Diminishing returns with vocabulary acquisition

[黄有光]

In other news, as I've progressed, the ratio of idioms and phrases to singular words in my vocabulary intake has dramatically increased. Back when I was working my way through my first book (personal vocabulary ~5.000 words), I would have said the vast majority of my 生词 were 2-character words. Now (personal vocabulary ~18.500) I'd say almost a third of the new words I'm learning are 3-4+ character words, phrases, idioms, and the occasional proverb.  Four character idioms and phrases in particular are becoming increasingly common.

[Moshen]

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I would say it is rare for me to come across a word in English that I am truly, absolutely, 100% in the dark about. I

 

In that case, I wonder if you're not reading widely enough.  Here are 8 new words I came across in a mystery by a Scottish writer, 7 of which were 100% unfamiliar to me:

• croft (this was repeated enough that I figured out it means something like "farm")
• clype
• shieling
• bothan
• byre
• tilley
• po-faced
• kipper (I believe this is some kind of little fish, like a sardine? but I'm not sure)

Here are a few more words/expressions that baffled me that I encountered in emails or blog posts in the last week or two:

• white editorial blight
• extratextually
• manosphere
• edgelord
• pelf
• sus

So, unless I confined myself to some very limited genre, in my Chinese studies I would expect to keep encountering new expressions no matter how extensive my vocabulary was already.  And to me, that's all to the good, not some kind of failure or weakness.

 

[黄有光]

On 3/28/2022 at 8:36 PM, Moshen said:

• croft (this was repeated enough that I figured out it means something like "farm")
• clype
• shieling
• bothan
• byre
• tilley
• po-faced
• kipper (I believe this is some kind of little fish, like a sardine? but I'm not sure)

Coming across 8 unknown words in a decently sized book aimed at adults counts as "rare" for me.

[imron]

On 2/20/2022 at 3:00 PM, 黄有光 said:

I would say that if it could perfectly divide words 100% of the time, it would be only a relatively small improvement over its current capabilities.

This is the main reason I haven't invested the time required to make improvements to this.  It would require a non-trivial time investment and only deliver a small amount of benefit.

 

CTA is better for giving you a high-level overview of the contents of a piece of text, rather than specific word-by-word breakdowns.  At a high view, the segmentation is sufficient for getting a good idea of frequently used, unknown vocabulary because frequently used words will still be filtered towards the top of the frequency lists despite the occasional segmentation errors, and incorrect segmentation gets filtered towards the bottom of the frequency list because the incorrectly segmented word won't appear very often.

 

In any given text, and for any given student, there will still be enough high-frequency unknown words for this to be useful.

[imron]

On 2/23/2022 at 11:21 AM, 黄有光 said:

I am also lucky in that I have an innate skill with sound mimicry that I think escapes most people.

Like everything, this is a skill that can be trained!

 

If you can recall the sound of "Happy Birthday", "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star" and the theme to your favourite TV show/movie, you have the ability to train yourself to recall the sounds of Mandarin (with tones being part of the sound).

[黄有光]

On 3/31/2022 at 4:00 AM, imron said:

Like everything, this is a skill that can be trained!

You are right to an extent, but unfortunately my experience as an accent coach has shown me that there truly is a very, very wide range of natural talent at play here. Some of my students pick up new sounds almost right away. Some of my students show no improvement, no matter how many exercises I lead them through. Most students fall somewhere in the middle.

 

I do agree with you though that students should under no circumstances consign themselves to failure because they feel like trying is hopeless.

[imron]

For sure there are levels of skill, and not everyone is going to reach the same levels of ability, but auditory recall is a skill most people can learn to a useful level - you don’t need to be best in the world, just good enough for it to be of use.
 

It’s also a skill most people already have - just applied to things they don’t realize, like TV show theme songs and character voices. 
 

Once you recognize that, it’s then a matter of learning to applying that to language learning.