Cavesa wrote:And am I the only one around here with experience with foreign doctors and hospitals (not only in the professional sense), foreign policemen, getting stuck somewhere due to a technical problem, car crashes abroad, simply needing the words for household items, and so on? In situations like that, it is simply really impractical to start searching your dictionary for every word.
Why I am convinced anyone striving to get a practical high level in a language needs more than a frequency list and a pocket dictionary:
-sometimes, there is no time for searching.
-when you are searching too much (and what is "too much" depends on the native you are dealing with), you look like a moron and make things complicated.
-too much searching can cause loss of respect. We are not always talking about weather while drinking tea in a café. We are learning languages to serve us in various situations. That includes heated ones with stress included, and including really unpleasant people who will use any advantage over you. You definitely don't want to need a dictionary in those moments.
-Large vocabulary is a sign of a high enough level. And without that, many people will treat you as inferior. Not in the touristy situations. In the more complicated yes.
-You would be surprised by the stuff many dictionaries don't contain (for example, I once had a dictionary by a well reputed publisher, that didn't include the word for "heating". You might agree solving a non functional heating is quite important in winter and communicating with the hotel staff without the word about it would have been complicated)
I absolutely agree with most of your main points here. Particularly about large vocabulary being a sign of a high level. Most of the people I speak Mandarin with are aware that I'm in kind of an intermediate rut and have trouble expressing myself precisely. Pretty much every time I use the
exact word for what I'm trying to say, there's some kind of comment like "Oh, you know that word!" Through my previous lack of knowledge, I've convinced them somehow that I'm incapable of really using the language correctly. What fun.
I also agree that many coursebooks think the only "advanced" topics are politics, philosophy, and culture. I was, however, pleasantly surprised to revisit my intermediate German text just now (Stationen: Ein Kursbuch für die Mittelstufe) and find that Chapter 11 has a recipe (vocab includes
schnetzeln, hacken, schmelzen, warm stellen, anbraten, dünsten, der Topf, die Zitronenschale), a text about Müesli (
vocab: die Rohkost, das Gericht, die Haferflocken), and a note on Swiss military service.
But I've been in stressful situations without English available as a lifeline, and I got through it. People who are about to go live abroad for a while (I just returned from Abroad and I'm going back to Abroad in four days) should certainly be making an effort to improve their vocabulary - but it's hard. Sitting in your living room at home, it's much easier to imagine that everything will go well instead of preparing what words you need to explain some terrible predicament.
So I suppose it comes down to being prepared by finding material that really does cover real life - the point of the thread, in fact. Yesterday I watched a short German documentary on lifeguards and learned a handful of pool and swimming related words I hadn't known before. Reading fiction has already been discussed with regards to its importance for vocabulary. This thread inspired me to make another video similar to my
Kitchen English one, which should be uploaded shortly (the link will appear in my log).
News is very easy to find and "prestigious" in a way ("Can you read a newspaper in your target language?") but news sites always have lifestyle, auto, food, tech, entertainment sections with, perhaps, more immediately useful vocabulary for many people.