FRENCH C1 Vocabulary

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Re: FRENCH C1 Vocabulary

Postby garyb » Wed Aug 31, 2022 5:04 pm

Usual disclaimer that I've not done one of these exams so am speculating...

I'm as against word-counting as s_allard and all are, but the issue I see is that you can't predict the content of the exam in order to "just learn whatever you need", although with good preparation materials I'm sure you can make an educated guess. So you might only use a few hundred words, but common high-frequency ones aside, which words these are will depend on the subject you're asked about and will come from a much larger pool of known words.

But there are a few things in there I can't quantify: how many of them might be high-frequency beyond these 30 most common words, how many very specific to the subject, how many not too common but also not too specific? I'm sure there's all sorts of analysis on this sort of thing, although I've never looked into it, and the people here with exam experience will have a better idea. And there's also the skill of being able to work around word you don't know using ones you do.

In any case, I agree with the general idea to focus on language, not on words. I'd expect that knowing enough words to pass a C1 exam would just be a side effect of doing the amount and type of practice that is needed to pass a C1 exam.

Correlation isn't causation: saying "a C1 speaker tends to know x words" doesn't mean that "knowing x words makes you a C1 speaker". Unfortunately I've come across various online level assessments based on that idea...

I'm also not convinced that grammar and spelling are hugely important, judging by the writing of people with C1 and C2 certificates that I've seen. Obviously mistakes will only count against you, but I'm unsure that they do so by a large amount. Which isn't a bad thing, since CEFR is more about what you can do with the language than on producing it perfectly. Again I'm speculating, but if I were preparing for an exam I'd focus much more on wide language exposure and the ability to explain my thoughts with fluidity than on correctness.
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Re: FRENCH C1 Vocabulary

Postby FRAnglais1919 » Fri Sep 02, 2022 5:04 pm

I agree with BeaP and s_allard. Here's an article on why you shouldn't worry about counting the number of words in your vocabulary: http://www.fluentfrenchnow.com/how-many ... -fluently/

For starters, it's impossible to predict which words will appear on a language exam. Just think about the number itself. This article says there are about 60,000 distinct words in French (I assume it's not counting conjugations of verbs). No Anki deck will prepare you for that.

If you listen to French radio and film, even badly, you'll notice that all the speakers use the same handful of words repetitively. You do the same thing in English. Sure, there are times when the speaker says a word whose meaning you do not know. But by and large, the same 300 or 400 words are used repetitively.
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Re: FRENCH C1 Vocabulary

Postby Le Baron » Fri Sep 02, 2022 7:40 pm

I also agree with BeaP and s_allard. For an exam the real test of creative usage is in writing/speaking, and it's where any shortcomings and errors are always most evident. Reading, and to some level listening, is less of a problem, because you can guess and even miss out things so long as you extract the correct message. And no one will ever know that you didn't know a particular word if the answer is correct. Reading is more congenial because you can re-read to form a picture of comprehension.
s_allard wrote:What counts is not how many words we can spew out in the shortest time ; it’s how we can skillfully use the words we have..

Yes I agree with this. It's such a widely applicable principle. We know already that you can cook simple, but effective dishes with limited ingredients; which aren't spectacular or complicated, but is better than having access to all the ingredients you want and still producing only gruel. It's down to the skill. It points to the value of some sort of balance between materials and method.

Without doubt a C1 exam doesn't deal with elementary topics and is a test of active and passive vocabularies, so there are going to be uncommon vocabulary items. We can't account for all of them. A C1 exam is something to be tackled after having used progressively wider vocabularies over some time. The idea that one runs through lists and learns a large battery of 'required words' over some short time period and thereby 'develop an 'advanced' vocabulary', is pseudo-theoretical twaddle. We develop usable vocabularies by usage and it's a fraction of the words encountered or even run multiple times through SRS systems. It's also about familiarity with patterns and usage.

anyone who asks: 'can I pass a [add letter/number] exam?' The answer is to look at a sample exam and if it's not comprehensible you have work to do...and not just learning words.
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Re: FRENCH C1 Vocabulary

Postby s_allard » Sat Sep 03, 2022 4:53 am

One way to look at this question is to ask ourselves how does it take for us to determine the level of speaking proficiency, let’s say A, B and C, of exam candidates. I would say about 30 seconds. We don’t have to listen to 10 minutes of talking to make a basic judgement because the overall level of proficiency will not really change between the first and the tenth minute. It’s not as if the speaker will get nicely warmed up and all the components of language proficiency will start magically falling into place, and the speaker goes from A to C.

To simplify things, let’s say that the A speaker may not fully understand the question or the prompt, sounds awkward, hesitates frequently, searches for words, makes outright grammatical and pronunciation mistakes due primarily to the influence of the native language, and certainly has no real sense of idiomatic speech.

On the other hand, the C speaker is the very opposite. They are off to a flying start after the question or the prompt, have a good sense of fluidity, pronounce quite clearly, make relatively few or minor grammatical mistakes, can make subtle distinctions in word usage including elements of abstraction and will use some idioms or forms of formulaic speech.

The B level speaker is somewhere in between the A and C above. All this is immediately visible or rather audible from the minute the person opens their mouth. The only reason the examiner will use more time is to have more material on which to make a final judgement and to give the candidate time to get over some initial nervousness.

The same could be said of writing. One paragraph is probably all you need to demonstrate your skill in writing the target language.

The point of all this is that our level of proficiency is basically fixed and is immediately evident. So we have to work diligently on all the components that enter into demonstrating proficiency. While vocabulary size and breadth is important, it is only one of various components.
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Re: FRENCH C1 Vocabulary

Postby Le Baron » Sat Sep 03, 2022 9:40 am

I'm not so sure that 30 seconds under exam conditions does always paint a true and fair picture of a person's abilities. Certainly the C candidate is likely to get off to a better start and perhaps maintain it as such, but the B level people can vary between confident and less confident. In my interim jobs at language schools I saw people who went to pieces in a 20 minute oral assessment, but managed well enough in 20 minute informal discussion about how their study was going.

The latter is more realistic as a prospect. How often are we called upon to speak for 20-30 minutes in our native language(s)? Let alone a foreign one with no interaction. It's abnormal.

One of the students - a Spanish person who is now a friend of mine - absolutely failed his English oral assessment even though I once sat in a pool bar with him and he spoke fluently enough for the entire evening! So he had vocabulary, but didn't seem to be able to retrieve it under pressure.
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Re: FRENCH C1 Vocabulary

Postby rdearman » Sat Sep 03, 2022 10:46 am

Le Baron wrote:I'm not so sure that 30 seconds under exam conditions does always paint a true and fair picture of a person's abilities. Certainly the C candidate is likely to get off to a better start and perhaps maintain it as such, but the B level people can vary between confident and less confident. In my interim jobs at language schools I saw people who went to pieces in a 20 minute oral assessment, but managed well enough in 20 minute informal discussion about how their study was going.

The latter is more realistic as a prospect. How often are we called upon to speak for 20-30 minutes in our native language(s)? Let alone a foreign one with no interaction. It's abnormal.

One of the students - a Spanish person who is now a friend of mine - absolutely failed his English oral assessment even though I once sat in a pool bar with him and he spoke fluently enough for the entire evening! So he had vocabulary, but didn't seem to be able to retrieve it under pressure.

I managed to speak with 2 Spanish guys in Zaragoza for an entire evening with only some John Wayne film Spanish and a lot of hand gestures. Lubrication of the tongue with multiple cerveza seems to be the trick.
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Re: FRENCH C1 Vocabulary

Postby BeaP » Sat Sep 03, 2022 12:41 pm

I think a lot of people do badly at these exams because they're not prepared for the specific tasks. Exam topics are often not the ones we normally talk about every day. For example politics is an absolute no-go and at the C levels you shouldn't really talk about your personal experience and even opinion, because it belongs to the B levels. A lot of candidates simply don't have ideas to express in general about single-parent households during covid or the current status of the e-reader market. Yes, usually you get some help to start from, but there's very little time and the whole thing means extreme pressure. During the preparation you work with the same or at least very similar topics and because of this you're confident. Being shocked by a strange, unknown topic can make anyone underperform even in an embarrassing way.

It's obvious after 1-2 minutes if you are prepared to take the exam. If the answer is no, the examiners will try to help you show your knowledge (which might be there in spite of the lack of focused exam preparation) with questions, but your chances are low.
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Re: FRENCH C1 Vocabulary

Postby s_allard » Sat Sep 03, 2022 3:28 pm

Le Baron wrote:I'm not so sure that 30 seconds under exam conditions does always paint a true and fair picture of a person's abilities. Certainly the C candidate is likely to get off to a better start and perhaps maintain it as such, but the B level people can vary between confident and less confident. ....


I agree, 30 seconds may be a bit short but I think everybody gets the point.

Just today I was watching a video of an interview with a Mexican journalist, and at one point she was searching for how to say electric saw in Spanish. It made me think how at times we all search for words in our native language. This doesn’t mean we are less proficient in our language ; it happens because there are many words and things we are not familiar with.

The really interesting thing is that as native speakers we have various strategies to deal with this situation. Very often our interlocutor will suggest the word we are looking for. Or we can just ask for help : How do you say that ? or You know what I mean or the What you call it. Or maybe just use some kind of workaround.

This is very different from the exam candidate who stops the conversation while searching for a word for a few seconds and then blurts out something totally wrong.

This also makes me think that the advanced speaker is also able to self-correct appropriately. Let’s say you use the wrong verb conjugation or the wrong gender agreement. But you quickly backtrack and make the correction. All of this shows off your mastery of the language.
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Re: FRENCH C1 Vocabulary

Postby Le Baron » Sat Sep 03, 2022 3:45 pm

s_allard wrote:The really interesting thing is that as native speakers we have various strategies to deal with this situation. Very often our interlocutor will suggest the word we are looking for. Or we can just ask for help : How do you say that ? or You know what I mean or the What you call it. Or maybe just use some kind of workaround.

Yes indeed. This is also seen as unproblematic if the language you are speaking is considered your native language. Just a moment of forgetfulness or unfamiliarity which is never reflected back onto your proficiency, which is assumed as standard. With an L2 speaker it's immediately thought of as lack of ability.
s_allard wrote:This also makes me think that the advanced speaker is also able to self-correct appropriately. Let’s say you use the wrong verb conjugation or the wrong gender agreement. But you quickly backtrack and make the correction. All of this shows off your mastery of the language.

Indeed, I've done this and it's also a sort of the relief for the interlocutor who notices the error then shares the instant satisfaction of you making your own correction. :lol:
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Re: FRENCH C1 Vocabulary

Postby Erisnimi » Mon Sep 05, 2022 10:24 am

s_allard wrote:Just today I was watching a video of an interview with a Mexican journalist, and at one point she was searching for how to say electric saw in Spanish. It made me think how at times we all search for words in our native language. This doesn’t mean we are less proficient in our language ; it happens because there are many words and things we are not familiar with.

The really interesting thing is that as native speakers we have various strategies to deal with this situation. Very often our interlocutor will suggest the word we are looking for. Or we can just ask for help : How do you say that ? or You know what I mean or the What you call it. Or maybe just use some kind of workaround.


You have good points and whether mine is one or not, I was reminded of something.

I think speaking "natively" sometimes has to do with speaking before thinking things through, not just looking for the right words. I recall one time speaking with a friend in Finnish (both of us being native speakers) and saying something to the effect of "I couldn't see a thing for all the trees that were on the leaves" (En nähnyt mitään, kun oli lehdissä puita). You have a mental image, the words that go with it, and now you're supposed to form a sentence that makes sense? To make the correction I could have rephrased it by changing the word order and two noun endings (...kun puissa oli lehtiä), or used a hand gesture indicating I meant to say it the other way around (I used a hand gesture).

If you use a language in a formal setting or otherwise need to get it right, I suppose it's a bit like you are both you and your friend you're talking to and you both get it but now you have to make a third person who's not there, who doesn't see all the gesturing and who has little time for the quirks in your speech pattern, understand it. It takes an effort for a native speaker to think before they speak or write but at times they have the freedom of not having to, where it's more visual, both literally and in terms of conveying mental images.

As for the topic at hand, I don't know about French tests but I'd say in general, the problem with thinking 10,000 words (or 20,000 or whatever) is that you might think they're equally essential. What about word number 10,001? In practical terms you have to draw the line somewhere and have a working vocabulary you know inside and out and can find use for. I'd think of extending your vocabulary in stages and practicing each stage separately. At the higher numbers, the more unusual words, it becomes more about recognition. But this comes from a non-expert. I like to study French by reading books and it would be disappointing if I didn't come across a new word every now and then. It's not always the most useful word but it might be essential to fully understand that particular work of literature.
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