Colin, we would love to have someone do research based on our learners here at LingQ.
Friedemann, the point is I do not understand your point. I have made it clear that my word count is a count of words that are passively known. You cannot say that I have not acquired that many words passively, in the different languages that I have studied at LingQ. You cannot say that you cannot do it, because you have not tried to do it. Different people will acquire words at LingQ at different rates. The rate will depend on many factors, including how much time they put in, how close languages are to ones they already know, and other personal considerations.
Combined reading and listening is a powerful way to acquire words, at first passive words, and eventually with enough speaking opportunity, active words. There is research to support this. LingQ makes this process particularly effective, in my view. There is no research to support this.
Iāve gotta be honest, Friedemann, you are giving some slightly mixed messages here: first you do a hatchet job on Steveās Chinese, but then you say he is āreally goodāā¦??
Personally, I think Steve deserves extra credit for becoming fluent in this fantastically difficult language without ever having been immersed in a Chinese speaking environment. (I have real doubts whether I would be able to do what he does now - even if I had lived for a decade in China!)
Have you contacted any genuine academics who study language learning to see if they are interested in doing such research? I think there is a huge amount of data here that could be used for genuine research.
I for one would be interested in knowing how much you can learn about somebodies level in a language from whether or not they know the word āshoelaceā, which the LingQ data could probably answer. I guess thatās not really a serious piece of research.
This idea of doing some kind of statistical analysis of the LingQ database is one that has been mentioned a few times. At one point, I even became excited about doing it myself. I could build a much more sophisticated tool than LingQ currently is. The problem is that the API that is made available is very limited, and does not allow access to very much at all - in fact, it is does not enable much more than the limited functionality currently in the iPad app for LingQ. This is a great shame, since full access to the LingQ database would enable some really great features to be developed.
hatched job? Here is what I said: āā¦you certainly have very good flow, above average pronounciation but you do not strike me as someone with a very rich vocabulary.ā
would you mind to elaborate a bit more on the methods to measure vocabulary size you were referring to in your presentation? Why is it such a complicated quantity to measure?
Here we go again,replying to your specific points.
I donāt remember the numbers that Anthony gave in his presentation. However, searching on the Internet shows levels of between 10 and 60,000 words (Pinker) as the average English personās passive vocabulary. Anthony did say that we increase our vocabulary by 1000 words a year. If this were true, I would have 67,000 words in English. Of course this assumes we are talking about passive vocabulary. It also sidesteps the issue of whether we are referring to word families or each individual form of words.
In any case, the important point is that learning words in a second or foreign language is not the same as adding words in your native language, for the reasons I already provided. If you disagree with this concept please say so. Donāt just ignore it.
I donāt really care about the accuracy of my word count in LingQ. It is a measure of the increasing size of my vocabulary, which enables me to read more and more difficult texts. If you believe that I am not telling the truth about the range of my increasing reading ability, please say so.
I donāt know why you would make assumptions about my Chinese word count. I donāt know how you count words in Chinese and how that relates to English or Russian word count. Do you?
Why would you assume that my active vocabulary in Chinese, a language I have used little over the last 40 years, should be particularly rich? Why is my active vocabulary in Chinese relevant to the acquisition of passive vocabulary in other languages as reported on LingQ?
Anthony, I am intrigued. What are some of the features and functions that you would like to create for LingQ to make it a more sophisticated tool. We have lots of ideas and limited resources. From our experience, everything takes much longer than we expect.
If you can help us improve LingQ, we are very interested in listening.
No, it wasnāt really a hatchet job, but you did say to Steve: āā¦you do not strike me as someone with a very rich vocabulary. For instance you must have used ē»éŖ some ten times in your video to mean āhaving experienced somethingā. First of all ē»éŖ is not often used as a verb but rather as a noun, secondly someone with a rich active vocabulary would use words like ē»åļ¼ä½ä¼ļ¼ä½éŖļ¼to provide some variation and to employ the subtle differences in meaning of these verbsā¦ā
(I guess Iām just saying this seems a little Ć¼ber-critical, considering that Steve hasnāt actually lived in Chinaā¦)
@AnthonyLauder - We are working on updating the API to include more functions. Send one of us an email with some of the things you had in mind and weāll see what we can do for you here.
Ah, I forgot to say it is a very interesting and informational presentation regarding both the content and the Takahashi method. By the way, I also ordered the book because of your presentation
youāre right, I do not know the number of Chinese words you know, I simply made the assumption that it should be āqualitativelyā at least equivalent to your Russian and Czech since you often refer to Chinese, Japanese and French as your first tier languages. I think words are really easy to count in Chinese since there are no flections.
I believe, based on my wordlists that my passive vocabulary in Chinese is well below 20,000 words and that is after 5 years studying and living the language.
Again, I hope that Anthony will weigh in on this here. In the presentation he said that more recent studies suggest that previous estimates of word counts were an overestimation. I think he said 20,000 words (in English?) by age 20 and then further accumulation will be much slower so I donāt think we continue at a rate of 1000/year until we are into our 70ies.
With regard to the word count in Chinese, the issue is not inflections. But rather how the characters combine to form words in the sense that we understand words. I donāt know how this is dealt when it comes to word counts in Chinese, I just donāt know.
However that is not the important point. The important point is that my active vocabulary in Chinese is not relevant to how many passive words I have acquired using LingQ in the languages I have studied most recently.
@Friedemann - the Chinese LingQ stats are just that - stats for work done on LingQ texts - so if someone hasnāt read much Chinese in the last 10 years, let alone on this site, obviously the stats are not going to show anything like the amount learned from prior years.
If I spend more time reading LingQ Chinese or whatever, then those stats will always be higher than my Japanese say, even though my Japanese is my strongest L2. If your Chinese LingQ stats reflect everything you know, good for you. Mine certainly donāt. Iām not in any hurry either to get my LingQ stats to match my current ability.
What am I missing here?
[didnāt update quick enough to see Steveās post just then]
Here are some samples of vocabulary size tests for English, based on work by ISP Nation (the author of the big fat boring book). The same webpage has frequency lists for vocabulary in French and English. http://www.er.uqam.ca/nobel/r21270/levels/
@Friedemann The conference organisers have assured people that the remaining presentations will be uploaded in the coming weeks. Remember, there were many hours of conference material, and the videos are being edited by one kind volunteer during his limited free time.
