Learn 12 languages in 12 months? Right.

[Le Baron]

Well yes and no. If we're looking at what they actually do, we're going to learn something; if we ask them whether they do something or other, you might well learn something or you might not; if you just ask them what they do, you probably won't learn anything...

It reminds me of a discussion I had with someone who claimed they only read books on musical technique (orchestration, harmony etc) from 'real' composers. The claim being that since this person, e.g. Berlioz, also put out works now considered 'great', it also meant the germ of this greatness is for the taking via his treatise. I see this as a vast error.

As I've mentioned repeatedly (including quite recently), I bought a book on swimming called Total Immersion which talked about how swimmers would repeat the lines that their coaches gave them on how to swim "properly" with no analysis of their own technique. But then the underwater chase cam was invented, and you could see the swimmers' technique better than ever. What was discovered was that the best swimmers were doing something quite differently from what they would describe. Swimming changed very rapidly as people started looking at what the top swimmers actually did rather than placing all the weight on what they said they did.

It's indeed interesting. It doesn't greatly surprise me, since I imagine that once people learn something they only learn the motions and get 'advice', but this tends to be put into practise in a personal way. I learned tailoring from my father, but I don't at all do things the same way as he did. I have found ways that suit me better, even though the core 'rule' holds. And in fact he didn't always do things in the way he described them as a 'rule'. This mirrors quite closely I would say the processes of 'language learning' and 'language using', where things making the transition from theory to practise undergo a process where you shape it to yourself and your needs, style and abilities. This makes it not really easy to just transfer it as 'knowledge'.

[jeff_lindqvist]

1500-2500 words active vocabulary I think is the A2. I was watching some CEFR (standard) exam interviews on YT for A2 for reference yesterday. I would be massively impressed if someone could achieve those in standards in 3-6 months of intensive study.

As far as I am aware, there have never been any official vocabulary size numbers for the CEFR. I have just flipped through the latest revised guidelines (PDF), and I still couldn't find a table with actual numbers for vocabulary. (I searched for "vocabulary" and skimmed the relevant sections looking for tables.) The CEFR has always been task oriented, and previous attempts to estimate actual vocabulary sizes corresponding those tasks have been all over the map. There may be some other publications that I've missed; I haven't looked seriously for 5-8 years or so.

Forum speculations from the days of yore (15 Aug 2016):
CEFR levels and vocabulary size

[Cainntear]

1500-2500 words active vocabulary I think is the A2. I was watching some CEFR (standard) exam interviews on YT for A2 for reference yesterday. I would be massively impressed if someone could achieve those in standards in 3-6 months of intensive study.

As far as I am aware, there have never been any official vocabulary size numbers for the CEFR. I have just flipped through the latest revised guidelines (PDF), and I still couldn't find a table with actual numbers for vocabulary. (I searched for "vocabulary" and skimmed the relevant sections looking for tables.) The CEFR has always been task oriented, and previous attempts to estimate actual vocabulary sizes corresponding those tasks have been all over the map. There may be some other publications that I've missed; I haven't looked seriously for 5-8 years or so.

Indeed. Pretty much everyone at ALTE would be well aware of the dramatic difference in words between languages. English has stupidly many words. French, Spanish and Italian retain a lot of the old Latin derived/inflected forms borrowed in, even if the process of inflections is dying off. In Eastern Europe, there are a lot of Slavic languages with dozens of pronouns when all the cases are counted up. Then of course there's Hungarian, because what counts as a word in an agglutinative language?

Putting numbers in would have meant the CEFR would never have been widely accepted.

[leosmith]

I don't understand why we are spending any time at all on such a silly statement.

Put yourself out there then and start your own thread. It's been a while right? How about something like "We can become fluent with only 300 words".

[orlandohill]

How about something like "We can become fluent with only 300 words".

The number of words needed to communicate effectively in a given situation depends on the language. An extreme example would be a constructed language like Toki Pona that only has 137 essential words.

[bombobuffoon]

1500-2500 words active vocabulary I think is the A2. I was watching some CEFR (standard) exam interviews on YT for A2 for reference yesterday. I would be massively impressed if someone could achieve those in standards in 3-6 months of intensive study.

As far as I am aware, there have never been any official vocabulary size numbers for the CEFR. I have just flipped through the latest revised guidelines (PDF), and I still couldn't find a table with actual numbers for vocabulary. (I searched for "vocabulary" and skimmed the relevant sections looking for tables.) The CEFR has always been task oriented, and previous attempts to estimate actual vocabulary sizes corresponding those tasks have been all over the map. There may be some other publications that I've missed; I haven't looked seriously for 5-8 years or so.

Indeed. Pretty much everyone at ALTE would be well aware of the dramatic difference in words between languages. English has stupidly many words. French, Spanish and Italian retain a lot of the old Latin derived/inflected forms borrowed in, even if the process of inflections is dying off. In Eastern Europe, there are a lot of Slavic languages with dozens of pronouns when all the cases are counted up. Then of course there's Hungarian, because what counts as a word in an agglutinative language?

Putting numbers in would have meant the CEFR would never have been widely accepted.

Taken from DOI:10.1057/9780230242258 Vocabulary size and the common European framework of reference for languages

Just another research paper but I wonder if then there is less work to do getting to A2 in French in England, than the other way around.

[emk]

Taken from DOI:10.1057/9780230242258 Vocabulary size and the common European framework of reference for languages

Just another research paper but I wonder if then there is less work to do getting to A2 in French in England, than the other way around.

As Jeff Lindqvist mentioned, we had a couple of giant threads on these papers back in the day. I read a couple of these studies in detail at the time, and they were riddled with methodological issues.

Just for example, let's just say that I am completely unwilling to accept the UK's education system's assessment of French CEFR levels. The French have two fine sets of tests for this purpose: the TCF, and the DELF/DALF. If you want to know someone's CEFR level, have them sit the TCF. Then test them against a frequency dictionary. You will get very different numbers than are found in this table.

What you don't do is ask their teachers in the UK which French CEFR-level class they're in, or look at results on French tests designed in the UK, or rely on their UK teacher's assessment of French CEFR levels. Many countries practice rampant "CEFR inflation" when evaluating other countries' languages. There are no negative consequences for making inflated claims, and there are powerful incentives that encourage CEFR level inflation.

If you want to evaluate French CEFR levels, look at the tests backed by the French government, the tests which are officially accepted for immigration or for university admission. These are well-designed tests, calibrated against the official CEFR level descriptions.

You will not find people scoring B2 on the TCF with a 1,882-word vocabulary.

I'm not going to dig into any of these old papers again. It wasn't particularly worth it last time.

[bombobuffoon]

Taken from DOI:10.1057/9780230242258 Vocabulary size and the common European framework of reference for languages

Just another research paper but I wonder if then there is less work to do getting to A2 in French in England, than the other way around.

As Jeff Lindqvist mentioned, we had a couple of giant threads on these papers back in the day. I read a couple of these studies in detail at the time, and they were riddled with methodological issues.

Just for example, let's just say that I am completely unwilling to accept the UK's education system's assessment of French CEFR levels. The French have two fine sets of tests for this purpose: the TCF, and the DELF/DALF. If you want to know someone's CEFR level, have them sit the TCF. Then test them against a frequency dictionary. You will get very different numbers than are found in this table.

What you don't do is ask their teachers in the UK which French CEFR-level class they're in, or look at results on French tests designed in the UK, or rely on their UK teacher's assessment of French CEFR levels. Many countries practice rampant "CEFR inflation" when evaluating other countries' languages. There are no negative consequences for making inflated claims, and there are powerful incentives that encourage CEFR level inflation.

If you want to evaluate French CEFR levels, look at the tests backed by the French government, the tests which are officially accepted for immigration or for university admission. These are well-designed tests, calibrated against the official CEFR level descriptions.

You will not find people scoring B2 on the TCF with a 1,882-word vocabulary.

I'm not going to dig into any of these old papers again. It wasn't particularly worth it last time.

All estimates have their limitations. As a way of guessing at how long it may take to achieve A2, word count seems reasonable to be used in combination as an additional factor. Of course there are the other factors such as "class hours", and the necessary practice factors, etc.

Originally all I was getting at is that just the word count alone is enough cause for doubt. I just get a bit suspicious that one can reach A2 with for example 30 hours of study over the course of a month. Or being able to retain, let alone use 1000 words in just one month of learning. That is immediately enough of a doubt, purely not having enough words. Not including practice, retention, etc.

[bombobuffoon]

Would it be possible even in theory to reach A2 in 12 languages in 12 months? I highly doubt it.

That would mean a crushing 1500 words in each. Or gaining a working vocabulary of 18000 words over the span of a year. That's 50 words a day. While I am sure there are some memory freaks out there who could do that, they would be unlikely be well rounded enough to handle the other aspects like pronunciation, listening. Nah.

Actually we did the 30/30 challenge which is 30 vocabulary words in 30 days. It killed me, and I didn't manage to do it.

I honestly think I would struggle with a 5/30 challenge. SRS or whatever means. My brain would just flush it after a while. I personally don't believe my brain can really handle picking up lots of information that it can't do stuff with.

I am sure there are some memory freaks who could do the 30/30 challenge. I recall watching a documentary about the autist memory guy Daniel Tammet who supposedly learnt Icelandic in a week. I have no idea how accurate that is, because he also gets labelled a maths genius for being able to recite PI...

[s_allard]

I don't understand why we are spending any time at all on such a silly statement.

Put yourself out there then and start your own thread. It's been a while right? How about something like "We can become fluent with only 300 words".

I'm so glad you brought this up. I didn't dare intervene in the discussion about CEFR levels and vocabulary size because I was sure people would start howling "There goes s_allard again on his usual crazy rant about needing only 300 words to pass a C2 level test. Everybody knows you need at least 5000 words. " But now that the cat is out of the bag, I'll revisit the idea very briefly from a different angle.

When I took the Italian B2 test last year, I was surprised by the very short duration of the speaking test. It literally consists of two minutes of conversation on two topics. Even more surprising to me was the fact that I passed this section that carries just as much weight as the the other longer sections of the test.

This experience solidified my belief that you can get a pretty good idea of how well a person speaks a language after less than a minute of hearing them talk. You notice the accent immediately. A few sentences demonstrate fluency or fluidity in the manipulation of grammatical and vocabulary elements.

How many different words or word families did I use in less than two minutes of actually speaking? Maybe 200. So let me proclaim: I, s_allard, say that you only need around 200 words to pass the speaking section of the official B2 test of Italian.

All facetiousness aside, there's a serious point here: it's not the number of words that is important, it's how the words are used. For example, a high level of proficiency will be indicated by fluidity, the presence of more complex grammatical structures and the use of idioms. This is how language works. A tiny sample is thus all you need to assess general speaking ability.

Edit: added "the speaking section" to "of the official B2 test of Italian"