Old hsk vocab lists...

[Guest realmayo]

I don't think I said you should wait to start reading, I just suggested that acquisition of vocabulary via reading might be sub-optimal if at an early stage you rely on extensive reading alone. I think the comparison with a five-year old native kid implies a misunderstanding of ... everything, really.

[Publius]

OK you want a better way to build vocabulary than the natural way. So enter SRS. Then when will SRS become sub-optimal? When you have mastered 5000 words? 10000? 20000?

[Lu]

This sounds like a nature vs nurture debate. SRS or extensive reading? Well, both, of course. If you only SRS, you'll never feel how the words are used in their natural environment; if you only read, you'll forget some words (like handgrenade) before you encounter them again, or you'll just gloss over words that you kind-of-but-not-really understand because you get the general meaning. So both.

[Shelley]

I think there is big difference between knowing lists of words and being able to use them confidently and correctly in context.

A list is useful to check what you should know at any particular level and to have something to aim for.

IMHO though context and usage is everything.

 

Reading and speaking will give you the best chance of coming across things you are learning " in the wild" and recognise and understand it.

 

I also think though that different approaches suit different people, if people like lists and there is progresses, its not wrong. I think that as part of a wider learning strategy its helpful.

[Guest realmayo]

1 hour ago, Lu said:

SRS or extensive reading? Well, both, of course

 

Definitely, and at different stages and in different environments their usages will change. If I was living in Beijing and using Chinese all day long, then I imagine there are lots of new words I wouldn't need to put into any SRS system because I'd expect to be encountering them frequently enough in real life that they'd sink into my head quickly.

 

1 hour ago, Publius said:

OK you want a better way to build vocabulary than the natural way. So enter SRS. Then when will SRS become sub-optimal? When you have mastered 5000 words? 10000? 20000?

 

You're right, usage must change as circumstances change. As I said, I use it very differently from how I used to.

[fabiothebest]

6 hours ago, Publius said:

 

Google Ngram

 

@Publius wow I didn't know Google Ngram. Thanks.

@roddy Thanks for the list. I'm sure it's available elsewhere, but it's nice to have it here also in case it gets deleted. After I learnt HSK 6 words (still far from it) I'll learn also the old HSK vocabulary. I think it's worthwhile.

 

[imron]

7 hours ago, fabiothebest said:

I think it's worthwhile.

I don't!

 

It's far more efficient to learn from context than from a word list - orders of magnitude more efficient even.

[murrayjames]

Whenever I come across 手榴弹 I think back to the first video games I played in Chinese. Incidentally, first-person shooters are a great way to pick up words like 手榴弹、冲锋枪、狙击枪、弩弓 and 铁撬棍.

 

Odd that 汉办 did not include 共产主义 in the HSK new list. It's hard to imagine foreigners making sense of documents like this without it.

[Mati1]

17 hours ago, Publius said:

My English vocab size, according to this website, is at native level.

So how did you get there? By extensive reading and living in English speaking countries?

[Publius]

@Mati1, yes by extensive reading. Have never lived abroad.

[fabiothebest]

I certainly agree that learning in context is the best way to do and I don't consider HSK wordlists to be the real de facto standard although they are made by Hanban and thus supported by the Chinese government. I use HSK wordlists to have a sort of guideline and prepare for HSK exams to test myself but I integrate that with other vocabulary learnt in context. I didn't reach HSK 6 yet but I already feel that even at that level I wouldn't have a native speaker level. Some HSK words may appear useless at first, right because they aren't learnt in context and because simply learning words without their usage and example sentences isn't that useful (this happens more frequently with self-study learners) and some words that are frequently used are introduced only at higher levels and not at the beginning, anyway HSK words together with other words I studied myself allow me to have a general conversation, so I wouldn't consider them totally useless at the end of the day. Everyone who studies for HSK thinks that he doesn't know enough words and the old HSK (apart from the questionable "quality") has a bigger quantity of words indeed, so it might be worth checking those words. Not having it done yet I don't know if it's a waste of time but there must be a logic (although maybe suboptimal) followed by those who created the wordlists though. Obviously acquiring a greater number of words isn't done by learning wordlists but by speaking, watching tv and reading.

[imron]

2 hours ago, fabiothebest said:

but there must be a logic

There is a logic.  They take a little bit of this and a little bit of that from a broad range of different genres and fields.

 

Typically though, when you are reading something it is on a specific topic or related to a specific field, or has a specific setting.

 

If you learn from context, by definition, every word you learn will be directly relevant to what you are reading.

 

If you learn from a general word list like HSK or frequency lists, you'll learn maybe a little bit (or maybe nothing) of something relevant to what you are reading, but then also a lot of other little bits from things that are not relevant to what you are reading, which is not an efficient use of time.

 

The words are all useful eventually.  The question is whether there are more useful words to you at a given point in time, and the answer is almost certain to be yes.

[Guest realmayo]

6 minutes ago, imron said:

whether there are more useful words

 

This is where lists can come in useful: if you're not sure whether to spent time learning a word you've just come across, its presence on say an HSK5 list indicates it's probably fairly useful. I dumped a Wechat corpus and a couple of others into a spreadsheet so if I've got a list of words from a novel that I think might be worth learning, those words which feature near the top of any of those corpuses [sic] are likely to be more "useful" than those which don't.

[imron]

Corpora is the word you're looking for. 

 

I agree this is a good use of word lists.  Every word you come across in context is relevant at that time, but many will not be relevant or useful for a long time after that.  Checking against other can be a good check for that, as is  the frequency with which it occurs in what you are reading. 

[RogerGe]

There are a few words in this list that aren't in the old HSK, for example 鄂 and 苑, and there are some words missing, such as 舵 and 酶. (I'm basing this off http://iphone.pleco.com/hsk-100428.txt and an Old HSK vocabulary book published in 2005, however https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Appendix:HSK_list_of_Mandarin_words seems to agree with this list) Does anyone know why this is the case?

[roddy]

Made some corrections thanks to @hoshi's post here - sorry it took so long, didn't notice it originally. Have updated the file.