If You Don't Like Anki or Wordlists, then . . .

Discussion in 'General Discussion' started by Peregrinus, May 28, 2014.

  1. Peregrinus

    Peregrinus Active Member

    Joined:
    May 27, 2014
    Messages:
    613
    Native Language:
    English
    Intermediate Languages:
    German
    Basic Languages:
    Spanish
    One of the other members mentioned not liking Anki as in finding it boring, an opinion shared by many on HTLAL too it seems. Since I do like Anki enough to use it, and have been using it intensively for a year to support both courses and extensive reading, I have some questions for those who don't like either Anki or wordlists.

    1) Do you already possess the vocabulary necessary to comfortably read a general interest newspaper (i.e. 98%+ coverage for English)?

    2) If not, how do you plan to acquire that vocabulary, assuming you are interested in reading a newspaper in addition to other passive or active activities in a L2?

    3) How long, as in how many hours per day for how many months/years do you think it will take to acquire that vocabulary?

    4) How much time per day on average do you spend on extensive/intensive reading and listening?

    For me, Anki seems to be the most optimal manner to acquire the vocabulary I need, in the shortest amount of time, so that my extensive activities can hopefully focus on learning grammar and usage minimally impeded by decoding the meaning of words (I do use pop-up dictionary in extensive reading but don't record new words). But perhaps others prefer longer use of more intensive activities or such.

    I would appreciate knowing the answers to these questions from other self-learners, because though I use Anki so much, I do have a love-hate relationship with it. If I thought there were a more optimal approach time-wise I would be willing to consider it.

    Note that the above assumes Anki equivalent to Iversen style word lists, and questions are posed to those who don't use either much, instead of the questions relating to Anki vs wordlists.
  2. tastyonions

    tastyonions Member VIP member

    Joined:
    Apr 27, 2014
    Messages:
    93
    Native Language:
    English
    Intermediate Languages:
    French, Spanish
    (1) In French, definitely. In Spanish, I am there most of the time but sometimes I can get lost depending on the content.

    (2) After I learn all the vocabulary in a "basic" book like Assimil (mostly through using the L1 page + repeated reading and listening), my main vocabulary acquisition method is to start reading other things that are either fairly basic (like Wikipedia articles) or where I already have good background knowledge (like the science section of a newspaper), looking up unknown vocabulary as I go but not making any special effort to memorize it. If there is too much unknown vocabulary, it gets too slow and frustrating and I just move on to another article that will hopefully be easier.

    (3) It's hard to say and I imagine it depends a lot on the language. With languages like French and Spanish, there is a huge base of cognates I can draw from, so it did not really take me much more than an hour or two each day for six to ten months. It would take rather longer with a language like Turkish or Indonesian, I bet.

    (4) My reading is mostly intensive and I spend probably an hour a day on it. I look up everything I don't know (where it does not seem possible to get a good guess at the meaning, anyway) and spend plenty of time on sentences where the grammar is not immediately obvious to me. My listening, on the other hand, is mostly extensive, and I am pretty happy listening to things at a level where whole sentences can fly by me, as long as I get "enough" of the content to be entertained by it. I tend to weight listening very heavily in the beginning, enough so that I may go a day or two without reading anything at all. I also look up words I hear occasionally, too.

    It's possible I would be more efficient if I used Anki. I don't know. With my current method, there are some words I probably look up three or four times before they stick. If I were racing somebody or had a really ambitious number of languages I wanted to learn in a set time, I would probably try using a flashcard type system again. But I am not, so I use my meandering way and it seems to be working okay.
  3. BAnna

    BAnna Active Member VIP member

    Joined:
    Apr 17, 2014
    Messages:
    104
    Native Language:
    English
    Intermediate Languages:
    German, Spanish
    Basic Languages:
    Russian, Turkish
    I started learning German a bit over 3 years ago, and 1) yes I can comfortably read a regular newspaper, so 2) is not how do I plan to acquire the vocabulary, but how did I? For the first year and a half or so until I was about B1 level, I basically just worked through course materials and would occasionally watch a subtitled movie. Then at B1 I started doing lots of listening and reading. Lots and lots. And looking up words after I read (I'd underline the unknown word as I read, then later go back and write the unknowns onto an index card, then look them up even later). I'd watch L2 movies with L2 subtitles and programs aimed at explaining things to children (this is how a bank works, think Mr. Rogers/Sesame Street). I also used Lingq quite a lot for online news articles, and would off and on use Anki but I must have some sort of "allergy" to it :D, since I could only sustain it for a couple of days. I also experimented with Goldlisting for about 2 months and with Iversen's wordlist method for about a month, but eventually became "allergic" to those as well. What I could sustain was doing "scriptorum", recommended by Prof Arguelles: copying out a page from a book one sentence at a time while reading aloud, looking up words and grammar so I really understood them. For me, the actual writing out of things by hand was important for me to remember the words.
    3/4) From B1 to a solid B2/C1 (where I am now), it was about 18 months of about 2-3 hours a day on most days. I basically stopped watching news or reading books in English and did it all in German instead. Not quite as extreme as AJATT, but something along those lines.

    Currently I'm trying to go from zero in Russian and am doing about 1 hour a day of traditional course study and another hour a day of reading/listening. I still read extremely slowly: 4 full 250 word pages in 15 minutes, sometimes it takes even longer.
    luke likes this.
  4. Big_Dog

    Big_Dog Administrator Staff Member

    Joined:
    Jan 11, 2014
    Messages:
    1,039
    Native Language:
    English
    Advanced Languages:
    Spanish
    Intermediate Languages:
    French, Japanese, Mandarin, Russian, Swahili, Thai
    Basic Languages:
    Korean
    I've been using anki/wordlists for most of my studies, but hate them. If I don't use them, words just don't stick. Or at least that's how it was years ago when I tried. After reading that Prof Arguelles and Luca don't do isolated vocabulary, I started comparing their methods to mine. They both do a lot more writing and translating than I did. So I think the better balanced Synergy method will free me from isolated vocabulary study. I just have to be a lot more strict about following it. I'm following it with Russian right now; I'm balanced and improving steadily. Unfortunately I have 4 other languages in the B's, so my life is a little hectic right now. Here is a post on vocabulary, if you are interested.
  5. Cainntear

    Cainntear Active Member VIP member

    Joined:
    Apr 29, 2014
    Messages:
    343
    Native Language:
    English
    Advanced Languages:
    Catalan, French, Italian, Scottish_Gaelic, Spanish
    Intermediate Languages:
    Corsican
    Basic Languages:
    Dutch, German, Irish, Polish, Russian, Welsh, Sicilian
    I've never really relied on this sort of stuff, instead just encountering words and remembering them through contact and practice. But then again, I was studying at university level, so I was being exposed to lots of material. My vocabulary in Italian isn't increasing particularly quickly, so perhaps it's time I recognised that my circumstances have changed and make a change in my strategy....
  6. Big_Dog

    Big_Dog Administrator Staff Member

    Joined:
    Jan 11, 2014
    Messages:
    1,039
    Native Language:
    English
    Advanced Languages:
    Spanish
    Intermediate Languages:
    French, Japanese, Mandarin, Russian, Swahili, Thai
    Basic Languages:
    Korean
    If you were to do that, what might you try?
  7. Iversen

    Iversen Member VIP member

    Joined:
    May 1, 2014
    Messages:
    91
    I spend more time on intensive studies than on extensive reading these days. One problem is that when I find a book or really long text about a suitable theme on the internet, or when I read magazines in the local languages bought during my travels, I tend to get through them so fast that they don't really can't oust my short intensive texts from the prime position as time gobblers. Luckily I listen to things in different languages on TV and on my computer, and this helps to bring about some balance in the time expenditure - but so far I haven't got TV in a number of crucial languages like Russian and Greek (and I'm still waiting for my Serbian TV channel).

    During all my intensive activities I collect words for wordlists, and in spite of Prof Arguelles and Luca I also do wordlists based directly on dictionaries - and I like it! The thing is that once you are past the beginners stadium OR you are studying a language close to one you already know there will be an immense amount of purely linguistic associations available to you, and for me those are just as real as words in sentences said by somebody in a film. Or you may have a vague feeling that you have seen certain words before - and you probably have if you have been battling with a language for some time. Linguistic associations are also a kind of context, but probably not to the same degree for everybody. For me it is pure bliss to discover that the Serbians say "бламирати се" just as we do here in Denmark ('blamere sig' = make a fool of yourself), and I don't think I have actually to do it to remember this specific word.

    However I don't like Anki (because I think my general reading serves me enough surprises), so with this lame excuse I should like to answer the questions of Peregrinus:

    1) Do you already possess the vocabulary necessary to comfortably read a general interest newspaper (i.e. 98%+ coverage for English)?
    I have just read an article about Plaka inAthens in Greek without even reaching for my dictionary, and Greek is one of my weak languages. There will always be words which you might want to learn more about (or check that you have understood correctly), but lack of vocabulary is not one of my problems.

    2) If not, how do you plan to acquire that vocabulary, assuming you are interested in reading a newspaper in addition to other passive or active activities in a L2?
    I may learn specialized vocabulary from technical literature or even newspapers during extensive reading activities, but the bulk of my vocabulary in recent times has come through intensive studies, including wordlists. Howver there is a philosophical problem here: if I read a book about the construction of medieval wind instruments, I may learn a lot of new words, but only if I do an effort to remember them. But isn't that also intensive study, although under the cover of studying instrument making?

    3) How long, as in how many hours per day for how many months/years do you think it will take to acquire that vocabulary?
    If I should count vocabulary from the zero point to now, I can't use languages I have known for ages, but only those I have staretd recently. And with Serbian, which I started learning in February I have been shocked by the overlap with Russian , Polish and even Danish so even though I haven't done a vocabulary count for Serbian yet I'm fairly sure the number is up somewhere in the thousands already. But the absolute numbers are less interesting than the percentage of words in a midsize dictionary (my Italian <--> Serbian dictionary is at the short end of the scale with its paltry 2 x 10.000 words). Just for fun and with no scientific pretentions I have just counted known/unknown words on a page I have been through with a wordlist and another which I haven't reached yet: 20 known and 8 unknown on the first page, and 11 vs. 17 on the second, i.e. respectively 70% and 40%. So it seems - based on this very limited tidbid of evidence - it does seem possible that doing wordlists isn't a total waste of time.

    4) How much time per day on average do you spend on extensive/intensive reading and listening?
    Well, most evenings and some shorter periods during the day (I work a lot with spreadsheets, and you go berserk if you don't do something else in between - and I do languages in those pauses). Many travels also have a linguistic aspect.
    Last edited: May 30, 2014
  8. Peregrinus

    Peregrinus Active Member

    Joined:
    May 27, 2014
    Messages:
    613
    Native Language:
    English
    Intermediate Languages:
    German
    Basic Languages:
    Spanish
    Thanks to all that have replied so far. Iversen's method as is obvious, is somewhat similar to Anki in that one studies wordlists, digital or analog, intensively, and then follows up with extensive reading to consolidate same. The difference from what I remember Iversen saying in the past is that he views his word list method as "doing a proper job the first time". I myself view Anki as doing a proper job, but just the job is spread out over time in the learning as well as the reviews acting as a control. A significant benefit to my mind with both such methods is that allow one to count or keep running counts of vocabulary learned, even if such is somewhat hazy (especially in German) due to collocations (which I try to stick on cards for the component parts instead of bloating my count).

    As for the other replies above, it seems most rely on extensive reading. BAnna's method though seems similar to word lists and Anki in that recording unknown words on notecards is essentially creating such lists, with the difference being the source of that vocabulary is mainly extensive reading after B1, instead of dictionaries or B2+ word lists (the latter of which I have used for German since despite a certain amount of junk vocab I trust the judgment of course makers more than my own with a dictionary like Iversen does).

    I remember reading old threads on HTLAL where the poster lingua/linguamor talked about using extensive reading only and how as one learned more and more vocabulary one read faster and faster and thus accelerated the pace of learning even more words. Dr. Arguelles also seems to follow this method after exhausting courses, i.e. for maybe past the 3K word mark. But it seems to me than an extensive only approach to learn an additional 12K+ words one needs to reach the lexical threshold of 15K+, it would take a much greater amount of time per day than my hour of Anki plus 1/2 hour of new card preparation plus hour of actual extensive reading. My objective is to learn vocabulary as fast as possible so that I can then focus primarily on usage.

    The number of times to learn a new word by extensive reading when not writing down same would seem to be anywhere from a few to dozens of times, thus again indicating that a LOT of time has to be put into such extensive reading each and every day to be effective. Perhaps I just don't remember well from extensive reading alone. However I do remember when I was spending time on Spanish, what helped a lot was to stick to familiar topics as a lot of the vocabulary tended to get reused more often. So again maybe I just need to do that more with German.

    In the past year now I have learned or partially learned 9500+ words according to my Anki deck (and I try to keep phrases/idioms/collocations down, so such probably accounts for less than 5%). If I had started only using extensive reading after B1 level courses, I don't know if I could have learned another 5-6K words in that time. Nor do I think I could have gone through initial courses as fast without also putting the vocab for same in Anki.

    The real question to me then is how fast one can acquire vocabulary by extensive reading alone after the first 3K words. Obviously as tastyonions mentioned it will be faster in related languages like Romance ones, but for others?
  9. Cainntear

    Cainntear Active Member VIP member

    Joined:
    Apr 29, 2014
    Messages:
    343
    Native Language:
    English
    Advanced Languages:
    Catalan, French, Italian, Scottish_Gaelic, Spanish
    Intermediate Languages:
    Corsican
    Basic Languages:
    Dutch, German, Irish, Polish, Russian, Welsh, Sicilian
    Well actually, I'm wondering if my problem is just the fact that I haven't bought a single DVD since I arrived. I was buying French films at a rate of about once a week for the last few months in Corsica, and during my studies, I was constantly buying DVDs in various languages from Fopp.

    I was considering getting back into Anki, but it occurs to me that I don't really know how to choose which words to input, and if I was doing stuff which would tell me which words I need, I suspect I would get back into "absorb" mode and wouldn't really need the SRS....
  10. Peregrinus

    Peregrinus Active Member

    Joined:
    May 27, 2014
    Messages:
    613
    Native Language:
    English
    Intermediate Languages:
    German
    Basic Languages:
    Spanish
    I generally input words from courses I am using, words from courses I am not actually using (from lists available on the net or quizlet etc.). As I mentioned above, I don't trust my own judgment with just a dictionary as Iversen does, so I prefer to trust the judgment of course authors, at least more modern ones (every old 1800s German reader seems to have the words for elf, goblin, gnome etc. in the first few chapters).


    Anki is an aid to assist "absorbing", at least for me. Being already familiar with words I run across in a course or extensive reading helps cement those words and allows me to concentrate on grammar and usage.

    One type of source I think is very useful for methodically inputting into Anki are those 5000 word vocab books, usually arranged thematically. An awful lot of common household and work vocabulary is pretty low frequency, but every native speaker knows them and it seems silly for me not to. Sure I may rarely/never need "whisk" or "paperclip" in a L2 conversation or even read them, but they are in plain sight to most of us and I would like to know such kind of hidden vocabulary (hidden from the standpoint of conversation and reading).
  11. Wise owl chick

    Wise owl chick Active Member

    Joined:
    Apr 28, 2014
    Messages:
    326
    Native Language:
    French
    Advanced Languages:
    Dutch, German
    Intermediate Languages:
    English, Spanish
    Basic Languages:
    Italian
    I don't think that 98% is necessary for read a newspaper in English, but much lower truly possessed vocabulary because it's possible understand with the cognates. I can read most things without difficulty in English, but this is because of some things, for example, it's the internet's lingua franca and you encounter it all the time online, I speak French, Dutch and German, therefore English is little bit of each, and mostly simple to read. But listening is completely different, then it's very difficult, a big difference. ​

    Read more and participate in a forum is good, ideally where the native speakers are kind and helpful and explain your faults and you can read the corrections. If you watch TV, listen the porgramme in your own lanaguge and read the subtitles in the target language

    It depend of many things, I htink that the biggest factor is the proximity with your own lanagueg or the languages which you can speak very well. With Dutch and German they are incredibly similar, therfore you can understand nearly immediately, but of course if you can speak only English or French or German etc and you learn Japanese, then this will be much, much, much, extremrely, much longer!!!!!!

    Some hours I read, I don't know about extensive or intensive. Listening much less, but I have to do more, it would help. Soem years it wasn't possible for me watch the TV but since about 1 or 2 years I can watch it and I think that videos, programmes, movies etc are great for the language's learning.
  12. Peregrinus

    Peregrinus Active Member

    Joined:
    May 27, 2014
    Messages:
    613
    Native Language:
    English
    Intermediate Languages:
    German
    Basic Languages:
    Spanish
  13. Wise owl chick

    Wise owl chick Active Member

    Joined:
    Apr 28, 2014
    Messages:
    326
    Native Language:
    French
    Advanced Languages:
    Dutch, German
    Intermediate Languages:
    English, Spanish
    Basic Languages:
    Italian
    I said with the cognates!!!!! of course this will depend of your own langauge and the other ones which you know very well how many cognates are in English

    Your article said:

    I am 45372892927% certain that French has more cognates with English that Hebrew, Arabic or Russian together. then I speak very well Dutch also, and my German is good as well. With this three languages I can read English newspapers. but if you ask me what are this words in English I wouldn't know ( I mean for example translate Fr-En), but in the newspaper I can udnerstand them.

    In my opinion the article is wrong because it is only the case for the hebrew, arabic and russian speakers and this is not the same for the romance or germanic speakers, especially the people who can speak one of both the groups.
    Last edited: May 30, 2014
  14. Peregrinus

    Peregrinus Active Member

    Joined:
    May 27, 2014
    Messages:
    613
    Native Language:
    English
    Intermediate Languages:
    German
    Basic Languages:
    Spanish
    kuikentje,

    Obviously cognates matter a great deal, same as with lack of them. Also the lexical threshold of about 15K words (not word families - divide by 1.7 to get that), is for English. I suspect the threshold is 20%+ higher for German and 20%+ lower for Spanish and possibly other romance languages. Still there is no evidence that I have seen to suggest the number is off by anything approaching an order of magnitude for example.

    While you may "disagree" with Laufer and/or his methodology, he is a well respected expert in the field, along with Nation and others.

    Note that your idea of reading "comfortably" may be very different from his, in that you possibly are willing to suffer a lot more unknown words per page, and thus may be willing to either look up a greater number of words as you read or instead simply tolerate a higher level of ambiguity.

    Also worthy of mention is that a lexical threshold of 15K+ falls substantially short of the vocabulary of native speakers which seems to fall in the 34K+ range.
  15. Big_Dog

    Big_Dog Administrator Staff Member

    Joined:
    Jan 11, 2014
    Messages:
    1,039
    Native Language:
    English
    Advanced Languages:
    Spanish
    Intermediate Languages:
    French, Japanese, Mandarin, Russian, Swahili, Thai
    Basic Languages:
    Korean
    So if I divide the total number of words by 1.7, I will get the number of word families? Where did you get that number? I'm interested in what it would be for different languages too.
  16. Peregrinus

    Peregrinus Active Member

    Joined:
    May 27, 2014
    Messages:
    613
    Native Language:
    English
    Intermediate Languages:
    German
    Basic Languages:
    Spanish
    Big_Dog likes this.
  17. Iversen

    Iversen Member VIP member

    Joined:
    May 1, 2014
    Messages:
    91
    I would like to mention a simple test to check what 'reading comfortably' really means to different persons: find a text which you can read comfortably according to your own standards, and then go through it word by word and grammatical form by grammatical form - down to the last iota. How many unknown or dubious words were there in the text? How many word forms, grammatical markers or constructions did you spot whose function you didn't quite understand? I can read many things without looking in a dictionary because I subjectively feel I get the meaning, but when I then go through them once again at the micro level it always turns out that I had been skipping a lot of things.

    For me the result of this exercise is a clear indication that intensive study of vocabulary is an indispensable part of my language learning.

    I can give one more quantitative argument. As I have written elsewhere I am trying to learn some Serbian, and I'm making solid progress especially at the passive level (even though I still haven't got my Serbian TV channel, which I ordered in April!). I have been doing the usual copies, retranslations and extensive readings, and I have done word lists with the unknown words I ran into. Wednesday evening and Thursday I started out doing wordlists directly from my two dictionaries (both relatively small), and I got through the first two letters of the Cyrellic alphabet. Friday I made a simple repetition simply by copying the Serbian words and adding a translation whenever the meaning of a word was in any way unclear. Then it struck me that I had an one-time opportunity to measure the short-term effect of this most nerdy exercise. I took three pages from the 'read' part of the alphabet and three from the still-not-read, and then I calculated the number of known or guessable words. In the part I had studied I knew 60% of the words and could guess a further 18%. In the rest of the dictionary the numbers were reversed: I knew 18% (inclusive 'international' words) and could guess a further 19%, so 63% were still unknown. Now working directly from a dictionary isn't the first thing you should do so I have waited 3 months to start doing it, but it seems that it is worth doing for the whole azbuka right now.

    There is one aspect more: it is sometimes affirmed that words you learn without a context (or rather: without the canonical kind of social or narrative context, as there certainly is a linguistic context for the words in a dictionary) disappear faster than words you have learned in a social setting or from literature. After 2½ day I can't yet check the longterm effect of doing wordlists from a dictionary (or two) in Serbian, but I have a couple of short term indications: I added translations to 18% of the 365 words on my lists during the first repetition round (yesterday afternoon). But later in the evening I covered the translations and checked the words again, and now only 7 words were absolutely incompreghensible. I'll put them on a list again (in the best Goldlist style) and then I think the the matter is dealt with. The relevant thing then is how many of the 365 words I forget within a couple of weeks or a month or so. But I would almost certainly have forgotten some words whatever the method I had used to learn them. The difference is that I can quantify the loss as long as I take care not to throw the pages with the 365 words away. You can't judge how many words you lose if you just have picked them up from extensive reading without writing them down.

    And no, knowing a lot of words is not the same thing as being able to speak a language. We are speaking passive vocabulary here.
    Last edited: May 31, 2014
  18. Wise owl chick

    Wise owl chick Active Member

    Joined:
    Apr 28, 2014
    Messages:
    326
    Native Language:
    French
    Advanced Languages:
    Dutch, German
    Intermediate Languages:
    English, Spanish
    Basic Languages:
    Italian
    hi Peregrinus

    Sorry, it's complicated for me :confused:

    Therefore you must know 15 thousand words in English for understand a newspaper in English? This can't be words which you would know if the person ask you what's a particular word (he say it in your own langauge) in English? But it must be what is the word in your own language when you read it in the newspaper, no?

    For example, a French-speaker who doesn't know English at all, can know many things, like "possible" "music" "ameliorate" etc etc million times etc. Or a Dutch speaker and German speaker can do the same, of course with different examples. But the Russian, hebrew and Arab speakers can't. This is a veyr big difference, how can this not affect the % coverage?

    I suppose this is this?

    and the passive vocabulary can be automatically 10 times higher with the cognates?

    Then the 20% higher or lower for German and Spanish, I don't understand at all. What is this?

    Ok, I'm not an expert in soemthing at all, but his study was with Arab, hebrew and Russian speakers. It seems completely different for the languages' speakers where the cognates are immediately obvious. I don't udnerstand how this can be the same o_O

    Yes, I understand and agree.

    Then how can the coverage must be 98%? Then 19,000 words are only 2% and 15,000 words are 98%? :confused::confused::confused::confused::confused::confused::confused:

    It seems a great test, but I don't do such thigns. Probably I must do this and for sure I didn't quite understand the things.

    Until now, my vocaulary methods were two things. The first is the cognates method, the second is that when I encounter a new word (I mean which I didn't understand) then I discover the meaning, spelling and if possible the pronuncaiton, then I think about it and put it in the conversations in my head. anyway, every time I see a new word, this happen three times. Mostly, my methods function, but with the phrases it depend. But yes, I agree that my understanding is probably not at all optimal, and that i must do more for the vocabulary acquisition. I've asked tastyonions about anki and I've installed this on ym laptop now.
  19. Peregrinus

    Peregrinus Active Member

    Joined:
    May 27, 2014
    Messages:
    613
    Native Language:
    English
    Intermediate Languages:
    German
    Basic Languages:
    Spanish
    kuikentje,

    You might want to review old threads on HTLAL on vocabulary coverage which go into all this in greater detail, albeit those discussions were often sidetracked by the ramblings of persons hyping the idea that a mere 3K vocabulary equals fluency, when considering speaking only, and when not considering proficiency (i.e. you can only get by on that small a vocabulary if it is all active, your range of topics is severely limited, you are willing to use lots of circumlocutions, and you can guide the discussion to fit your vocabulary while the natives cooperate).

    Regarding numbers:

    a) Various studies have shown that the vocabulary of native *college educated* English speakers is in the 34K range (words again not families), and that it increases about 1K a year until one reaches one's 60s, thus ending up with a passive vocabulary in the 50K+ range.

    b) It is generally accepted that non-college educated English speakers have a passive vocabulary of around 10K words and an active vocabulary of about half that, i.e. 5K words. While they, and people with even less education are certainly fluent, they are not necessarily highly proficient, as in they could not understand nor converse about many, especially technical, subjects, or with only limited accuracy.

    c) Re 98% and 2%, yes there is a greatly dwindling return on learning lots of additional vocabulary. See Nation (2006) among other studies. The reason that 98% is used for the lexical threshold is that it is a level where the other 2% can often be inferred, accurately or not, from the remaining known surrounding text, and is the level where readers in the studies report being "comfortable" with any remaining ambiguity.

    d) 95% vocabulary coverage, perhaps afforded by a passive vocabulary of 3-6K words, often offers significant payoffs in understanding, and allows those willing to tolerate looking up words a lot, the chance to start extensive activities.

    e) The big challenge in vocabulary acquisition is mid-range vocabulary in the 2K-9K word family range (times 1.7 for words). See Schmitt (2011): Mid Frequency Vocabulary the Great Gap ... (I can't find this online right now).

    f) The studies on this topic almost exclusively deal with English. One exception is Davis (2005): Vocabulary Range and Text Coverage: Insights from the Forthcoming Routledge Frequency Dictionary of Spanish. It is only my personal subjective speculation based on the limited studies for non-English languages and my own experience that leads me to speculate a higher lexical threshold for reading German, and a lower one for Spanish.

    See also:

    -youtube video of Dr. Alexander Arguelles: Extensive Reading and Vocabulary Range. It covers this topic well.
    -Nation (2006): How Large a Vocabulary is Needed for Reading?
    -Mondria (2007): Myths About Vocabulary Acquisition. (This is a GREAT not overly technical summary of this topic.)
    Last edited: May 31, 2014
    luke, Iversen, BAnna and 2 others like this.
  20. Wise owl chick

    Wise owl chick Active Member

    Joined:
    Apr 28, 2014
    Messages:
    326
    Native Language:
    French
    Advanced Languages:
    Dutch, German
    Intermediate Languages:
    English, Spanish
    Basic Languages:
    Italian
    wow peregrinus you love the articles and references!!!!

    I won't read on HTLAL becasue they banned me and I don't feel so well when I read there. The mods there are nasty (except Iversen)

    I've done a vocabluary test you can see it here http://www.gameswithwords.org/index.html

    My result was this
    [​IMG]

    It is different for the different ages and education I think (for me age 22, education High School diploma) but I'm happy that I know this % LOL many native English speakers don't know their own words hahaha

    I will read your post again later, but it seems complicated.

Share This Page