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How the words we teach English language learners changed
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Re: How the words we teach English language learners changed
#52It's changed so much I can't even parse the title.
Evidently grammar's become slacker
Re: How the words we teach English language learners changed
#53I tried to organize vocab by difficulty level for an English language-learning app once. It shocked me how there is absolutely no "right" answer. If you are teaching English for travel, then you're prioritizing a lot of stuff around bathrooms, transportation, menu items, etc. If it's for understanding TV, it's a lot of words like "murder", etc. Depending on which TV shows you want to understand. If it's for reading t…
I read years ago that:
1. TV vocabulary is 2,000 words
2. High school vocabulary is 10,000 words
3. College vocabulary is 30,000 words
4. English language has 1,000,000 words
This is good news - you can be proficient in a foreign language by learning only 2,000 words!
Re: How the words we teach English language learners changed
#54I tried to organize vocab by difficulty level for an English language-learning app once. It shocked me how there is absolutely no "right" answer. If you are teaching English for travel, then you're prioritizing a lot of stuff around bathrooms, transportation, menu items, etc. If it's for understanding TV, it's a lot of words like "murder", etc. Depending on which TV shows you want to understand. If it's for reading t…
Beware though that only learning words may leave you confused as in my experience Americans tend to overload the same word with a different meaning depending on the context. They also often resort to idioms and cultural references. For reasons unknown to me, instead of using the word with the meaning they probably are trying to convey, they rather use vague analogies or metaphors. It always made me question if Americ…
Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra
Re: How the words we teach English language learners changed
#55I tried to organize vocab by difficulty level for an English language-learning app once. It shocked me how there is absolutely no "right" answer. If you are teaching English for travel, then you're prioritizing a lot of stuff around bathrooms, transportation, menu items, etc. If it's for understanding TV, it's a lot of words like "murder", etc. Depending on which TV shows you want to understand. If it's for reading t…
> While if you are living somewhere, it's really important to know a lot of basic supermarket items that you wouldn't prioritize for other usages. Why? Having spent a good amount of time living in Shanghai, I found it important to be able to understand menus. But there's no pressure to know the words for supermarket items; you can just go to the supermarket and look for the item. Otherwise your point is correct; all…
> you need to understand almost all of the words that appear in that document
I didn't learn English by reading vocabulary lists or dictionaries. Pretty much all was learned by context.
Re: How the words we teach English language learners changed
#56When I was in high school at a private school, I was surrounded by students who were religious but didn’t have much curiosity. I got into a debate with basically my whole class about how languages shift and change over time, and everyone was saying that languages stay the same and that they were all determined at the Tower of Babel. I used the examples of Latin to Spanish and English, or Old English to new English. I…
Huh, English has changed perceptibly over just my lifetime.
Re: How the words we teach English language learners changed
#57I tried to organize vocab by difficulty level for an English language-learning app once. It shocked me how there is absolutely no "right" answer. If you are teaching English for travel, then you're prioritizing a lot of stuff around bathrooms, transportation, menu items, etc. If it's for understanding TV, it's a lot of words like "murder", etc. Depending on which TV shows you want to understand. If it's for reading t…
I read years ago that: 1. TV vocabulary is 2,000 words 2. High school vocabulary is 10,000 words 3. College vocabulary is 30,000 words 4. English language has 1,000,000 words This is good news - you can be proficient in a foreign language by learning only 2,000 words!
Please someone tell me where to get those 1 million words in decreasing order of difficulty or ascending order of usage along with their meanings and insinuations
Re: How the words we teach English language learners changed
#58Earlier quoted context omitted.
As a native English speaker, keen feels like a very 1950s TV word. Don't know if that's actually true but feels like that way. I expect you're more likely to hear like cool today are some more contemporary word.
Brits still use the word somewhat frequently, though I haven’t bumped into many of them in the last ten years.
Keen is definitely a word but when used to describe a person it’s often a bit of a backhanded compliment… you don’t really want to be keen.
Saying "I'm keen to do x" or "he's keen to do y" is a fairly common normal usage but having said that, wouldn't normally be my first choice of language as a millennial, maybe does sound a bit old fashioned
Re: How the words we teach English language learners changed
#59Trying to read this article by paging through it with the spacebar is ... absolutely impossible. I'm not going to finger-scroll or down-arrow the whole thing. Don't break scrolling. Please.
A new fad I've seen more and more lately is removing the scroll bars. Arrgh.
Re: How the words we teach English language learners changed
#60When I was in high school at a private school, I was surrounded by students who were religious but didn’t have much curiosity. I got into a debate with basically my whole class about how languages shift and change over time, and everyone was saying that languages stay the same and that they were all determined at the Tower of Babel. I used the examples of Latin to Spanish and English, or Old English to new English. I…
Here’s one verse from the Bible itself that shows that language changed: 1 Samuel 9:9:
> (Formerly in Israel, when a man went to inquire of God, he said, “Come, let us go to the seer”; for he who is now called a prophet was formerly called a seer.)
I love that one because it translates so well into English because we also have an older and a newer word for close enough to the same thing. Though when saying older and newer I should note that the words “prophet” and “seer” have been used consistently since the very first English translation, Wycliffe’s in ~1382. Maybe it’s more the feel of the words. (In Bible Gateway’s catalogue of English translations, only the CEV doesn’t use both of those words: https://www.biblegateway.com/verse/en/1sam9.9>; I disqualify OJB as not English.)
That’s the only one I can think of off the top of my head that’s specifically about language, but there are plenty of others about changed customs over time, in Old and New Testaments.