I happen to think fluency is not only about the richness of your vocabulary. Without knowing the correct grammatical structures it’s really hard to express and convey some concepts.
Shoelaces, come on …when you know what ‘Gerrymandering’ means i’d say you were pretty fluent 
To be honest I think the bloke speaks perfect sense. Very goodadvice indeed.
Potrebuju provazek por moje boty prosim
Shoelaces, come on …when you know what ‘Gerrymandering’ means i’d say you were pretty fluent
To be honest I think the bloke speaks perfect sense. Very goodadvice indeed.
Potrebuju provazek por moje boty prosim
“Potrebuju provazek por moje boty prosim”
Pretty good! Are you learning Czech?
Provázky would be little ropes, or cords, which is perfectly understandable. The actual Czech term for shoelaces is tkaničky, or even more precisely tkaničky do bot. However, saying provázky is a perfect example of what my video is about: people will know what you mean, so knowing the exact word is pretty unimportant for real life conversations.
Thought I might chime in as something came to me as I was reading Steve’s book.
Perhaps the people that seem to know a lot of vocabulary but can not speak at all have learned the vocabulary in the wrong way. What I mean is, did these people learn the vocabulary by studying individual words out of context? I wonder if someone that has a very large vocabulary but learned the vocabulary in a similar way to lingq suggests, that is, learning within a context, would ever not be able to actually communicate.
Just a thought. It might depend on how the vocabulary is learned.
As a side note: Anthony, your videos on youtube are really great. Thank you so much for taking the time to share your knowledge with us. I have found them to be very informative as well as inspirational. Thanks.
I can’t speak for others but I can tell you my own experience: I never learned words out of context, all the vocabulary I know is from watching movies, series and listening to podcasts (This American Life, Selected Shorts, WTF? are my favorites) or even using English as a tool for studying other subjects such as History, Biology and so on. Now, I’ve been doing this for almost two years and I don’t know exactly how to measure it but I think that my listening and reading skills in English are somewhere between C1 and C2 levels. On the other hand, I would say that my writing and speaking skills are, at most, at B1.
That is normal though. Even in your native language listening and reading skills are always a lot higher than your speaking and writing skill. But, you can at least get a long in speaking English after having learned so much vocabulary in context right?
@anthony
Yep, i’ve been studying czech for 2 years without much success. I couldn’t even speak more than a sentence or two. Then In Feb I joined intensive Czech training at CZLT where everything is in Czech. I’m now able to speak enough to get myself by. My biggest shortfall still is understanding conversation that’s why I’m now focusing on listening and this place is a great tool for that side of learning.
Before seeing your video I was talking to myself, but as you described, I was focusing on nouns. I’ll take your advice and try discribing an event or somethingi’ve read/seen. Pretty solid advice i think cheers.
Ferdy
I once read somewhere that it wasn’t uncommon for people from Korea and Japan to memorize entire English dictionaries. While I’d never consider doing that, I find that learning vocabulary is rather easy - it just takes A LOT OF time. Time which I (ideally) would rather spend on something more useful.
By the way, great video Anthony! For what it’s worth, I only pass the shoelace test in Swedish and English. It’s not the end of the world. I’ve never had to buy new shoelaces in another country.
Do you think they are able to recall most of these words when they are not looking in the dictionary? I found that I was able to learn a massive number of words out of context in Anki, but was unable to recall most of them unless I was actually using Anki.
I actually spend a fair bit of time on Memrise to build my vocab. However I combine this with the intensive classes where i hear/read the word in context and then know how to use it properly. One without the other would be useless, but combing does help me.
I think Lingq is great for helping in certain areas of language learnig more than others. When i asked my Czech wife to assess Steves Czech on one of his videos, she said his conversation was ok but he seemed to have excellent vocal understanding. This is exactly where i want to focus now, so i think this is the place to be.
@ Kadin_Goldberg
I agree that there’s a small gap between the passive and active knowledge of the language, even if you are a native speaker. But I don’t think that such a huge difference is something that should be considered normal. It means that something is missing in your learning process. In my case, I just don’t practice writing and speaking enough.
Now answering your question: I don’t really know if would get by speaking English because I never really tried. The only time I had the chance to speak with anyone in English for more than a minute was via chat on facebook with a Russian guy. In that occasion I understood everything he said but, judging by the face he made every time I tried to say something longer than a few sentences, I don’t think he understood me that well. haha
@Kadin “…What I mean is, did these people learn the vocabulary by studying individual words out of context?..”
I would say it is always best to learn words in context. However I also think it depends to some extent on the kind of word: in my experience nouns (especially those which can be described with a simple illustration) actually can be learned from a list. On the other hand verbs pretty much do HAVE to be learned as part of a whole sentence, in my experience.
@Allisson: “…On the other hand, I would say that my writing and speaking skills are, at most, at B1…”
Your written English looks much better than B1. (Your posts on this thread are very close to level C2.)
@alison
It’s pretty interesting for me that you can write so well but can’t speak. My experience working out here is that many colleagues can speak pretty good English (as they have to) , but can have pretty serious issues when writing. I’ve met people, whom i considered to be fluent in English, then received an email which was practically illegible. I was often confused at how someone could speak almost perfect English but couldn’t really write.
I think you prove it all just depends what area you dedicate the time to.
Ferdy
I believe that eventually to write well, we have to write a lot, and pay attention to what we write. To speak well, we eventually have to speak a lot. However, if we don’t first build up our ability to read and listen, to understand, our passive vocabulary, we will have limited ability to write and speak, and therefore will not be able to develop a strong capability in these output activities. I therefore aim for a large passive vocabulary, through massive reading and listening, with the full confidence that my ability to convert this all into active vocabulary will come with enough practice. Without this passive vocabulary I cannot engage in meaningful exchanges with educated native speakers who all have much larger vocabularies than I do.
A lot of people learn writing in school through translation practice, and are unable to break that habit. They can speak fine, but their writing is a garbled mess.
As for the shoelace question, I pass it in Japanese 靴紐, but that’s probably because I once made a lesson for kids based around the sponbebob episode where he forgets how to tie his shoelaces. Happy coincidence If not for that, I probably wouldn’t know it. It just combines “shoe” and “string” though, so it’s certainly guessable.
I do think you can gauge someone’s level by testing them on a range of moderately uncommon vocabulary. I suppose shoelace could be on that list. Fluency is just such a tough thing to define. If you want to understand native speakers well, you need to listen to lots and lots of authentic conversations, as well as learn a lot of words.
I’ve seen students study for a long time at language schools here in Vancouver, get up to a decent level (depending on how you define that I guess) but be more or less completely unable to understand native speakers talking to each other because they’ve simply had no practice doing this. Other than their teachers, who slow down for them, they mostly just hear other students.
I’ve met people who sound like they memorized the dictionary. They just use all kinds of rare vocabulary in situations where it’s not quite appropriate. I do some vocabulary learning on anki, and I use these words inappropriately sometimes too. I’ll use a word that’s primarily a written word in conversation or something - and it’s often because I learned it on anki out of context. I don’t worry about it too much though - as long as it’s just occasional, I guess it’s something that will sort itself out.
@J_for_Jones “Your written English looks much better than B1. (Your posts on this thread are very close to level C2.)”
Then maybe I’m being too hard on myself? I don’t know… I’m a bit obsessive with my writing. Whenever I finish a text, I go over it again and again until I have the feeling that everything is right. Generally, it takes me a lot of time to write even small texts. So maybe, that’s why sometimes others have the impression that my level is higher than it actually is.
My former English teacher used to say the same thing!
You all very often use ‘level C2’.
I’m a language teacher with 25 year’s experience and I’ve got only 3 times 'C2" to my students for all my long work experience!..
I consider that 70% of native speakers are also only C1 speakers and even B2 speakers, not C2!
@ evgueny - I don’t really know much about it, but I looked at the contents of a C2 German exam, and it seemed to me that a lot of what was being tested was the person’s level of education, and not just their command of the language. This would mean that uneducated native speakers of a language might be lower down on the scale because they do not know how to do stuff like give structured presentations and summarise texts, whereas an educated non-native speaker might do better, even though they know much less vocabulary, have a lower level of comprehension, and cannot speak as effortlessly and spontaneously as the uneducated native speaker.
As I said, I don’t know much about this, so I would be interested to see what you think on the subject.
@ Allison - I read over everything I post too, and often more than once. I also often edit them after posting to correct mistakes, or rephrase sentences. If I didn’t do this, my posts would be full of mistakes.