Best approach to learning more words

[Seneca]

As someone still very early in the language learning journey, this is quite an interesting thread. I have so far liked reading books with parallel texts. I have no idea of the efficacy of this versus flash cards or anki or whatever long term, but hopefully it is of some use!

I just did a rough count of all the books I have in physical form, and it is ~1600 pages total, so 800 pages of Italian. That seems a good bit lower than the spot where some people have said they can comfortably read without a dictionary, but my plan is to work through all them and then tackle something all in Italian with just a dictionary and see how it goes!

Oh, and I am not only reading. I am working on grammar a bit in the meantime while fooling around with the readers.

[Carmody]

neofight78 wrote:
I'm a mediocre learner and I need something for mediocre learners and not for genius polyglots.

Thank you neofight78; good to find I am not alone.

[DianaRay]

There is a big difference between Russian literary language and Russian spoken language. Most of words from the books (especially from classic ones) we, Russians, never use in our daily life. But we use lots of slang, idioms and English words which we change in Russian manner. For my opinion, if you want to speak modern Russian you'd better work with modern books/magazines and with Russian movies. I think that working on movies (subtitles translations, repetitions and imitation actors) is the best way to learn not just words, but also useful phrases and idioms, intonation and, the most important, Russian modern culture and mentality.

[smallwhite]

A link:

Vocabulary coverage ratios

French... 5000 words covers 96.0%
English... 5000 words covers 93.5%
Spanish... 5000 words covers 92.5%
Russian... 5000 words covers 92.0%
German... 5000 words covers 83.13%

Russian does not look particularly bad?

[blaurebell]

Russian does not look particularly bad?

That depends on how these words are counted. Russian has verb aspect which effectively doubles the amount of verbs to learn. This table looks like it counts aspect pairs as one word. You still have to learn the aspect pairs separately though, because there is no rule that connects them. Sometimes they contain just a syllable more/less, sometimes as a prefix, sometimes in the middle of the word, but often enough they have a different stem altogether. And just like in German a prefix can also significantly change the meaning of the verb, which means you have an awful lot of additional interference when learning verbs. One prefix might mark perfective / imperfective, another a different meaning, which then shifts the perfective imperfective change to a syllable in the middle or to a completely different stem. And then the reflexive version of the same verb can sometimes have a completely different meaning too! All that confusion makes for a lot more time spent learning these words. So, that table makes only sense if you count aspect pairs as one word, but then you might spend double or triple the amount of time learning them. After all you might mix them up with 2 or 3 other verbs and have to learn 2 words instead of one as well. There is a grammar book called "I know and love Russian verbs", which should probably be renamed to "I don't understand and hate Russian verbs" to coincide with the reality of most Russian learners. And the most lovely thing: The average Russian sentence in literary language seems to contain 5-10 verbs thanks to the joy that are participle constructions!

But then frankly, I don't believe in those numbers in general. There are significant differences between classic, soviet and contemporary Russian, and when you compare frequency lists compiled from soviet newspapers to those compiled from the classics not even the most frequent 1000 words will coincide.

[Teango]

[There are significant differences between classic, soviet and contemporary Russian, and when you compare frequency lists compiled from soviet newspapers to those compiled from the classics not even the most frequent 1000 words will coincide.

I concur with blaurebell and DianaRay...contemporary spoken Russian can vary a lot from the type of vocabulary gleaned from classic literature and old soviet newspapers that is all too often used to compile word frequency lists. I recall that words like "колхоз" (collective farm) fell within the top 500 words in Brown's "Russian Learners' Dictionary: 10,000 Russian Words in Frequency Order", while words I hear my wife and Russian in-laws use every day, like "сметана" (sour cream), fell only within the 7,500-8,000 range.

[neofight78]

Russian has verb aspect which effectively doubles the amount of verbs to learn. This table looks like it counts aspect pairs as one word. You still have to learn the aspect pairs separately though, because there is no rule that connects them.

Very often there is more than one perfective form of a verb, so it's more than double.

But then frankly, I don't believe in those numbers in general. There are significant differences between classic, soviet and contemporary Russian, and when you compare frequency lists compiled from soviet newspapers to those compiled from the classics not even the most frequent 1000 words will coincide.

blaurebell correctly points out that the statistics very much depend on the corpus. I wouldn't be surprised if the above figure was correct for slang free conversational Russian, but for reading it's clearly not true. My vocabulary is heading towards 8,000 words and a page from a new book quite often results in a known word count in the 70-80% range.

Plus there is the testimony of lots of learners who say that Russian vocabulary is hard, including those who have already learned a couple of languages. Perhaps all Russian learners are a bunch of moaners, but I suspect not.

Also % words known does not equal % text understood. Whether in that lies a difference between languages I don't know. Perhaps someone else has an insight or data on that?

[neofight78]

I recall that words like "колхоз" (collective farm) fell within the top 500 words in Brown's "Russian Learners' Dictionary: 10,000 Russian Words in Frequency Order"

The exact same example came to my mind

[blaurebell]

Russian has verb aspect which effectively doubles the amount of verbs to learn. This table looks like it counts aspect pairs as one word. You still have to learn the aspect pairs separately though, because there is no rule that connects them.

Very often there is more than one perfective form of a verb, so it's more than double.

True. I think I'm still in denial about that though

Plus there is the testimony of lots of learners who say that Russian vocabulary is hard, including those who have already learned a couple of languages. Perhaps all Russian learners are a bunch of moaners, but I suspect not.

When I started intensive reading with LWT in French after about 200 pages I was down to breezy 6-15% unknown word forms. I'm now at about 350 pages with Russian and I'm still at 10-20% with the occasional page of 25% or even 30% new word forms. And it doesn't seem to be getting any less LWT + highly inflected language => Moan moan moan.

Also, verb aspect, the potential of gazillion mistakes thanks to cases, low number of cognates, oodles of difficult vocabulary that all seems to differ only by a single sound, which you might not even be able to hear, let alone pronounce, e.g. ы vs и, т vs ть, дедушка, девушка, дядюшка, девочка , half page sentences with 10+ verbs and the maddest word order. Did I forget anything? I think we're entitled to moan a little

[Cavesa]

contemporary spoken Russian can vary a lot from the type of vocabulary gleaned from classic literature and old soviet newspapers that is all too often used to compile word frequency lists. I recall that words like "колхоз" (collective farm) fell within the top 500 words in Brown's "Russian Learners' Dictionary: 10,000 Russian Words in Frequency Order", while words I hear my wife and Russian in-laws use every day, like "сметана" (sour cream), fell only within the 7,500-8,000 range.

There is a real problem with too many frequency lists being based only on written sources, more specifically newspapers. That is one of my biggest complaints about frequency lists and why I don't find their uncritical adoration appropriate.

2.WHY are such old newspapers still being used as the corpus?
It is not just about some terms related to propaganda or stuff related to a narrowly defined political-historical era, like колхоз. Why would linguists in any country use 30 or 40 years old newspapers for such a corpus? The whole world has changed, the subjects we speak and read about, the political and economical problems and terminology, the technology and science that is being discussed daily in the media. The domestic items the old advertisements promoted would be laughable now, while today's are not likely to be found on such a frequency list. It makes as much sense as two hundred years old sources, the world has simply changed so much during the last several decades.