Well, can you admit for once that linguistics is useful to other people even if it isn’t to you? All it takes is just that little bit of humility…
Imyirtseshem,
I see you’re new here, so let me tell you something about Steve. It is virtually impossible to reach a consensus on most of his opinions, in particular when it comes to linguistics. I have honestly tried to help people here by providing many arguments, links to studies, practical advice, and so on. In most cases, the initial reaction has been along the lines of that of customic above: “Thanks for the link! I’ve just read both parts of the article and found them fascinating. It certainly gave me food for thought . . . I have to read more on this topic.”
The next thing you know, along comes Rev. Kaufman and says that linguistics is a useless (or even harmful) pseudo science, an unnecessary complication of the obvious, that it is contributing little value, and that “[s]ome words we learn quickly, for no apparent reason.” Then the congregation is instructed to say ten Hail Marys and not listen to the words of the devil.
Fortunately, apostasy is not (yet) punished by stoning here, but it still feels very much like you’re arguing with a young Earth creationist.
There is not much one can do here. I once tried to have constructive arguments with Steve for the benefit of other members (even at the cost of resorting to ad hominem), but have since largely abandoned my attempts.
He reminds me of teenagers in math class. There are those who get it, and put their heads down and get to work. There are some, who, for whatever reasons, don’t and claim it is all useless and that they hate it. I was one of those but have since changed my mind - because the facts have shown me otherwise. I decided to keep my mind open and I was influenced for the better.
Thanks for the advice, Astamoore.
To answer the original question: I’ve been learning 20 new words and phrases a day all year with LingQ and that’s certainly achievable over the long term. 100 a day over the short term may well be achievable, but I think you’d get bored and stop within 6 weeks.
What have others managed?
I can’t imagine getting bored in the sense that I’d no longer want to learn the language any more. More likely, it would become harder to find words which you can then review in context (because I take them from textbooks and review in the context of dialogue). If 6 weeks is all that you manage, then you’ve learnt 4200 words! Even one week is enough to get all the beginner vocabulary down. That’s totally awesome when you think about it! Surely, going back to 20 per day would be a piece of cake.
You could also do one week on and one week off.
Actually I’ll start a vocabulary project using this method and tell you all how it goes, if anybody is interested.
If you learn 20 per day, how many do you forget per day? 5, 10 ?
Hape, that’s what review is for. However, I don’t think that’s a serious question…
I think hape’s question is a valid one. To me, the idea that you can somehow stuff 20 or 100 new words into your brain every day is ludicrous. Many words you think you’ve learned one day will disappear under the radar again. I don’t think you can accurately quantify this.
Spending time with the language will raise the bar higher, and gradually sweep up words and phrases that before were out of reach. But I don’t think we can (or should) control which words are swept up.
I agree it’s a valid question but I suspect the motivations for asking the question. It seems a little ‘trollish’. I do apologise if I’m mistaken. (Maybe too many years of the Internet for me…hehe).
I don’t see it as being ludicrous at all because I’ve done it several times with success. 20 words is simple for me. That’s taking things easy. 100 isn’t as hard on the memory as much as it’s hard to be consistent (more a logistics problem that anything). I find that things become difficult around the 140 mark. It’s a matter of doing things the right way for yourself. You’ve got to know the methods behind getting the words in, reviewing them properly and making them part of the passive and in turn active knowledge.
Are all people able to do this? Well, I’d like to think so. Over my 3 years of language learning, I’ve witnessed several of my personal contacts achieving a lot with this. I must say that I’m pretty obsessed with languages and tend to attract people with the same obsession. haha
When I was learning Chinese characters I would aim to learn ten a day at first and then gou up to thirty, and always assumed I was forgetting about half.
At that time, learning Chinese was my job so I put in many hours a day. Still, once past the first one thousand characters, I just relied on reading and listening and writing out most new characters when I met them, again assuming a large loss factor.
Now that I learn for fun , with only an hour or so a day available, I prefer reading and listening. I think the key is to enjoy the process. I would not enjoy learning lists of words and doubt if it would work for me. To each his or her own.j
Perhaps I should add that for the forgetting of words or characters for Chinese is, to me, a given in learning vocabulary. That is why the yellow highlight in LingQ is important. I often not only forget the meaning, but also that I ever saw the word before. It even happens with Known words! If we read and listen enough, we see these words again and again, and what is more pick up an even larger number incidentally, all the while enjoying content of interest.
Now I am off to run with Mark s dog, while listening to Russian.
skyblueteapot wrote:
“I’ve been learning 20 new words and phrases a day”
My own experience is that one can “learn” 20 words per day but the net learning rate will be much lower, especially in the case of Chinese characters. Normally I learn 10 and I forget 3-5 per day. You have to read and write a lot to achieve a good retention.
So I think 20 per day are quite high especially for an old brain.
Yes, I agree with you, Hape. Me too, I learn new words a day, but I forget many words, too.
(In various situations, I cannot use new words I learned, so this is not my real known words.)
To tell the truth, I can not use new words in various situations when talking with native speakers. For example, I can not speak out long sentences including new words very naturally when describing various pictures. I judged in my mind that non-active words are not really known words.
That’s why known Chinese words still are over 4000, there is not a dramatic progress since last year, even if I have many occasions to talk with native speakers.
However, the number of my passive words (which I can recognize in contexts) are probably over 5000 in Chinese.
@hape: “So I think 20 per day are quite high especially for an old brain.”
I’ll have you know I have the brain of a teenager! I keep in in a jar in the kitchen next to the pickled onions 
I don’t learn 20 words a day from cold (that never works for me), they are all from my reading and listening. Yes, I may well “forget” a lot of them, only to remember (some of) them again when I come across them in another book.
eg I learned a lot of words for “undead” when I read Dracula 2 years ago. I couldn’t pronounce or spell any of them now, but if I read another vampire book, I have a head start on that vocabulary.
I apologise to you for thinking you were trolling Hape. Sometimes I forget that not everybody has my knack for learning vocabulary.
Interesting Skyblueteapot. I prefer to go the other way around. I memorise the words first and then go reading/listening to the sources I took them from. If there is no list of words, then I have to go through the text to find the unknown words, naturally.
On linguistics,
I have to agree with astamoore. I’ve had several frustrating exchanges with Steve on linguistics.
It may help to realize that when Steve talks about linguistics, he seems to mostly mean structural linguistics (the sort of linguisitcs they do in France - semiotics and whatnot), sociolinguistics (power relations sort of stuff), and applied linguistics (TESL). These are pretty marginal areas of linguistics. And I certainly agree that there is a lot of baloney in applied linguistics. Most people in applied linguistics are not trained in what I would properly consider linguistics.
I think most when most people in the English-speaking world use the word “linguistics” they’re refering to either Comparative and Historical Linguistics (what used to be called “philology”) or Theoretical Linguistics (the sort of generative linguistics that Chomsky is involved in).
After a while I realized that Steve and I were just discussing different things. Steve’s previous comments, particularly in the linguistics video he later deleted, showed that he didn’t really have even a rudimentary understanding of theoretical linguistics. Neverthless, he thinks Chomsky is a fool, and he will most likely continue to bash linguistics.
People who are trained in theoretical linguistics, and who visit Steve’s blog or this forum, will simply have to get used to that. He’s said that he’s not going to read an introduction to theoretical linguistics, so that’s that. I’ve commented in the past because, like astamoore, I thought it’d be good for people to see counter-points, but my arguments had zero effect on Steve.
If your goal is to get Steve to change his mind about linguistics, you will probably just end up frustrated. I’m probably not going to challenge him about linguistics in the future because I don’t want all our exchanges to be so argumentative. I will join astamoore in the quiet box…
Bortrun,
“Steve’s previous comments, particularly in the linguistics video he later deleted, showed that he didn’t really have even a rudimentary understanding of theoretical linguistics.”
Oh yes, I have read on linguistics, and this included theoretic linguistics, and I named the books somewhere previously, at least 5 of them, in addition to books on TESOL and SLA. That is what I base my views on. To me what I saw there was much unnecessary sophisticated theorizing, mostly of benefit only to the practitioners, who are able to write learned papers and teach in universities, largely at the expense of the tax-payer.
The only branch of linguistics that is of interest to me is historical linguistics, which describes the evolution and relationship of different languages.
I deleted the video you referred to because I was largely restating what I had said before and was tired of the argument.
You may be frustrated that I am not persuaded by your arguments, but that is often the case in discussions. If your purpose in a discussion is to convince someone of your arguments, you will usually be disappointed. Rather, I find discussions to be opportunities to focus on developing one’s own ideas, and challenging them in the light of what the other person has to say. The other person’s arguments may not change one’s own views, but it is useful to be forced to defend one’s own views, or possibly change them somewhat in the light of new information or perspectives. It is rare that we are converted to the other person’s point of view, and that is an unrealistic expectation.
I have found the views of the linguistics defenders to be less than persuasive, although full of anger that I should challenge something so obvious to them as the value of linguistics.
Steve,
Yes, but of the books you listed, none of them were really properly theoretical linguistics books. The only things close to that were Pinker’s book and Teach Yourself Linguistics. I don’t count the French books because those come from a different tradition - not the tradition of generative linguistics. From what I’ve heard of linguistics in France, it doesn’t seem very useful or interesting to me either. But, not being terribly familiar with it, I can’t say more than that.
It was your comments that gave away your unfamiliarity with generative linguistics - how can linguistics posit a common basis for all language when languages are very different from each other - for example, you can say 暑かった in Japanese and not require a verb. You said that most of the stuff you saw was about French and German and whatnot, and you wondered if linguists had even considered more exotic languages like Japanese. Comments and questions like these demonstrate your unfamiliarity with linguistic theory. As well, your puzzlement at Pinker’s book shows a lack of familiarity with the material as those sorts of tree diagrams are a really basic thing.
I also disagree with your comments on argument. The purpose of argument is to persuade. In many public debates, votes are taken before and after the debate, and you can see that people’s positions shift as a result of the debate. Yes, if you’re dealing with someone who has a solid, well-developed, long-held position, you’re probabaly not going to change their mind with a single debate, and the debate is more an exercise in defending your position as you said.
What I found frustrating about interacting with you about linguisitcs was not that I failed to persuade you, it was that you seemed to have such strongly held opinions despite an apparent lack of familiarity with the material. I still stick with my conclusion that when you say “linguistics” and I say “linguistics”, we are talking about largely different things, given that most of your reading seemed to be done in semiotics, sociolinguistics and TESL. That is not what I mean when I say linguistics. I mean Chomskyian generative linguistics, which, in addition to comparative and historical lingusitics, is what “linguistics” has generally come to mean in the English-speaking world. I’m glad that you appreciate historical linguistics - that is at least one of the main parts of what consitutes linguistics - unlike semiotics and TESL theory and whatnot.
I also found it frustrating that you insist you have a good understanding of theoretical linguistics despite the fact that your reading list and your comments do not support this. In the end, all I asked was that you read an introductory textbook in theoretical linguistics like “An Introduction to Language”. If you do that, and still think it’s baloney, then fine. It’s not so much that we disagree, it’s that it seems to me that you’re largely unfamiliar with theoretical linguistics.
At any rate, I’m supposed to be in the quiet box. For myself, from now on when I see you write “linguistics”, I’m going to append “strucutral/socio/applied” in front of it. That should help me stay in the quiet box.
I do appreciate though that you don’t seem to take these disagreements personally. I don’t take them personally either, but a lot of people seem to get personally upset when having these sorts of disagreements.