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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

#141

Post by Xorakios »

mmooss wrote: post #119
PsylentKnight wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And animals have evolved perceptibly in my lifetime, they still don't believe in evolution. I grew up in a culture of Jesus Freaks. The way they place faith above evidence and logic is so disturbing and irritating to me

> animals have evolved perceptibly in my lifetime ? Which animals? Evolution requires orders of magnitude longer time spans. I doubt we're perceptibly different (in any genetic sense) than Homo sapiens from 200,000 years ago. I'm not sure the change from that point is perceptible. > Jesus Freaks That people accept that language on HN would seem to tell us a lot about the population here.

"perceptibly" perhaps not so much? blue eyes are definitely newer.

pale skin perhaps only after agriculture replaced meat eating for D3 production.

despite what Sliders intimated, Europeans are more Cro-mag than 'thals ;)

Re: How the words we teach English language learners changed

#142

Post by Smoosh »

crazygringo wrote: post #16

I 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 see another problem being that the same words can have different meaning or intent in different contexts and particularly with different intonations and facial expressions.

Re: How the words we teach English language learners changed

#143

Post by TRiG_Ireland »

KPGv2 wrote: post #111
TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Different context. One social register is extreme understatement, which may be laden with passive aggression, but could also be approving. "That's not a bad idea" is likely to mean "Good idea, let's do it, or at least consider it seriously." But "Interesting idea" is likely to mean "You're an idiot." This is more corporate/middle class. There's also a working class register which is very direct and sweary, and extrem…

> Americans don't seem to do understatement. Brits say this all the time because they assume we talk like people in movies and interviews do (or they interpret corporate-speak as how Americans actually talk). We use understatement plenty. In fact, the "interesting idea" understatement? I wouldn't even clock it as British because we use that in the US, too. I would say it is a classic example we use here of how you po…

I think that it's often true that Americans don't get British sarcasm. And it's similarly often true that British people don't get American sarcasm.

Re: How the words we teach English language learners changed

#144

Post by WalterBright »

mmooss wrote: post #119
PsylentKnight wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And animals have evolved perceptibly in my lifetime, they still don't believe in evolution. I grew up in a culture of Jesus Freaks. The way they place faith above evidence and logic is so disturbing and irritating to me

> animals have evolved perceptibly in my lifetime ? Which animals? Evolution requires orders of magnitude longer time spans. I doubt we're perceptibly different (in any genetic sense) than Homo sapiens from 200,000 years ago. I'm not sure the change from that point is perceptible. > Jesus Freaks That people accept that language on HN would seem to tell us a lot about the population here.

> I doubt we're perceptibly different

If you're around various ethnic groups long enough, you'll start recognizing which group a person you are unacquainted with belongs to. And I don't mean the obvious differences.

Sort of like "My Fair Lady" where the linguist could tell where a person came from by the way they spoke.

Re: How the words we teach English language learners changed

#145

Post by fluoridation »

jonahx wrote: post #85
dadie wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Americans tend to overload the same word with a different meaning depending on the context. They also often resort to idioms and cultural references. This is not specific to "Americans". Learn any language and you will have the same impression, and experience the same gulf between textbook usage and everyday usage.

As a non-native speaker, English does have (what I think is) a rather unique phenomenon where the same verb can be used to express different shades of meaning (or sometimes wildly different meanings) depending on whether or which proposition is attached to it. "To step" means to take a step, but "to step up" means to confront something. When you "talk to" someone you converse with them, and when you "talk at" someone you monologue at them.

Re: How the words we teach English language learners changed

#146

Post by crazygringo »

WalterBright wrote: post #53
crazygringo wrote: post #16

I 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!

Those numbers aren't right.

I don't know what "TV vocabulary" is even supposed to mean... but even if you're talking about just sitcoms it's way more than 2,000 words. You cannot be proficient in a foreign language with just 2,000 words. That's generally considered around the "basic" level of language learning classes, before intermediate and advanced.

A fluent adult generally knows 15,000-30,000 words.

The English language really only has 50,000-60,000 words, depending on how you count them. I have no idea where you got the "million" figure but it's nonsensical. Like it's not even a matter of how many archaic or technical terms you include, it's off by a full order of magnitude no matter what.

Re: How the words we teach English language learners changed

#147

Post by fluoridation »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #20
crazygringo wrote: post #16

I 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…

>(2) Word frequencies are still the wrong concept. If you want to understand a particular document, you need to understand almost all of the words that appear in that document. (You'll be able to learn some of them from their use in the document.) If you decide to learn a list of "frequent" words, you're unlikely to be able to understand more than a couple of isolated sentences in any given document.

The point of learning by generic word frequency is to optimize study, not to attempt to brute-force understanding. If you have a document in front of you, would you rather have to look up every word in a dictionary, or only every other word?

Re: How the words we teach English language learners changed

#148

Post by raincole »

mmooss wrote: post #119
PsylentKnight wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And animals have evolved perceptibly in my lifetime, they still don't believe in evolution. I grew up in a culture of Jesus Freaks. The way they place faith above evidence and logic is so disturbing and irritating to me

> animals have evolved perceptibly in my lifetime ? Which animals? Evolution requires orders of magnitude longer time spans. I doubt we're perceptibly different (in any genetic sense) than Homo sapiens from 200,000 years ago. I'm not sure the change from that point is perceptible. > Jesus Freaks That people accept that language on HN would seem to tell us a lot about the population here.

> ? Which animals? Evolution requires orders of magnitude longer time spans

Acktually (push glasses) selective breeding is a form of evolution and it takes only a few generations to see perceptible changes.

Re: How the words we teach English language learners changed

#149

Post by ggm »

I love that English is the lingua franca and that the phrase "lingua franca" is well understood in English, enough to be legitemately "an english word" (so to speak).

The whole "we have a word for that" carries the seeds of it's own destruction. English does too: it's the same word.

Re: How the words we teach English language learners changed

#150

Post by zarzavat »

> But also: apple didn’t make the new list. Neither did fork, soap, umbrella or leaf, for example. It’s not that these things vanished from everyday life, but many hands-on words became less central to the core vocabulary.

I do not understand what this article is about. Clearly anyone learning English needs to know the word "fork".

The article is essentially saying that the new list is more advanced than the old list. Okay? That's not interesting.

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