axe, but trying to construct the perfect axe starting from a position of knowing very little about how axes are constructed. At some point, you're better just buying an axe that is good enough and starting chopping.

I need to put a practical limit on my aspirations so that I don't encounter my earlier problem of overambition.

Yes, and we're trying to help you with that, by pointing out where you're heading in the wrong direction. You are free to make mistakes for yourself, but don't be annoyed if we warn against repeating our mistakes.