So yes, these are my amateur observations, but I think they show that the methodology could make a ton of difference, like always. I am also careful about this, as the amount and complexity of vocabulary is a rather explosive argument. Basically any time in the history, when one group wanted to discredit another group based on the language (the closest example to me is the AU empire and Czech vs German), the "they have much less vocabulary" argument almost always shows up! It is the "they should learn the better language instead of theirs for their own good, to not be limited by it". That's why I would be very careful about such statements.
Inst wrote:TBH, it's just my bad memory. The way I do recall was the comparison between vocabulary requirements for C2 French vs C2 English (TOEFL), with the latter being significantly larger.
I totally believe that but I'd see a different element here, taking a part of the "blame". I am not an English native. And I do not hesitate to say that English is being taught much more seriously than the other languages in Europe. It is not just about the amount of classes in the mainstream schools. But the attitude of "well, you are not expected to learn French anyways" and "English is vital" is so prevalent, that it may skew even the expectations from the C2 learners.
Based on my individual experience (and I haven't found any reliable sources on that), I am convinced that the expectations of what the learners can achieve at each level are not equal among the langauges, despite the CEFR scale being just one and intended to level the field.
So, when we see a table with a lower number of words required of a French learner at a certain level than of an English level (or even more obviously the real number of words the French and English learner has learnt at that level), I think it is caused at leastjust as much by the curriculum and the different expectations (which do get into coursebooks and the teachers' heads) as by the chachacteristics of the languages themselves.
The way I assumed the synthetic / analytic difference worked was that a synthetic language usually had a complex grammar with many inflections. For instance, nouns in English are gendered rarely, and the gender plays little grammatical effect. French, in contrast, has gender on its nouns, and someone on this board claimed that verbs have up to 30 forms, although many fall into verb classes. German has three genders, in contrast, with four different cases. What I thought the end effect would be would that it'd be harder for native speakers to expand their vocabulary; not only would they need to grasp the meaning, pronunciation, and sometimes orthography of the new word, they would also need to learn the grammatical features of the new word.
No. That's not how it works. Yes, small children will make different mistakes, based on their native language. But as a native speaker of a language with conjugations, declinations (7 cases), three genders, etc, I can assure you that this has absolutely nothing to do with acquiring more vocabulary. Natives do not struggle with that. After the initial phases in childhood and after a few years of learning to write correctly at school (the fact the English natives seem to have fewer grammar classes doesn't mean they don't need them just as much), you grasp the grammar related to the new words automatically. The same is true about the French and German natives.
With your argument, you could say the opposite. The English natives would struggle with learning new words, because of the crazily irregular ortograph.
A better illustration might be Chinese, although it is analytic.
Not really. CEFR is difficult to apply on non european languages. As you've said yourself, the HSK 6 is not C2. The difficulties are different, the way the learners progress is different.
But this is just a conjecture, anyways. I can't get clear and definitive data on the following topics:
-Rates at which children learn words/word families up to adulthood in a given language
-Vocabulary size of young adults in a given language, varying by education level
Such research will still be of limited value, as the researchers tend to leave out the most important parts that make enormous differences between the children: the communication and teaching activities from the parents, the IQ of the child, and how early and eagerly (or not) the child reads.
And it would still be irrelevant for the adult langauge learners, in my opinion.