reading fluency

[roddy]

I think What imron is suggesting is based on the theory that the frequency of a word is the only factor that determines its effect on comprehension.

I'm 98% sure Imron isn't that silly, but I'm sure he'll confirm this himself. Both you and jkhsu seem to be saying the same, obvious, thing - important words are important.

[bande]

I like the positions in this thread. While I consider reading important, I feel like I've come closer to the Rezaf position. Recently, I've enjoyed learning words from dictionaries and saved reading for reading. I've also been experimenting with hand copying portions of texts to see writing by hand will help improve reading skills.

[rezaf]

My point is that not knowing those difficult words doesn’t necessarily reduce the comprehension by 2%. It might be somewhere between 2% to for example something like 50% depending on the text but even if they reduce it by 10% on average it means that although you can understand most of what’s going on, they might make reading quite uncomfortable which explains why learners with 10,000 vocabulary still feel they are not fluent.

@bande:I think if the goal is to achieve the fluency of a native speaker then sooner or later we need to learn all those twenty something thousand words and phrases. Depending on what we like whatever method we choose is gonna be difficult and is gonna take us a lot of time and practice(and most people can't finish it anyway). The reason I don’t focus too much on reading at this point is that I hate interrupting my reading and checking the dictionary all the time. Also I hate to ignore the parts I don’t understand and lose all those things that I could learn from them. That’s why I have chosen to finish the vocabulary list first. Of course memorizing 30,000 words doesn’t guarantee that I can immediately use them fluently but it can guarantee that when I start my reading project I will learn 100% of what I can learn from those books without needing to check my dictionary so much.

[renzhe]

rezaf, I agree with your general premise, but I think that 30,000 is far too high a number, IMHO.

I'd recommend tackling a long, challenging book when you're in the 5,000-10,000 range because of the many reading skills you can only acquire through reading, as mentioned by imron. You can continue learning vocabulary in other ways while you're at it, but there is no reason to keep delaying reading.

I think that looking things up in a dictionary is not the worst part of reading, and that trying to painstakingly puzzle together meaning from hundreds of words you sort-of-know out of context is much more tiresome. As long as you can get through a page without too many dictionary lookups, it's worth reading, IMHO.

[rezaf]

Nearly one third of my list is for TCM, western medicine and academic words that's why it's too big.

But the number of the words that native speakers know is very high. One first-year student chose around 24,000 words for me, one 4th-year student chose around 35,000 and one graduate student chose around 38,000. Now another graduate student is helping me to reduce the list to 30,000 as I progress.

Edit: I have managed to keep my reading skills alive by reading my textbooks(which I have to) and newspaper. I have bought many good Chinese novels that have to wait for another year until I finish this project because it's fine to waste a newspaper article but I don't want to waste a good novel.

[Guest realmayo]

Interesting. Although my guts say that more people would find it better following renzhe's route than rezaf's, I guess none of us really know for sure. Especially if motivation isn't an issue. And actually, rezaf's edit above makes clear he's actually reading, just not sitting down to plough through a novel. I imagine TCM textbooks are not the easiest things to read....

[Gleaves]

Reading speed and reading endurance both contribute immensely to my feeling of reading fluency. It came as something of a shock how little these two things progress without really consistent practice. I know I'm always going to run into new vocab, and so I accept the fact that I need to skip or guess stuff I don't know. Its the words that I know I know, but that take a second, that kill me.

[jkhsu]

Also I think the clozing is wrong in "Restrictions on “naked” (Word #1) (Word #2)" -- makes no sense.

Good catch. It should be (Word #2) (Word #1) ...

I purposely picked that article because I had to look up Credit Default Swap myself. I thought the article illustrated the feeling of not knowing an important word. Because this is a news article about a CDS related policy, I would not walk away and say that I completely understood it while leaving CDS = "some financial instrument".

This 98% figure: this is on average, right? So occasionally you'll be unlucky and that 2% will cause problems. By picking and choosing the 2% you want to remove, you're skewing the balance of probabilities.

This I agree with. You can always pick and choose words to remove from an article but is that representative of words readers might miss? Like I said, for the most part I agree with the 98% figure. For this particular article, I actually picked the word that I didn't know myself (CDS) and then a couple of much easier words that I thought would enable someone to guess the meaning.

[OneEye]

The thing is, I (and probably many) wouldn't care that I didn't know what a CDS is, so I'd be just fine with not "completely understanding it". I wouldn't care if the article was in Chinese, either. "Some financial instrument" is just fine with me (in any language), as is an incomplete understanding of the article, because it isn't a topic that I have much interest in. If I don't know what something is in my mother tongue, I certainly don't need to know it in Chinese or any other language.

[jkhsu]

The thing is, I (and probably many) wouldn't care that I didn't know what a CDS is...

The example was supposed to illustrate comprehension levels not interest levels. I get that this probably wasn't a good example based on the responses. I'm cool with that. I'm sure I could find another one if I had the time but I think I've stated my points.

[Silent]

My point is that not knowing those difficult words doesn’t necessarily reduce the comprehension by 2%. It might be somewhere between 2% to for example something like 50% depending on the text

I would rather say that comprehension is effected by something between 0 and 50% (or more). E.g. "The teddy bear he bought was so large that the storekeeper had no bag ### enough to fit it in." I think few people have a hard time to decide that ### should be big, so basicly no loss of information. If the text elaborates enough you can miss quite a few words without any effect on the comprehension at all.

The reason I don’t focus too much on reading at this point is that I hate interrupting my reading and checking the dictionary all the time. Also I hate to ignore the parts I don’t understand and lose all those things that I could learn from them. That’s why I have chosen to finish the vocabulary list first.

You may have learned all the words in the text, but it does not mean you are able to understand the text. Learning from a vocabulary list you will never learn the nuances of a word and often you will learn only a limited number of it's meanings. Also you need knowledge and experience with a language and it's grammar to be able to fit pieces together correctly. E.g. "go to" and "to go" have different meanings though they are the same words.

With enough vocabulary learned it becomes easier to learn to read. Reading makes it easier to learn vocabulary. skills are interrelated. I think a balanced approach is best. Which should take the lead depends on personal preferences.

[bande]

Rezaf,

Have you written a post on how you compiled your vocabulary lists? I think a new thread based around that topic would be interesting.

[rezaf]

I have mentioned it a few times in different threads like these two:

http://www.chinese-forums.com/index.php?/topic/28025-how-many-words-does-an-average-native-speaker-know/page__fromsearch__1

http://www.chinese-forums.com/index.php?/topic/32665-book-recommendation/page__fromsearch__1

But a lot of things have happened since I wrote them and I have changed my strategies as well as my list a few times. Compiling, editing and reciting these words has been an extremely difficult project so far and I have just finished less than a third of it. I will write more about this method as soon as I finish it (hopefully) in about a year so that I can have a better idea about its benefits.

[yonglin]

Okay, so I'm arriving late, but just wanted to point out that the Credit Default Swaps article is a commentary on this report/news brief. In that article, the journalist defines "naked short-selling" and "CDS contracts". That is, an average WSJ reader (=a very select group in the first place) is not expected to know what these terms mean. The blog is obviously written by a person in finance, for people in finance. I agree 100% with imron that you can pick a technical article from any field and make the article next to incomprehensible by removing key words.

[rezaf]

You may have learned all the words in the text, but it does not mean you are able to understand the text. Learning from a vocabulary list you will never learn the nuances of a word and often you will learn only a limited number of it's meanings. Also you need knowledge and experience with a language and it's grammar to be able to fit pieces together correctly. E.g. "go to" and "to go" have different meanings though they are the same words.

With enough vocabulary learned it becomes easier to learn to read. Reading makes it easier to learn vocabulary. skills are interrelated. I think a balanced approach is best. Which should take the lead depends on personal preferences.

I agree with this and I know that after finishing this list I need to do a lot of reading to learn where they can be used. I don't expect to achieve real fluency in anything less than another 5 years but I think if I don't do it this way it might take me much longer than that.

[anonymoose]

The thing is, I (and probably many) wouldn't care that I didn't know what a CDS is, so I'd be just fine with not "completely understanding it". I wouldn't care if the article was in Chinese, either.

I think the problem here is that, if your native language is English, it's very easy to determine that "Credit Default Swaps" is a term that doesn't require a full understanding. On the other hand, if you see an equivalent apparently nonsensical string of Chinese characters, you are more likely to ascribe your lack of understanding to a deficiency in your Chinese, rather than realising that, in fact, even most native speakers wouldn't understand it, and thus such terms are likely to cause undue consternation in Chinese.

[Silent]

I think the problem here is that, if your native language is English, it's very easy to determine that "Credit Default Swaps" is a term that doesn't require a full understanding.

I think that as a native English speaker you should know what a "Credit Default Swap" is as it came out of the specialist literature into the popular press. In order to understand the popular financial press you have to know that it's a financial derivative of the credit markets used to (de)leverage positions in/exposure to the credit markets. It does not mean you have to know how exactly it works. Just the same as most people don't know exactly how a car, computer, or open heart surgery work. Few however will claim that they don't fully understand what a car, computer or open heart surgery is if they read about a car crash, new computer software or a heart surgery that went wrong.

[yonglin]

I think that as a native English speaker you should know what a "Credit Default Swap" is as it came out of the specialist literature into the popular press. In order to understand the popular financial press you have to know that it's a financial derivative of the credit markets used to (de)leverage positions in/exposure to the credit markets.

Although I'm not a native English speaker, I'm absolutely positive that your expectations for what a native English speaker "should" know are way above what an average native English speaker actually knows. Have you ever seen these surveys where the public are asked about their general knowledge of current affairs (example)?

As for the share of native English speakers that can give a reasonable definition of "Credit Default Swap", I'd estimate <5%. Of course, if the people you interact with on a daily basis are college educated, interested in finance and/or current affairs, things might not seem this way to you.

Concepts like "car", "computer", and "heart surgery" are way easier to understand than "credit default swaps". Ask any 10-year old. For financial concepts that you would expect the general public to understand, you have "mortgage", "interest rate", and "stock market" (even some of these can be a stretch: you often read about people who feel they were "tricked" by high-interest pay-day loan companies).

[rezaf]

I think it's time to add 信用違約互換（CDS）to our lists.

[Silent]

Although I'm not a native English speaker, I'm absolutely positive that your expectations for what a native English speaker "should" know are way above what an average native English speaker actually knows.

I may have stretched it with my definition. I also know many people are precious unaware of the news and consequently have not come across a CDS. Nevertheless I think your 5% is far too low, but it also depends on what you consider reasonable. I really believe the majority of people know the concept behind a credit default swap, that it is a financial derivative, some financial 'magic' instrument. Sure, they will not be able to explain how it works, they may even have a hard time to clearly define it but I maintain they know the concept behind it.

you often read about people who feel they were "tricked" by high-interest pay-day loan companies

Sure, you read those stories, but I don't think they're representative for the entire population. At least I hope not. Also, those "tricked" have an incentive to act not too smart. There is a negative sentiment about what happened (for a good reason), and there is a chance for some compensation. It's smarter to say "It's complicated stuff, the salesman gave bad info and tricked me into it" then "It smelled fishy but the salesman said it was ok. As it's complicated stuff I decided not to check and took my chances". Though essentially saying the same the first reaction gives a much better perspective to get compensation.