number of known words

In English, it seems the average native speaker knows about 17,000 word families. A study of vocabulary comparing Dutch students entering university to non-native Dutch students found that the average vocabulary size of the Dutch was approximately 18,800 words.

The Common European Framework for Reference of languages (CEFR), appears to cover the most frequent 5,000 words at the C2 level, which is the top level of the test. You can check here on page 186. To pass C2 in English, one needs a vocabulary of around 4,000 or more words. For French, the learner should know 3,300 - 3,700 words to pass C2. These figures are a far cry from what the native speaker knows but apparently enough to perform well on the most advanced level of the CEFR test. So I wouldn't quite call C2 mastery of the language, nor equivalent to a native speaker.

learn homophones by ear

The picture above is one of the new DVD boxes that I bought to store my TV dramas in. The disc you see on the left side is on a hinged panel. It swings around and the first disc is on the other side. What's interesting is the way the discs overlap on the right side. This box is the same size as a regular DVD case but holds 4 discs. It's 19 cm tall and 1.5 cm thick.

You can see a picture in my previous posts that shows the Heroic Legend packaging. It has 1 disc per box. So I have 12 DVD boxes for that series. An unfortunate waste of space.

As promised, (did I make a promise?) I finished the Last Agent series by the last day of the month. This is the 2nd time I have watched the 15 hour series, and I still don't know who the last agent is. I'm not sure which character the title refers to. Maybe "agent" has a different meaning than the one I'm thinking of.

There are so many words in English that have multiple meanings. You don't even realize it until you search in a dictionary to try to find the right word. On Sunday, at work I had to translate some English to Japanese. What a pain that was.

Chinese can be said to have a lot of homophones. English has a lot too, but we don't recognize it so easily because given a certain word we may think of one basic meaning. But for many words there are other uses that are actually different meanings. One of the things about being a native speaker is that when a word is encountered in context, the other meanings of the word never come to mind.

If I say I'm going to break a board, or I need to take a break because I'm bored, you would never stop to think about which meaning I intended for the words break and board/bored. And to us the word "break" might seem like the same word because in both instances something is being divided. But a coffee break is fundamentally different than a board break and a learner of English might see them as totally different. I can say I'm breaking a board, but I can't use the -ing for the other kind of break.

So I think that saying a language has a lot of homophones is not a good criterion for a language being difficult to learn. When you know the language well, the context is so specific that you never get the wrong idea, nor do you have to stop and think about the meaning because of all the homophones. Just try this one on for size: A competition to learn how to tie a tie in Thai ended in a tie.

With the TV method, I'm learning by listening. I don't know if this is the same as learning to play an instrument by ear or not. I haven't learned to play the piano, although I did take a piano class in college. But I was thinking the other day that if I was learning to play the piano, it would be a good idea to actually listen to the song that I was learning. If I knew the song well I would be able to recognize if I hit the wrong key in practice. If I didn't know the song well, I could be practicing an unnatural pace and I wouldn't even notice if I got some keys wrong.

When I was in band class around 5th grade, at first I was on drums. I was so bad at keeping the beat that I had to change instruments after a while. I changed to the slide trombone then. I found it difficult to learn to read the music sheet. So I was a pretty bad music student back then too. In fact, I remember a music class where we each had to sing something individually so the teacher could grade us once. I was so off tune that the music teacher didn't seem to believe it. In fact, she seemed disgusted by my awful performance. I'm still bad at singing.

Even though the TV method is a 'learn by ear' method, it won't be a problem learning different meanings for words that sound the same. The brain figures these things out. Just like when you were growing up, before you ever learned to read, you never had a problem with there, they're, and their.

don't use new words!

When using the TV method on a new language, there are a lot of new words that you can eventually understand directly from the situation and what you see happening on the screen. I say "eventually" because even though it is quite obvious, you probably won't pick up on it the first time you see it. It may be on the second viewing or even later when you are ready to learn that new word. For the not-so-obvious, you may just be wondering what the words mean and you keep noticing them and then one day it becomes obvious to you. You'll learn it when you're ready. That's how the brain works.

In the beginning, you'll be oblivious to most words. (Why are "obvious" and "oblivious" so similar-looking when the meanings are almost opposites?) Eventually, of course, the words start making themselves known to you. They have a funny way of doing that. And through exposure, the new words will become old words.

The natural approach advocates that you don't speak at all in the beginning. Which makes sense because, really, what kind of conversation are you going to have when you only know 10 words? So you won't have any problem refraining from using new words in the early stages. But how about the later stages when you've acquired enough of the language to speak it? Should you try to use new words right away? If you've read the title of this post, my answer should be obvious.

When words are still new to you, you're not ready to use them. You need time to get to the point where you know how the word sounds. You may also need more time to redefine your understanding of the new words. And last but not least, words should come out of your mouth without you having to think about them. A new word is not ready to do that. With new words, you would have to stop and think, and remember.

Like old friends, old words are your friend. They're comfortable. You know what they mean. You can use them without even thinking. Give your new words time to grow and when they become old you'll be using them too without so much as a thought.

So it's not new words you want to acquire. It's old words! That's why study and memorization should have no place in language acquisition. 5,000 new words and only a few hundred old words won't do you much good. Spend your time getting exposure to the language instead of thinking about words. You take care of the language input and the words will take care of themselves.