As I have said before the three keys to language learning are
Attitude
Time on task
Noticing
Doing tasks we enjoy doing ensures we have a positive attitude, and ensures that we spend enough time on the language. A variety of activities help us to notice. Paying attention to words and phrases while listening and reading can help us notice, LingQing can help us notice, reviewing grammar books can help us notice, but speaking and writing are powerful ways to help us notice.
Unfortunately, in my case, I do not enjoy speaking to someone for any length of time, when I do not have enough words. So, other than the occasional opportunity to greet someone in a new language, and then stand there while I get an incomprehensible reply, I just focus on input for a long while. I find it convenient and enjoyable.
As Vera, Yutaka and others point out, this number of known words is totally biased.
First, in many languages, a “word” can show in more forms (cat, cats)
Second, A single word in a language can be a whole phrase in another one.
Third, you can make a infinite number of words with just a few morphemes. For example: to do, to redo, to re-redo, to re-re-redo, and so on. And more complex ones: industry, industrial, industrialize, industrialization, industrializational (although this word is not in my dictionary, I known that anyone who’s fluent in English understands that it is an adjective that describe something characterize by industrialization) and so on.
I believe that what is important is not the number of “words” one knows, but the number of morphemes. And I wouldn’t be surprise if that 1000 “words” was actually a 1000 roots (the most basic form of a word).
The known words count is not be used across different languages. It is merely a simple measurable of a learners progress. The more we keep it simple, in my view the better. Even phrases consist of words.
At LingQ we count each form of the word. One can also count word families. The key is to be consistent.
I would hesitate to introduce specialized terms like morphemes, roots etc. We are not talking science here.
I have seen studies which correlate vocabulary size (words known) in English, with test results on TOEIC and TOEFL. I think this is valid.
Thanks all for your imput. Here is my two cents of what I have experiemented on my own. Warning, every body is different and what might work for some it might not work for others.
1.- I do agree that the more vocabulary I know, the more confident I feel.
2.- We should start learning simple day to day words and work our way up to more difficult ones. On my introduction, I was not thinking in learning morphones, roots, etc., for it defeats the purpose.
3.- When I mentioned about 100 or 1000, it is basically a point of reference. I do not agree with these other polyglots, that this basic number will make you fluent. I do agree that by learning some of these basic words first, for these are words we use on a daily basis in our own language, perhaps, will make learning a language more fun and as Steve says, then we start noticing.
4.- Lets simplify here, we are not talking of gramatical analysis we are talking about loose words such as: where, what, when, this, that, etc. When you stick to the romance languages for example, i noticed they are almost the same. Sure in other non romance languages it may vary but why not find out what are for instance the 100 most used words in Russian or Chinese and start with those. Al least personally, it gives a sense of a better foundation, stronger blocks that will allow me to build a much stronger imput.
It is tempting to believe that we can just acquire a small number of very useful words, and sort of get a jump start in a language. I have never found that to be the case. Even learning where, when why etc. does not help a lot, in my experience. I find that we need a certain amount of time to get used to a language.
It is not difficult to get a list of the most “useful” words in a language. You can look them up, or you can just type them out in your own language and submit them to google translate. I doubt if that will help much, at least it does not in my case.
I find it just as useful to go after content, preferably interesting content, and pick away at these useful words, saving them as in LingQ., If they are really that useful, they will appear soon and often. And the less frequent words that I just need to get through the content, I ignore them until they show up often enough that I soon find that I have learned them.
I create lots of LingQs, and not only of words I do not know, but also of common little words that work differently in the new language, like “meu” or “minha” in Portuguese versus “mi” in Spanish. Some of these common words I may Tag.
I just keep doing that and gradually improve. The more I do it, the faster I improve. There is no great leap forward. It is a long road driven by the three key engines; our attitude, the time we spend, and our ability to notice what happens in the language.
Steve, I’m not against listening to the texts and working with words. Of course, it’s very important. Maybe more effectively it’s to remember not only words, but the word combination. That way we don’t make some stupide mistakes like ‘a strong rain’ because we sai in Russian ‘сильный дождь’ or otherwise if we literarily translate english ‘a heavy rain’ into ‘тяжелый дождь’- it’s in Russian like after Chernobyl.
But my point that only the quantity of words never gives you a confident of speaking because there are always words that you haven’t known yet. I would like to quote an emigrant who had lived in the UK for 9 years:“Remember that those 500 words an average Englishman uses are far from being the whole vocabulary of the language. You may learn another 500 words and another 5000 words and yet another 50000 and still you may come across a further 50000 you have never heard before, and nobody else either.”
That’s why I think that input and output must go and continue at the same time, perhaps with a bit certain excellance of input. Actually, by knowing only 100-200 words we can’t describe all our thoughts and feeling, but first of all we learn speaking without beeing afraid of it, we start speculating with words transforming them from passive into active position that it’s possible only in speaking. But I don’t recommend spontaneous conversation for first 10 seccions, it’s really very useful but for advansed level of speaking. I advise to restrict first conversations to some easy topics. And then you can enlarge your topics constantly.
Naturally, you won’t be confident during first one to ten conversations, it does’t depend on the quantity of words, but these conversations are for you like first steps for a child - unskilled and uncertain. But without these uncertain steps you will never speak fluently! It means we all have to go through them, overcome them when we begin to speak a new language.
I think this is a matter of preference. I do not enjoy conversations when I have few words. I know when I want to start speaking. It is after I have a few thousand words. Even then, for me, the input activities dominate, by far. This is even the case when I live surrounded by the language. Even the time I would spend with native speakers, would largely be devoted to listening since there is very little I can say.
When I start speaking there is always some tension as I struggle to express myself. The greater my vocabulary, the less tension. So unless I am in a classroom and forced to speak, I put off my speaking until after a few months or even longer, depending on how much time I have per day for study and how difficult the language is. Remember that most of my language learning was on my own and not with a teacher.
Of course we need to learn not only the words, but also which words naturally go together in phrases. That is why LingQ captures short phrases automatically, phrases which we can edit. We can also save phrases to help us. Nevertheless it is inevitable that we will say things like “тяжелый дождь” or show other influences from our native language, until we start to notice these differences. Speaking and being corrected can help us notice.
So, yes we all have to speak in order to improve in speaking. However, it is not true for everyone that they need to start early. I prefer to wait until I feel ready, then my first steps are more pleasant. I do not mind say “hello” “how are you” and the like, but I know that I cannot have a meaningful conversation on even the most simple subjects before I have a few thousand words.
OK, all ways are good and useful if they lead us to our goal: the real mastering of the foreign language. But from my own experience: when I started speaking English( a long time ago) I knew about 100 words. It was difficult for me, but it worked. Learning more words I tried to add them to my speaking, and it worked again.
And now: I learn about 2000 words in French by reading and listening, but 90% of them are for me in a passive сondition. And when I have recently started to speak French, I got much more difficulties than by Engish starting only with 100 words. Actually, the French pronuciation is much more complicated, French irregular verbs are for me more intricate, but a larger quantity of the known words helps me in any case very little.
Of course, it’s not a complaint, and I would speak French fluently sooner or later. However, it’s a statement that a quantity of known words can’t guarantee you the confidence in speaking, and you have to build this confidence for a long time, step by step, like the child is learning gradually to walk. Good luck for everyone in this difficult, but interesting and noble affair!
It’s not JUST a matter of knowing the words. I can recognise over 3 000 Russian words, but putting them together to make a sentence that a Russian would understand is not straightforward. There are common ways of glueing words together. In Lingq we call these set phrases, and encourage students to lingQ and learn common set phrases as well as the individual words.
Yes, it’s not just a matter of knowing words, but I think Evgeny’s ideas hold water when it comes to an Englishman learning German. I think that with a small vocabulary, an English speaker can start building simple sentences with 50 odd verbs, modal verbs, 50 adjectives, 200 nouns or whatever. I think this will build confidence. It may be disrespectful to the language to say this, but I think the case system can be ignored til later on.
Yes, in my experience it is enough to be aware of the case system without knowing it. However, communicating with this small number of words is not something that has worked for me. Has it worked for you vankrot?
When I moved to Mexico, I was able to communicate with about five words in my ACTIVE VOCABULARY. The trick is, I was daily pushing my PASSIVE VOCABULARY to higher and higher levels. For me, that is the fist major goal. When I start learning a new language, I want to learn to read, write, say and understand several words or phrases. They are my “survival phrases” (yes, no, I don’t know, Where is the…?, and so on…). After I can properly pronounce and communicate those things, I basically stop working on my active vocabulary all together, and start listening and reading nearly all the time. My goal is to understand everything in the language. I don’t even feel comfortable before at least a couple of thousand words.
Even when my passive vocabulary feels quite extensive, I keep reading and listening. When I’m in a conversation, I get by with my same basic words and phrases. Eventually, though, necessity pulls some new words into my active vocabulary, but only when I feel ready. It happens naturally.
This natural growth didn’t happen for me in Spanish until I had large passive vocabulary (probably two to three thousand words). Based the experiences that I had, I can’t possible imagine a ‘cheat list’ of common words (and, the, a/an, and, why, what…) doing any good at all.
But, like evgueny40 said, there are probably many ways to get the same general goal. (Even though some of us might have slightly diferent goals in mind.) I can’t say that the method I used will be best for everyone.