How many words for fluency?

[Richard]

How many languages are you currently studying?

[Richard]

How many languages are you currently studying?

Well, I did a degree in Chinese and Russian, and am currently in China to top up my Chinese, and I am practising Russian with my flatmate here, who is from Russia. But as I have ancestors from Ireland and Finland (both language groups) I am aiming to learn Irish Gaelic, Swedish and Finnish in my spare time.

Well that should keep you busy in your spare time

[starbucks]

[enk]

In my opinion, which is never humble, you don't need a certain
number of words to be fluent, you need a certain attitude problem.

I know words in a few languages that most native speakers don't know,
but I still wouldn't say I'm fluent in those languages, I just happened to
learn them somewhere along the line.

Not to mention that it's easier to bypass timidity/whatever to start
speaking some languages than it is others. I will readily speak Estonian
when I'm in Estonia, even though I speak it horridly, but I won't
speak Swedish with almost anyone, even though I'm rather fluent in it
(I just can't pronounce it well enough for anyone to understand me).

So, as Jarabe de Palo says: depende

-enk

[kalmisto]

>> Well, I did a degree in Chinese and Russian, and am currently in China to top up my Chinese, and I am practising Russian with my flatmate here, who is from Russia. But as I have ancestors from Ireland and Finland (both language groups) I am aiming to learn Irish Gaelic, Swedish and Finnish in my spare time. <<

Sinulla on uskomaton aivokapasiteetti !

sinulla on = you have, ( sinä = you )

uskomaton = unbelievable

aivokapasiteetti = brain capacity, ( aivot = the brain, kapasiteetti = capacity)

[daryl]

No, it's just a hobby. But: the question still remains. Is 10,000 enough? There is a list of 10,000 Finnish words at http://www.csc.fi/kielipankki/aineistot ... ndex.phtml, and 10,000 Finland Swedish words at http://www.csc.fi/kielipankki/aineistot ... ndex.phtml

First thing: please tell me what you mean by a "word".

How many words are there in maantievärinen, which roughly means "light brown"? I can see three words: maa, tie and väri, all of which I think you will find in your basic list of lexical items. Unfortunately, knowing these three items will not get you to "light brown" unless you have certain other background information about Finland.

Would you view maantieväriset as the same word or a different word? This nominative plural form is far more likely to crop up in actual use.

Which is a natural and which is an unacceptable or odd collocation:

maantieväriset hiukset
maantievärinen maali

Can you say that you have "learned" a word without learning its collocations?

How many words have you learned when you learn how to use a verb? Have you learned these words even when you can only use the verb in a limited number of forms and structures, though you use it correctly at these times, but cannot use it in every single tense, mood or aspect?

How many words have you learned when you have learned a phrasal verb like käydä kimppuun?


Second thing: do you intend to speak the language and to understand others who speak it?

Speaking and understanding Finnish will require a certain set of cognitive and motor skills that are only tangentially connected with vocabulary.


Third thing: must you know all of the senses of a lexical item before you can claim to know the word? This would mean that you have not learned the verb korjata until you have learned both its meaning of "to repair/mend/fix/rectify" and its meaning of "to harvest/reap". On the other hand you could use the term quite correctly in either sense without knowing the other sense.


These questions indicate, I think, that "lexical stock" descriptions of language learning are complete tosh.

daryl

[daryl]

These questions indicate, I think, that "lexical stock" descriptions of language learning are complete tosh.

daryl

First of all you said "these questions". True, you only asked questions and didn't answer any of them. The questions by themselves don't indicate anything. To draw the conclusion that there is no such thing as vocabulary size as a factor in language learning, you need to show, not that some words have multiple meanings or that some words decline or are conjugated, but rather that it is possible to learn a language without acquiring vocabulary. Can you show that?

This is moving the goalposts. You began by talking about vocabulary in relation to language learning as if this is something that can be readily quantified in terms of "words learned".

The questions that I raised were not intended to have answers, but to illustrate the flaws in this understanding of language learning.

I don't think that any clear or useful answer can be given to the question "what is a word" or to the question of when a "word" has been "learned". This means that descriptions of language learning in terms of quantifiable "words learned" are, as I said, tosh.

The very notion of "vocabulary acquisition" is either an abstraction from actual competence or it refers to the result of testing that has nothing to do with L2 competence as such, i.e. in particular the ability to provide L1 translation equivalents.

Clearly some languages are more and some are less inflected. There is a list of 10,000 English words I downloaded from the Internet, but I am not happy with it because it lists "tell", "tells", "told, "telling" and so forth as separate lexical items. Now a language such as Chinese is uninflected, so all these terms will correspond to just one word in Chinese, and will correspond to a whole array of words in a highly inflected language. We should look a word families rather than words. The fact that some languages build their words from logical roots - you gave an example - should make the vocabulary easier to acquire. It is easier to learn "kirja" and "kirjasto" than it is to learn "book" and "library".

This seems to be an admission that the notion of a "word" is arbitrary. If so, then what price quantification in terms of "words learned"?

Of course the learner looks for cognates and other patterns in language items. Learners are usually much more aware of these than native speakers. If you are sharp, then you will put kirjasto together with expressions like toimisto and edustajisto and see a certain pattern here, too.

However, contrary to what you wrote in yoru posting, vocabulary acquisition is a major problem for language learners. If lexical stock was not an issue, why does Finland produce dictionaries of the Finnish language?

The notion of "vocabulary acquisition", as divorced from "language acquisition" brings to mind the study of lists of translation equivalents (however organised). This activity I consider to be a mind-numbing method of frustrating genuine language acquisition.

It may be my personal language learning style, but I never had much difficulty in "acquiring vocabulary", in the sense of enlarging the base of linguistic forms that I can recognise, understand and use. Dictionaries are sometimes helpful in this process, but I have to say that more often than not I consult a dictionary (monolingual or bilingual) only to check up on meanings that I have already at least partially deduced from context. Sometimes these expressions have already become part of my active vocabularly in the sense that I use them in the appropriate context and gauge from the response whether the use was appropriate.

In point of fact there are suprisingly few dictionaries of the Finnish language, unless you choose to include glossaries of "highbrow" terms borrowed from other languages and generally used in specialised contexts. To my knowledge there are no pocket dictionaries of Finnish or school editions, only hefty reference works of three volumes or more that one might find in a library.

With, perhaps, one clumsy exception, there are no dictionaries that have been specifically produced to assist learners of Finnish as a foreign language. Bilingual dictionaries of Finnish tend to assume that the reader already understands the use of the Finnish expressions that are listed. Thus, when finding yrittää and pyrkiä listed as verbs meaning "to try", you will find little or no guidance as to the very different syntactical forms in which these expressions are used.

In short, Finnish dictionaries are not produced to assist the abstract pursuit of "vocabularly building", and I doubt that English pocket and school editions are really for this purpose, either. Think about the last time you came across an English word that you did not recognise (it was probably an obscure adjective). My guess would be that you did not drop everything and rush to the library to look up the word in the Greater Oxford. Now imagine taking the same attitude towards lexical items in a foreign language. Why not?

daryl

[daryl]

A list of 10,000 basic English headwords (word families, not inflected forms) and their Finnish equivalents would probably give you the basic vocabulary of Finnish. An analysis of the list might however reveal 2 or 3 times as many roots in the English list compared with the Finnish list. To you, this means that vocabulary size is "tosh", but the translations for the 10,000 items still need to be learned, even if the words are structured in a different way.

My most immediate thought on reading this was that your ambition is to speak English using Finnish expressions. This is the implication of identifying a certain set of lexical items in English as the starting point for learning Finnish.

Anyway...

Is it really such a difficult point to grasp that "vocabulary" is an abstraction? This becomes clear immediately when we try to measure or otherwise quantify it.

The notion of a word, as you use it, seems to depend on certain conventions about written language (i.e. a word is something written with a space that separates it from the next word). By this criterion languages that have no written form likewise have no words.

My understanding is that the leading form of any natural human language is its spoken form. It is the peculiarities of the spoken form that dictate the original codification of the written form and its subsequent changes.

Of course it is possible to guess the meaning of words from the context. It is much better to learn words in context from a dictionary. Who said otherwise?

I didn't say "guess", but "deduce". Perhaps that's what you meant. However, I can make no sense of your idea of learning words in context from a dictionary. You seem to be talking about a process of memorising so-called translation equivalents, but I can see no learning going on here, nor any intelligible context. Incidentally, how many words of English have you learned from a dictionary?

My understanding is that dictionaries describe various relationships between abstracted and somewhat arbitrarily defined units of written language. Bilingual dictionaries attempt to map certain resemblances between these units in two languages. This is undoubtedly useful to the language learner, but recognition of these relationships and resemblances are not the same as language learning. I can learn the dictionary and the grammar book by heart but still be unable to maintain even a simple conversation in L2.

I also think that in this sense a "word" alone cannot be used to say anything, and so your notion of "word meaning" is an abstraction. It perhaps amounts to "contribution of a lexical unit to the meaning of expressions in which it customarily appears". Knowing "word meaning" in this sense is knowing a fact about the language, but it is not the same as competence in using lexical units.

Indeed I doubt that I am able to use very many Finnish "words" in all of their possible senses, but I know that I can use them effectively in certain senses and that I can recognise and avoid certain unacceptable collocations.

Perhaps I am most disturbed by your choice of title for this thread: "How many words for fluency?" This seems to get things back to front. By analysing a certain standard of L2 competence that we choose to call "fluency", we might find that some specific learner who achieves this standard can recognise and use a certain body of expressions. However, I am far from sure that this finding is of any great value to another learner.

daryl

[dave071061]

First of all I will admit to knowing nothing about learning a new language, except that I am crap at it, I've been in Finland 5 yrs now and still don't speak more than a couple of phrases.

However, I do remember hearing a comment on a BBC radio program last year, that to be fluent in a language you need 5000 words,
This comment was made in the context that a survey had just discovered that the average American 15yr old now has a vocabulary of 5500 words!

[Hank W.]

Knowing 5000 numbers though doesn't mean you can count.

[enk]

I can grasp that **you** say it is an abstraction. Is it so difficult for you to grasp the point that you are wrong? Let us say we are examining vocabulary by learning the roots of a language. A Russian professor who taught me recommended this approach to Russian. Now: the 5000 commonest roots are not an abstraction at all. They are a concrete body of data that needs to be assimilated.

Here you say it yourself: it's the roots that are important, not
words. It is pointless to use the word "word" to refer to Finnish
words, because if you learn a Finnish word in the nominative, it
doesn't guarantee that you're going to be able to guess what word it
is when it is in some other case (e.g., vesi --> vettä).

In Chinese the word for aeroplane is feiji. It means "flying machine". Fei and Ji may have been learned by the learner in another context, but the fact that the Chinese express the concept "aeroplane" by such a calque as "flying machine" needs to be separately assimilated by the learner.

Unfortunately, your point of view is quite fine and dandy from the
viewpoint of an English speaker learning a foreign language, but if
a second-language learner were to be a speaker of a different language,
one whose word for airplane is the same "flying machine" in his
or her language, then that learner wouldn't have to assimilate the calque
the same way.

Learning how to use vocabulary skilfully is indeed necessary. But vocabulary is not an abstraction. If you are lookiing for microwaveable popcorn in a Finnish supermarket, say, and let us imagine the unlikely circumstance that no availabel Finns spoke English: you could say "do you have....?", but if you do not know the word for microwaveable popcorn, you have hit an obstacle. No doubt you are a brilliant mimer, but in this circumstance you need to know a word you do not know. The simplest way is to look it up.

Actually, the simplest way is to try and mime it. Failing that,
to try and see if that person knows English or some other language.
Failing those, then look it up.

I can't say that I've learned any language from looking words up
constantly. I have, though, learned languages from asking people
what words are for things, concepts, what have you. I've successfully
bought food from supermarkets in countries where I don't know a single
word, but I can get my point across using hand signals ("I want this much hamburger meat" first pointing at the meat in question and then
showing how much with my hands), mimicking the eating process (e.g., ice cream, bananas), etc. I've also been fortunate to be blessed with
an analytical brain, so if I come across a can of food with no picture
indicating what is in it, but that comes adorned with words in many
languages, I can usually deduce what the product is.

In Finnish, I learned much of my vocabulary from my MIL, who speaks
not a word of English. She would take me out into the forest and
point at things and I would repeat them (with her laughing most of the
time ) until I learned them. Idiomatic Finnish I learned from
IRC (shame on me ) and from my FIL.

I think it's a shame that this thread has become so defensive, quite
frankly.

-enk

[dave071061]

Knowing 5000 numbers though doesn't mean you can count.

True, but it doesn't mean you can't. on the other hand if you don't know the numbers from1-5000 then you certainly can't count to 5000.

[Hank W.]

I was more meaning count like 1+1=2. But then again you use some different word in English for that kind of "counting"... calculate?

[Ravvy]

Just speaking for my own personal experience so far, I had to reach a minimum threshold number of vocabulary words before I could even think about assembling a basic sentence. Then after reaching "basic sentence" stage, now I need more vocabulary words and a whole lot more of the "structure rules". In the sheer number quantification game, I am probably at <1000 words, and have my doubts that I could talk to anybody in Finland beyond the first couple sentences of an introduction. I have worked out several options for my "en ymmarra/ en tieda" moments, which will be numerous!

[smoo]

Hmmm, I learnt the Finnish for "feiji" just yesterday actually - the fact that aeroplane is "lentokone" in Finnish didn't make it any easier or more difficult to learn the word. I already knew "kone" and in learning "lentokone" (and looking up "lento") I learned another word too.

I entirely take the points about the /theorectial/ meaninglessness of equating fluency in any language with a certain number of words. However, I suspect that assuming a half-intelligent approach towards learning vocabulary (e.g. if I know I'm learning a case-intensive language I don't just learn the nominative), the conceptual differences between any two languages for the purposes of every day communcation are probably finite, and their effects on the number of words you have to learn possibly average out to some extent such that maybe you /could/ come up with a universal figure for fluency of somewhere along the lines of "X +/- 20%" (or whatever).

Surely what's more important for fluency expressed in these terms to be meaningful is whether there are /discontinuities/ in the "commonness" or usefulness of words in most languages, i.e. if you ranked all words in order of some kind of index of usefulness/commonness would the rate at which the scores were falling drop dramatically after some point, e.g. 10,000 or whatever. Otherwise any figure would be completely arbitrary.