How many words does an adult know?

I've been wondering this a little lately, so I thought I'd lay down some thoughts just briefly since it's really not the purpose of this blog.

To be honest, I'm not too hung up on the number of words I know in German, though I must admit I did get a little thrill when my own Anki list passed the 2,000 card mark! That's over 1,000 pairs of mappings from German to English. I say mappings because it's quite rare for my cards to be a 1-to-1 pairing. I map 1 to N words to 1 to N words. N is probably never bigger than four. This means that the number of words represented in these mapping pairs is a lot more than 1,000. Probably at least 2,000. And yet, that's not too important to me really. The most important thing for me is that I am adding new words all the time because then at least I know I'm growing my possible vocabulary. Like I've said before, sure, it's not all about words, but they are a massive part of the task, especially, I feel, at my intermediate stage, but it's probably true at any stage. It's the one thing you will always need to increase to become a fully literate, high-functioning individual in a foreign language.

I read a very interesting article recently:

http://www.balancedreading.com/vocabulary.html

The basic gist of it is that reading substantially enhances your vocabulary (in your own language) and that early differences in reading ability and word recognition are magnified throughout your life. Perhaps the same could be said of reading a foreign language?

It also makes this very interesting point which seems to me to also relate to language learning:

"Part of the reason is that it is not clear what it means to "know" a word. Speaking personally, there are some words I am much more familiar with than others.
Consider these words: WHITE, DOG, and HOME
And compare them to these words: CALLIOPE, FOP, and BRACHIAL"

For a brachial specialist, the answer would be different of course, but I agreed somewhat with his assessment. Perhaps "fop" is more familiar to me than to him, but really all that's going on in your brain is some very clever neural network processing (with time sequencing of course). This maps firings to other firings to other firings, and you have meaning. Items that fire frequently are reinforced (hence the name "reinforcement learning") and less frequent items degrade over time to some extent.

I feel this way about German. I can think in German at times, and it feels pretty much like thinking in English except that I get stuck on some concepts. English and German have started to differentiate themselves in my head so that switching between them can be slow. Sometimes I'll get stuck for a word and first have to think of the word in English before it comes to me in German, at which point I switch back. This feeling of switching is probably fairly normal at an intermediate stage. Although I can (sometimes!) hold a relatively long conversation in German, I still have a long way to go. I feel like I have internalised many words and structures so that, normally, I can produce correct sentences at normal speed without thinking *consciously* about them. The same goes for comprehending. However, both, in general, require my full focus. English does not require my full focus, though it is still hard to listen to details if I don't pay attention, of course!

In German, it feels like the main conscious effort is in maintaining that focus, that attention. It's tiring. No, it doesn't often come easy yet, but I feel it slowly changing over time.

I think the interesting point for me from the link above was that people who read have a larger vocabulary than people who don't. This may not be *universally* true, but it sounds pretty reasonable as an assumption. This has two corollaries for language learning: (1) If you want a large vocabulary in the language you're studying, you're going to need to read LOTS and (2) When you read in a language you're learning, you will likely encounter a lot more unknown words than in general conversation. I would say that this is all even more so for literature as opposed to just general websites.

Of course, you don't just want a large vocabulary. You need to comprehend native speech at full-speed and interact. To be able to do that, you need to practice that skill. It won't just appear by magic. You also need to understand incomplete input over noisy channels (telephones, radios, speech partner mumbling, etc). Again, this is an acquired skill through practice.

After all, you wouldn't expect to become a Chess Grandmaster by just watching lots of games being played, would you? And yet, Chess is a purely deterministic, mathematically simple problem (albeit one with a very, very large search space). Chess Grandmasters are made through study, practice, instruction and LOTS and LOTS of progressively harder practice.

Anyway, enough talking about practice - I'll get back to actually doing it :-) I'll give an update on what I've been up to lately in my next post...