einzelne wrote:I'm sorry but you completely missed my point. As a native speaker, you think these words are common so you can find them a lot in literature or newspapers. In fact, they are not. That's why I gave these words as examples — something which you consider to be quite common is not for a non-native speaker. I didn't see these words only once in my life, of course, but sometimes the time interval could be several months or even a year, if not more.
Seems like you're trying to redefine the word "common". A common word is a common word, regardless of whether we're talking about a native or non-native speaker. A word can be more or less common in different contexts, and non-native speakers may find it difficult to get sufficient exposure to certain contexts of language use, but that's a separate matter.
I've been reading in English more than 13 years (fiction, non-fiction, news, magazines, literature in my field). I've watched hundreds, if not thousands of hours of TV series and movies and the first time I met the 'essential' expression 'to total the car' was this summer when I was reading a Philip K. Dick novel. With nonnative speakers this happens all the time — sometimes we don't know even some basic words, even if we had thousands of hours of exposure.
I realize that happens to non-native speakers all the time. And I'm saying that with the technology and available content of 2021, for the most popular languages, it can be alleviated with strategic choice of input. What's the average vocabulary difference between a native speaker and an advanced non-native speaker? 10 or 15k words? That's not an insurmountable gap. But it requires strategic choices of input, there are diminishing returns, and people have other priorities, so most people don't bother, which is fully understandable.
Yes, when I read books in my field, I rarely meet new words. And although I can easily read general fiction, newspapers, etc there are still gaps in my vocabulary. Sometimes even advanced learners don't realize what a huge gap separates them from native speakers.
I live in a city full of highly educated non-native speakers of English, and a nontrivial minority of them (especially the Harvard crowd) have vocabularies that rival or surpass the native speakers around them. You simply can't make such a blanket statement about this gap.
As I said, I only have about 2 hours (may be 3 in my best days) for language related activities in all my languages. I'm happy when I can read one fiction book per month in a given languages. Depending on the language, an average book will give me 400-800 new words. Some of them would be obscure or irrelevant for me. But some of them are pretty common like 'to total a car'. If I happen to review them, I increase the chances of getting them into my long term memory. My review sessions don't take much time (usually it's a batch of 50 word which takes about 5 minutes to review — I can easily go through it during a coffee break), so I don't see I need to give up this tool when intensive reading alone with low frequency words stops working.
You seem satisfied with your method, and that's what matters most.
Le Baron wrote:Is 'scrounge' a rare word? It seems to me to be the most common term bandied about in media to describe perfectly legitimate benefits claimants. You can barely get away from the word.
In my experience it's rare, but that could just be a quirk of the type of English input I get.