How many words

[DrZero]

Hi everybody. I am interested in people's opinions: How much vocabulary do you think is required to participate effectively in everyday Mandarin conversations on non-technical topics? I guess that would be intermediate level. I do not mean characters, but vocabulary items. For example, counting "tao3yan4" as a single item.

I am trying to set a New Year's resolution for vocabulary. I am married to a Chinese woman and have self-studied off-and-on (mainly "off") for quite some time. I'm probably a high beginner; because I hear Mandarin every day, day-in and day-out, my listening comprehension is not too bad, if I happen to know the words being used. Unfortunately my vocabulary is pretty limited.

If a Chinese conversation is going on around me, I'm likely to catch significant portions of it, especially if it's on an everyday topic, but will miss many other portions. As far as participating, I'm too tongue-tied to do so in any kind of natural manner.

I guess I'm looking to make a break-through this year, but am not sure exactly what it will take to get to where I want to be.

[wix]

It is a good idea to set goals, but measuring the exact number of words you know once you get beyond a few hundred is difficult. Also there is a difference between passive and active knowledge. It seems your passive vocabulary is already reasonable. You need to do more to work on your active vocabulary.

I would set yourself some goals. For example, learn five new words a day or be able to hold a five minute conversation with a stranger.

Also carry a notebook and make notes of words you hear and want to use and remember. Later check them in the dictionary or ask your wife.

[laowai1980]

That's a pretty interesting topic. I feel my passive vocabulary is also way beyond my active vocab. Are there other ways to improve the active vocabulary and "tongue-tiedness" apart from talking to a stranger or whatever? Where I am, there are not too many Chinese people, and I am already tired of talking to myself, which I practise on daily basis for the past 3 months, but it's kinda boring and weird So yeah, that's an issue most learners are probably concerned with - how to actualize the vocab. Any ideas?

As for how many words - based on learning other languages experience, it'd take ~3k words to feel ok in daily situations. See, the problem is, you may do ok with ~1k words in most conversations, but then you get some where you don't know a word here and a word there, which could be crucial to understanding what the heck it's all about, so you end up clueless on what's going on or miss out on details which is a more likely case. So it's best to learn as many words as possible of course, or you'd be asking the interlocutor what this means, what that means all the time, which blocks the natural flow of the speech. The next level is 6-7k words, which includes many social, economic, political words and expressions, enough to understand the broadcasted news.

[calibre2001]

I recommend watching lots of TV shows (preferably with subtitles) as it helps alot in making new words stick better. Sometimes people talk too fast, that's why Youtube is a blessing since I can pause the show!

[djwebb2004]

Well, one answer is that the HSK Intermediate includes about 5500 words, and the Advanced includes 8840 words. Of course, there is learning words, and there is learning how to use them. But learning more words obviously does help. In most languages about 10,000 words would see you very proficient as a foreigner, but native speakers of most languages have vocabularies of 20,000-50,000. Obviously "what is a word" varies from language to language, but 10,000 is a decent number of lexical items in any language.

[wushijiao]

A fascinating book that I would urge people to buy is “Second Langauge Vocabulary Acquisition”, edited by James Coady and Thomas Huckin (you should be able to buy it for cheap in China, as it is published by 上海外语教育出版社).

Anyway, one of the studies in the book referring to reading, tested batches of students on a reading tests. The students were divided into levels of knowing 2,000 word families, 3,000, 4,000 and 5,000. (Note: a word family might be:: find, findings, finder..etc, would all belong to one word family).

After the test, the researcher concluded that while the 5,000 did better than the 4,000, who did better than the 3,000…etc, there was a huge differences between the 2,000 and the 3,000. Later on, the book gives other studies that suggest the 3,000 word families (corresponding to about 5,000 words) is the threshold needed to understand a text at the bare minimum. At the threshold level, people can begin to make good use of other reading strategies such as guessing in context, looking at prefixes/suffixes, using background info and the such.

3,000 word families corresponds to understanding roughly 90-95% of an average text.

What would this mean for learners of Chinese? I would guess that the whole word families vs. word debate is much less important in Chinese, but the general ballpark of 4,000-5,000 words as the minimum necessary to adequately understand a text probably holds true.

Dr. Zero’s question referred to conversations, and my guess would be that conversations, on average, require less vocabulary than written texts, and therefore the number of words needed to understand a conversation might be slightly less (around 4,000 words?).

In any case, I think vocabulary acquisition is extremely important, but it seems that somewhere around 4,000-5,000 words is the key mark, at which you can then really start to make sense of stuff. I hope that helps.

[DrZero]

Thaks everybody for your replies. So I think I'll make my it my goal this year to reach a vocabulary of 3,000 to 4,000 words, while at the same time studying grammar. I measure myself by the number of flashcards I make, which is not an exact science because sometimes I'll write down a word I already know but in a different usage, or I'll write down a phrase. But I figure it's more or less a good measure. I guess I only know about 1,000 words now. That makes things really hit-or-miss in terms of understanding.

[leosmith]

Pimsleur suggests around 2500. But I imagine you want to be very comfortable in the language, because it's your wife's. So you probably want 10,000. How many words can you learn in a day, sustained? 5 to 20 are numbers I hear a lot. Just multiply by 300 or so, and you have a good goal for the year. To help manage the vocab, you may want to use a flashard program that figures out the bare minimum to review each day. Examples: supermemo; mnemosyne; twinkle.

[griz326]

20-50,000 word vocabularies? I'd like to know how they counted the words? It's been a few years, but I read a study that said the average American had a vocabulary of less than 10k words.

My Chinese study is going nowhere fast.

Pimsleur (I'm doing Pimsleur) doesn't want to teach you pinyin, yet pinyin seems to be an important learning tool. ...and then there are the characters.

OYE!

I've decided to mix and match a few different courses to see if I feel like I'm making better progress.

[djwebb2004]

First of all there is a difference between active and passive vocabulary. The 20,000-50,000 estimates are the higher end of the passive vocabulary.

Now all languages exhibit different morphological patterns, and so counting words in different languages for comparison purposes is fraught with difficulties. If you look at the A's in the Collins dictionary (Millennium edition), you can find as headwords "abandon", "abandoned" and "abandonee". Beneath the word "abandon", there are 2 more bold words/phrases, "abandon ship" and "abandonment". The definition also shows that "abandon" is a noun as well as a verb, eg "she danced with abandon". "Abandoned" as a headword is an adjective, eg an abandoned windmill, but clearly is also a participle. How many "words", "headwords" and "word families" are here? I presume that they are all one word family, but in terms of inflected words, you have: abandon, abandons, abandoned, abandoning, abandonee, abandonment - six words. And as I said, Collins divides them into three headwords. You could argue that as many past participles can be used as adjectives, there should be only two headwords: abandon, abandonment. But in Chinese there would only be one word owing to the lack of inflections: 遗弃, but a large series of synonyms too: 放弃,抛弃,丢弃,废弃,摒弃, and many more.

So: first of all you have to eliminate inflected forms from the comparison, and you have to account for the fact that word division varies between languages: German words combine many words into one long word. However, it seems clear that in this case there is one word family and two head words and 6 inflected words. I believe linguists think 10,000 head words would be a good English vocabulary. inflected this would be many more (did, does, done, doing,, etc), and would be equivalent to fewer word families. Now in Chinese: each character has a meaning, or generally so, so I regard characters as the "roots" of the language. 5000 roots = 5000 characters, can make up well over 100,000 words (ABCD has 60,000 characters making up 200,000 words, but most of those characters are rare and not productive i n terms of forming bisyllabic words). In fact if you learn all the HSK words plus the 1018 supplementary characters in a book I have posted about in this forum, you will have 4000 characters making up 10,000 words andd the ability to guess at tens of thousands of other words written using those same 4000 characters. So probably 10,000 headwords in English corresponds to these 10,000 words in Chinese, or maybe slightly more headwords in English would correspond to those 10,000 words in Chinese given the way that Chinese words can frequently be nouns and verbs at the same time and cover the ground covered by 2 headwords such as abandon and abandonment in English.

The conclusion: learn those 4000 characters and 10,000 words. Everything else is a bonus!