The size of vocabulary to set as a goal.

[lusan]

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.

Group 1? An easy one? Please don't believe. That designation should be considered pragmatically. For tourism, maybe 1 year will do a nice job, yes, but to read Garcia Marquez or Vargas Llosa? no way Jose.

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.

It depends what you mean by conversational and to whom you might want to speak to. Consider that though there is standard Spanish that all educated people speak, every latino country have their own twist. My wife studied in Spain and have Spanish teaching degree, but when she met my family and siblings ... ooph!! What are they talking about?! Sometimes I had to translate. Dominicans speak very fast, dropping ss, exchanging r-l consonants, and on top of that with adagios. Argentinians, Peruvians, Mexicans, Cubans, Espanoles, etc. all have their own special lingo. So, define your goal and target population and you will see the length of the journey.

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.

I am studying Italian. I believe that if I just want to have small talks the 50+ most common verbs will do the job. But if I want to read the news, that will NOT do. I need the 500+ on top of a bunch of expressions NEVER used in small talk. The learning goal defines the mountain height. Why do you want to learn Spanish? Your answer is fundamental.

[s_allard]

I would like to propose a different approach to the current debate. Here we have in the forum a newcomer OP with ostensibly very little foreign language proficiency but lots of enthusiasm. He or she finds a website that says a B2 proficiency level requires around 4000 words. For a year's work that's about 10 words a day. That means a language a year. That looks doable, so they'll start with one language and aim for three.

Then a bunch of old-timers in the world of polyglottery, myself included, get worked up and try to convince our newcomer that this naive idea of learning a certain number of words a day for proficiency is crazy and just won't work. As a charter member of this group of old-timers, I would now like to say we should be more welcoming and recognize that this idea of systematically learning a daily quota of words can be interpreted in a somewhat more favourable light.

But first of all, we probably agree that taking a list of the 4000 most frequent words in the language and trying to memorize 10 different words a day can't work. But we're not talking about that. My interpretation is more like we're talking about learning to actually use 10 words in the target language. That's a whole other ball game. We're not trying to memorize the words themselves; we're looking at all the ramifications of the words in the language.

Since in all frequency lists the first 100 words are usually grammar and function words, this approach means that a lot of time is spent on learning how the grammar works. Here are typically the 10 most frequent words in Spanish: que, de, no, a, la, el, ser, y, en, lo. There's a lot of very serious grammar there including the conjugation of the verb ser. Working through all that can easily take a lot more than a day if not a week.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that instead of thinking of learning as memorizing words, we should think of these words as concepts or even functional units of meaning to be mastered. Then studying a certain number of words a day is simply a very systematic approach to working one's way through a language. To me it's akin to taking a 400 page language book and saying I'll study 1 page a day. This actually would work quite well.

There you have it. All is not lost. Maybe learning 10 words a day is not such a crazy idea after all.

[lusan]

I would like to propose a different approach to the current debate. Here we have in the forum a newcomer OP with ostensibly very little foreign language proficiency but lots of enthusiasm. He or she finds a website that says a B2 proficiency level requires around 4000 words. For a year's work that's about 10 words a day. That means a language a year. That looks doable, so they'll start with one language and aim for three.

Then a bunch of old-timers in the world of polyglottery, myself included, get worked up and try to convince our newcomer that this naive idea of learning a certain number of words a day for proficiency is crazy and just won't work. As a charter member of this group of old-timers, I would now like to say we should be more welcoming and recognize that this idea of systematically learning a daily quota of words can be interpreted in a somewhat more favourable light.

But first of all, we probably agree that taking a list of the 4000 most frequent words in the language and trying to memorize 10 different words a day can't work. But we're not talking about that. My interpretation is more like we're talking about learning to actually use 10 words in the target language. That's a whole other ball game. We're not trying to memorize the words themselves; we're looking at all the ramifications of the words in the language.

Since in all frequency list the first 100 words are usually grammar and function words, this approach means that a lot of time is spent on learning how the grammar works. Here are typically the 10 most frequent words in Spanish: que, de, no, a, la, el, ser, y, en, lo. There's a lot of very serious grammar there including the conjugation of the verb ser. Working through all that can easily take a lot more than a day if not a week.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that instead of thinking of learning as memorizing words, we should think of these words as concepts or even functional units of meaning to be mastered. Then studying a certain number of words a day is simply a very systematic approach to working one's way through a language. To me it's akin to taking a 400 page language book and saying I'll study 1 page a day. This actually would work quite well.

There you have it. All is not lost. Maybe learning 10 words a day is not such a crazy idea after all.

You are always deep. I enjoy your posts. I suppose that the student would study consistently 10 words per day... h... I know many people having problems with high frequency words like with le, lo, se, que , and even yo and usted,etc.... those would take longer time to comprehend/memorize/assimilate... Or words like plano, sobre, cielo, etc. They need to be seem within a context and we have your 4000 words turning into 6000+ meaning... a tough job... and chasing their meanings... Too difficult for me. I would prefer to jump into FSI Spanish/a Verb book/Basic Grammar/Anki and presto... a lot easier path for me... a dedicated student, -a couple hours/day should be able to reach B1 or so within a year. How many people can dedicate themselves to this task while holding a job, etc.

This conversation reminds me of my first steps into Polish. In the old forum, I said I was going to learn some polish without studying grammar, just learn words as per lingq strategy. Someone told me that I would be talking like Tarzan! Now I know much better. Grammar for an adult is a critical backbone to hold all these words together.... Silly me.

[Gustav Aschenbach]

Interesting video by someone who took the same approach (memorizing vocabulary as a first step):

[Arizakai]

Interesting video by someone who took the same approach (memorizing vocabulary as a first step):

Interesting video, indeed. But memorising all vocabulary from a textbook before starting the textbook is a bit extreme imho. What I and probably most people do is memorising vocab for the unit you are learning at that moment. This way you achieve the same results with less pain.

[Iversen]

I don't find textbooks interesting so I learn my vocabulary partly from 1) printouts and other study texts ( in the beginning mainly bilingual ones) and 2) directly from dictionaries, in both cases by running new vocabulary through my standard wordlist format. So my way of learning words must be ranged as an extremist vocabulary driven thing in the same league as the strategy used by the guy in the video. But it functions for me - contrary to picking up words from conversation partners.

In the beginning the number of new words in my texts (and in the grammar books) is so high that I don't need to add much vocabulary from dictionaries, but later on the proportion is inversed so that I learn most of my words by doing dictionary based wordlists. And extensive reading/listening? No - that's where I rediscover and fixate the words I already have learned during my intensive studies. The few words I do pick up from reading texts without the usual copying etc. don't really form an exception since I sometimes do study scientific texts so meticulously and slowly that it almost constitute an intensive exercise. Picking anything up from TV or conversations etc - no, not really, unless I jot down the name of some extinct critter or a castle somewhere on a piece of paper .. and then we are already speaking intensive study in microscopic format.

And of course I also study grammar.

[Cainntear]

I would like to propose a different approach to the current debate. Here we have in the forum a newcomer OP with ostensibly very little foreign language proficiency but lots of enthusiasm. He or she finds a website that says a B2 proficiency level requires around 4000 words. For a year's work that's about 10 words a day. That means a language a year. That looks doable, so they'll start with one language and aim for three.

Then a bunch of old-timers in the world of polyglottery, myself included, get worked up and try to convince our newcomer that this naive idea of learning a certain number of words a day for proficiency is crazy and just won't work. As a charter member of this group of old-timers, I would now like to say we should be more welcoming and recognize that this idea of systematically learning a daily quota of words can be interpreted in a somewhat more favourable light.

No-one has said that learning X words a day isn't useful -- in fact, I myself said that a lot of us here do it.
No-one has argued against that part, but against other specific things that they said.

But first of all, we probably agree that taking a list of the 4000 most frequent words in the language and trying to memorize 10 different words a day can't work. But we're not talking about that. My interpretation is more like we're talking about learning to actually use 10 words in the target language. That's a whole other ball game. We're not trying to memorize the words themselves; we're looking at all the ramifications of the words in the language.

That's a very liberal interpretation, and rather than assuming that AcademiaNut is doing something they haven't explicitly said, why not ask if that's what they mean?

There you have it. All is not lost. Maybe learning 10 words a day is not such a crazy idea after all.

Nobody. Said. It. Was.

[s_allard]

Well I guess if I'm damned if I do and damned if I don't. I'll let other more learned people continue the thread, I have a bunch of Russian words to learn today. до встречи.

[Cainntear]

Interesting video by someone who took the same approach (memorizing vocabulary as a first step):

Interesting video, indeed. But memorising all vocabulary from a textbook before starting the textbook is a bit extreme imho. What I and probably most people do is memorising vocab for the unit you are learning at that moment. This way you achieve the same results with less pain.

I'm not sure from the little bit of the video that I actually watched whether he's saying he's ever done this himself, or that he's telling his girlfriend to do this with no prior experience of it as a technique. That latter one's a pattern I've seen far too often: "I'm good at learning languages, so follow my advice even though I've never used myself."

There is a real problem that most textbooks are too dense and cover too much material too quickly, without any reinforcement -- the book writers know this, which is why the publish accompanying student workbooks and big packs full of teachers' activities which most teachers never use. So yes, you need to do something more to make the material stick, but memorising all the vocab before starting seems mind-numbingly tedious, and would actually really overcompensate for the density of the material, leaving me with too little work to do when working through the lessons, so I'd get really bored.

To me, there can't really be any hard-and-fast rules that apply to all textbooks, because different textbooks have different weaknesses.

That's not to say learning vocab first isn't useful. When teaching beginners, particularly kids, I often start with vocab flashcards. I prefer to work these into sentences (eg "What is he doing?" "He's writing." "What is she doing?" "She's swimming.") but I don't always do it that way. I do this at the start of a lesson, but I've seen teachers in the past give new vocab at the end of a lesson to be memorised as homework before the next lesson. I don't know whether this has simply gone out of fashion or it has been demonstrated to be less effective (due to forgetting, memory schedules etc.) Even if it's the second one, it may be that computer-based homework can overcome the problem.

[Iversen]

(...) because different textbooks have different weaknesses.
That's not to say learning vocab first isn't useful. When teaching beginners, particularly kids, I often start with vocab flashcards. I prefer to work these into sentences (eg "What is he doing?" "He's writing." "What is she doing?" "She's swimming.") but I don't always do it that way. I do this at the start of a lesson, but I've seen teachers in the past give new vocab at the end of a lesson to be memorised as homework before the next lesson. (...)

If the (new) vocabulary doesn't follow immediately after the texts in a textbook then you can just as well drop the listing of new words completely and just tell your customers to use a standard dictionary. Giving pupils long lists of words to be used in the future doesn't sound very pedagogical, but it is not a bad idea to look up new vocabulary in a shorter passage immediately before you try to make sense of the passage - at least in new languages where everything still looks slightly scary and forbidding. But never more than one page at a time, and better less. And jot the looked-up words down somewhere so that you don't forget to learn them.

As for making up sentences up with the new words then it is probably a good idea, but less so if you only can make extremely standardized and simple sentences because you haven't learnt enough words yet. Making sentences on just one single mold, "this is a chair / table / lamp / yoghurt / family member / stuffed T rex /-n idea", won't contribute significantly more to your vocabulary than just memorizing the words as a list. It would be better - but also more time consuming - to ask your students to make three or four different sentences containing each new word, and then maybe do the exercise for fewer words.

However the quoted passage from Cainntear does accidentally point to a major problem with textbooks, namely that they aren't standardized enough. If you want to teach people a syntactical pattern or the gamut of uses of some 'little grey word' then it's fine to tell them what it looks like once, but after that you need to show them how it functions in real sentences - in more than one case, and with variations so that your customers can recognize the pattern even when it has been obscured by morphological changes, insertions of other elements and things like that.

In other words, you need to show them a bunch of simple sentences built on a certain pattern. Unfortunately this would seriously inflate the size of textbooks, so instead most textbook authors try to diversify their examples,which effectively prevents users from seeing and internalizing the patterns therein. Or in other words: wIth just one example you can't really illustrate how a pattern works, only point to one case where it did.

Are language guides then better? Normally not - I have one for Cebuan that does the trick, but it's a forlorn single loner covering a language which hardly anyone studies. The rest of my language guides may contain series à la "bla bla " plus some word alternatives, but that won't make people see patterns - you need a minimum of variation to do that. And since grammar is better learnt from simple (and, ahem, less simple) grammars where things are explained in a logical sequence the only task that is left to textbooks is providing users with extremely simple texts with recurring vocabulary. I leave it to the reader to judge whether this condition is met, and whether the result justifies the expenses, but the minimal requirement must be that any new vocabulary is shown together with the text that caused the problem.