The Linguist On Language

Imperfect grammar and pronunciation do not prevent communication and enjoyment of the language. Lack of vocabulary does.

When I correct writing, it is overwhelmingly vocabulary, improper use of words and phrases that is the biggest problem, not grammar.

How do you accumulate words and phrases? You do so from input, from reading, and from listening to content that is of interest to you. You have to see the words and phrases often in different contexts.

Three questions about words

(I will use English as an example but I believe the principles apply to al languages. Note that the relationship between word families and total words varies from language to language. For English I will accept Paul Nation's ratio of 1 word family to 1.6 words.)

1) How many words do we need to know?

A Japanese language blog put out by the ALC group cal ed Business English (BE) made the point that Japanese students of English are best advised to focus on the most frequent 2,000 words, which account for up to 80% of most written material and up to 90% of most conversations. BE cites sources that say that the average Japanese university student has a passive (receptive) vocabulary of between 2100 and 2600 word families, and an active (productive) vocabulary of 1900-2300 word families. BE quotes a certain Professor Schmitt, who claims that it is common to have a passive vocabulary 20% larger than one's active vocabulary.

BE goes on to state that 5,000 word families are needed to read English university text books, and that a survey of foreign students at US universities showed that the best group knew only 4,000 word families.

BE describes the situation in Japanese high schools, where text books are supposed to focus on the highest frequency words, but many of these words do not appear more than a few times in over one mil ion words of text. Since we need to encounter words anywhere from 5 to 10 times to learn them, BE claims that it is not surprising that there are great gaps in the known vocabulary of these students, even those who claim to know 3,000 or more words.

BE then quotes a source which shows that knowing the highest frequency 1,000 words enables learners to obtain scores of over 700 on TOEIC, 3,000 corresponds to a score over 900, and so forth. He shows a graph to this effect.

I disagree with a lot of this.

I have stated earlier, based on the vocabulary level of learners (mostly Japanese) at The Linguist (now LingQ), and their reported scores on TOEIC, that the required vocabulary level for TOEIC is much, much higher than BE implies. At LingQ we assume that a known words level of 7,500 (or 4,680 word families) is required to achieve a 750 score on TOEIC. In an earlier post, I quoted Batia Laufer whose research largely supported our observations.

If the average second year Japanese university student has a vocabulary of 2000 to 2500 words, and if 1,000 words will get you a score of over 700, why is the average score of Japanese people taking the TOEIC test around 400? I am sure that the vocabulary knowledge of these test-takers exceeds the 1000 level.

Beyond the level of traveling and shopping abroad, I believe the next goal should be fluency, with a TOEIC score as a meaningful target. And that is where piling up the words through a lot of exposure starts to be more and more important. The first 1,000 words may account for 70% of the content of a conversation, but the next 1,000 add only 3-5%, and after that there is not necessarily that much difference in the utility of words, regardless of where they place in the frequency lists. It depends more on what a person is using the language for.

So you do need a lot of exposure and an efficient system, like LingQ.

If the goal is to communicate comfortably, read, and become fluent in the language, I believe 5,000 word families, or 8,000 words (as we count them at LingQ) is a realistic goal.

Once you achieve that you will be well on your way to learn more, since you can infer more and more words from the context. If you can get to 5,000 families you can get to 7,500 families or 12,000 words on the LingQ count, which should ensure a very good score on TOEIC.

Even then, there will be many useful and necessary words that will not be covered. BE cites "punctual" as a word that Japanese students are required to know, but which he feels is so rare that it hardly ever appears. This might be the case, but to me, as a native speaker, "punctual" is not a rare word. It is word that a fluent speaker should know. However, not knowing a word, or forgetting a word is no disgrace. I am certain that there are many high frequency words that I either do not know, or have forgotten, or use improperly, in the foreign languages that I speak. Language learning is not about perfection. The odd mistake in TOEIC is not going sink you either.