Word Count, Graded Readers and Fluency Wortzahl, abgestufte Leser und flüssiges Lesen Recuento de palabras, lecturas graduadas y fluidez Décompte des mots, lectures graduées et fluidité 単語数、グレーデッド・リーダー、流暢さ 단어 수, 등급이 매겨진 독자 및 유창성 Contagem de palavras, leitores graduados e fluência Kelime Sayısı, Dereceli Okuyucular ve Akıcılık 字數統計、分級讀者和流利程度

Hi there, Steve Kaufmann here. Olá, fala Steve Kaufmann.

I'm sitting in Palm Springs, California. Ich sitze in Palm Springs, Kalifornien. Estou em Palm Springs, na Califórnia. The sun is beating down on me. Die Sonne brennt auf mich herab. O sol está a bater em mim. I'm going to talk about word count, graded readers and how many words we need to speak. Ich werde über Wortzahl, bewertete Leser und wie viele Wörter wir sprechen müssen sprechen. Vou falar sobre a contagem de palavras, leitores graduados e quantas palavras precisamos para falar. It all has to do with this whole issue of word count. Es hat alles mit dieser ganzen Frage der Wortzahl zu tun. Tudo tem a ver com esta questão da contagem de palavras.

My conclusions, because some of you want the conclusions upfront, is that to speak a language well you need lots of words. Meine Schlussfolgerungen, weil einige von Ihnen die Schlussfolgerungen im Voraus wollen, sind, dass man viele Wörter braucht, um eine Sprache gut zu sprechen. My conclusions, because some of you want the conclusions upfront, is that to speak a language well you need lots of words. As minhas conclusões, porque alguns de vós querem as conclusões à partida, são que para falar bem uma língua são necessárias muitas palavras.

If you just want to exchange pleasantries, you can do this with far fewer words. Se quiser apenas trocar cumprimentos, pode fazê-lo com muito menos palavras. Fluency means speaking a language well; therefore, fluency means knowing a lot of words. Fließend bedeutet, eine Sprache gut zu sprechen; Daher bedeutet fließend, viele Wörter zu kennen. Fluência significa falar bem uma língua; por conseguinte, fluência significa conhecer muitas palavras. Insofar as graded readers and the significance of word count, I find, personally, that I like to work, obviously, with easy, call it sheltered material, for the first few months, but I like to move into meaningful authentic content that's of interest to me as soon as possible. No que diz respeito aos leitores classificados e ao significado da contagem de palavras, pessoalmente, acho que gosto de trabalhar, obviamente, com material fácil, digamos, protegido, durante os primeiros meses, mas gosto de passar para conteúdos autênticos e significativos que sejam do meu interesse o mais rapidamente possível. This depends on the language, but typically within a few months. Depende da língua, mas, normalmente, o prazo é de alguns meses. Those are the conclusions. São estas as conclusões. Now let's get into the details. Vamos agora entrar nos pormenores.

First of all, you'll notice that I have what looks like dirt underneath my nose.

This is because after I left Vancouver a group of people at LingQ decided that they would participate in this Movember Movement, which is sort of a promotion to raise money for men's health issues, prostate cancer or whatever, and that people involved in this movement will grow a moustache and will be raising money. Isto porque, depois de eu ter saído de Vancouver, um grupo de pessoas do LingQ decidiu participar no Movember Movement, que é uma espécie de promoção para angariar dinheiro para problemas de saúde masculina, cancro da próstata ou qualquer outro, e que as pessoas envolvidas neste movimento vão deixar crescer o bigode e angariar dinheiro.

So at LingQ we've got a team together.

We've contributed some money, we're trying to raise money and we're all growing a moustache. I got a bit of a late start in this, but can assure you that Alex and Nav, in particular Mark, they're all sporting much more significant growth under their nose than I have so far. Comecei um pouco tarde, mas posso garantir que o Alex e o Nav, em particular o Mark, estão todos a ter um crescimento muito mais significativo debaixo do nariz do que eu até agora. Anyway, I'm working here outside without my normal microphone; I hope the sound quality is okay. De qualquer forma, estou a trabalhar aqui fora sem o meu microfone normal; espero que a qualidade do som seja boa.

Now, the subject of word count comes up all the time. O tema da contagem de palavras está sempre a surgir.

We had a thread at our forum at LingQ, someone was looking for more graded material for Russian on our site. We have a vast library of Russian content, lots of beginner material, lots of intermediate material. We recently obtained permission from Echo of Moscow to put all of their material on our website. Wir haben kürzlich die Erlaubnis von Echo of Moscow erhalten, ihr gesamtes Material auf unserer Website zu veröffentlichen. I mean you won't find, not in 10 books, more material than we have at LingQ. Quero dizer que não encontrará, nem em 10 livros, mais material do que aquele que temos no LingQ. Yet, still, this one learner said there's a gap between the sort of intermediate and upper intermediate. No entanto, este aluno disse que existe um fosso entre o tipo de intermediário e o intermediário superior. That the statistics at LingQ show him there are over 25% new words in some of the content that he would like to study, can we please fill the gap. Que as estatísticas do LingQ lhe mostram que há mais de 25% de palavras novas em alguns dos conteúdos que ele gostaria de estudar, podemos, por favor, preencher a lacuna. This got me thinking. Then other people commented about how nice it is to have graded readers and so forth and so on. Depois, outras pessoas comentaram como é bom ter leitores graduados, etc., etc.

Personally, I think it is unrealistic to expect that you can start with very simple material and then very gradually and seamlessly work your way through a lot of graded readers, sheltered text, embedded text and always deal with a very small number of new words.

I feel if you did that it would take forever to learn the number of words that you need. Penso que, se o fizer, demorará uma eternidade a aprender o número de palavras de que necessita. That's why, personally, I'm driven more by my interest in the subject matter and if there's 30-40% new words so be it, I work my way through it. É por isso que, pessoalmente, sou mais motivado pelo meu interesse no assunto e, se houver 30-40% de palavras novas, que assim seja. I do vary this more difficult content with easier stuff, just to give myself a bit of a relief, but there are a few things to remember. Eu vario este conteúdo mais difícil com coisas mais fáceis, só para me aliviar um pouco, mas há algumas coisas a ter em conta.

Yes, it's true that a relatively small number of words accounts for 70-80% of the content in any language.

I'm reading a book right now by Steven Pinker about the decline of violence in our society and he mentions in there that five words -- I think it was ‘a', ‘the', ‘be', ‘of' and maybe ‘it' or something -- accounts for like 20% of all content in English, but you can't say very much with those five words. The problem when you have the top 1,000 words is that it might account for 75% of any content, but you don't understand much with only those words. So I believe you need quite a large vocabulary.

The good thing about the fact that the most frequent words account for 70-80% of any content is that as you're pursuing content of interest and acquiring new words at a rather quicker pace, using LinqQ, for example, where you have online dictionaries and words and phrases saved into a database for review and all the rest of it, the advantage is that as you're pursuing these new words and I'm always motivated at LingQ to increase my known word count, that's kind of driving me, it forces me to regularly review the most frequent 70% so you're always going to get enough exposure to those most frequent words. O bom do facto de as palavras mais frequentes representarem 70-80% de qualquer conteúdo é que, à medida que se procura conteúdo de interesse e se adquirem novas palavras a um ritmo mais rápido, utilizando o LinqQ, por exemplo, onde se tem dicionários online e palavras e frases guardadas numa base de dados para revisão e tudo o resto, a vantagem é que, à medida que vai procurando novas palavras - e eu estou sempre motivado no LingQ para aumentar o meu número de palavras conhecidas, o que me motiva -, isso obriga-me a rever regularmente os 70% mais frequentes, para que tenha sempre exposição suficiente a essas palavras mais frequentes.

I guess the conclusion is, for those people who enjoy graded or sheltered reading, by all means, do what you like to do, but I don't think it's a condition of learning. Acho que a conclusão é que, para as pessoas que gostam de leitura graduada ou protegida, façam o que quiserem, mas não acho que seja uma condição de aprendizagem.

I don't think it's necessary. Personally, if I'm going to read Tolstoy, I don't want to read a dumbed-down, simplified version of Anna Karenina in 20 pages before attacking the full version, but some people do. Pessoalmente, se vou ler Tolstoi, não quero ler uma versão simplificada de Anna Karenina em 20 páginas antes de atacar a versão completa, mas há quem o faça. I don't have anything against those people. I'm just saying that we should do what we want to, but it shouldn't be held out as a condition that you must have these graded readers, you must always have no more than 10% unknown words. This may be true when you're reading away from the computer, but typically, I build up my vocabulary very much using LingQ on the computer, on my iPad, in which case after a few months I'm hitting authentic material. Isto pode ser verdade quando se está a ler longe do computador, mas, normalmente, eu construo o meu vocabulário muito usando o LingQ no computador, no meu iPad, e, nesse caso, ao fim de alguns meses, estou a atingir material autêntico.

A related question, sort of the converse of this, is you often hear the statement that with a very small number of words you can actually say a lot. Uma questão relacionada, mais ou menos o inverso disto, é que se ouve frequentemente a afirmação de que com um número muito pequeno de palavras se pode dizer muito.

It may be true that with a limited vocabulary, that is active vocabulary, you can express quite a few thoughts. É verdade que com um vocabulário limitado, ou seja, um vocabulário ativo, é possível exprimir muitos pensamentos. However, if you're in a meaningful conversation with people, what matters sometimes even more is your ability to understand what they are saying and in order to understand what other people are saying, native speakers, you actually need a large vocabulary.

I can prove this at LingQ.

If I go in and grab from our library a transcript of a conversation in whatever language I'm studying, there will always be words there, important words to the conversation, that I don't understand, that are new to me. So we do need a large vocabulary, a passive vocabulary in my opinion, as sort of a defensive measure in order to be able to understand people in conversations and, of course, movies, books, newspapers, you name it. So I am in favor of working to acquire a large vocabulary. I think the suggestion that we only need a small vocabulary in order to be fluent, I don't agree.

Then you get these people who say well, the definition of fluent is vague and we don't know what it means.

Again, I don't agree. I think we know very well what fluent means. Fluent means speaking the language well, proficiently. Now, you can say I speak a certain language quite well, fairly well. That modifies the ‘well' so it's less than well. Isso modifica o "bem", por isso é menos do que bem. So you can be quite fluent, fairly fluent, but if you say I'm fluent it means I speak the language well. In order to say that you are fluent, in my view, you need a large vocabulary. What's more, you not only need a large vocabulary, you need a lot of exposure to the culture, the language, the people, to the environment surrounding the language. All of this takes quite a long time.

So to achieve fluency, in other words to speak the language well, takes a long time and requires quite a large vocabulary.

In my view, the shortest path to acquiring that vocabulary is not staying in sheltered reading, graded readers and other sort of classroom or specially-prepared-for-the-learner type of content. After a few months, I feel you have to challenge yourself with the real thing. Nach ein paar Monaten habe ich das Gefühl, dass Sie sich mit der Realität herausfordern müssen. The same as is the case with emersion. Dasselbe gilt für die Emersion. Talking to a teacher in a classroom is not emersion. Emersion is getting out there and talking to real people who are going to use a wide range of vocabulary and you need to have as much of that as possible. Emersion geht raus und spricht mit echten Menschen, die ein breites Vokabular verwenden werden, und Sie müssen so viel wie möglich davon haben.

So I've kind of ranged around this subject dealing with word count, graded readers, embedded reading, how many words you need to be fluent, what fluency means, but it's all part of the same theme. Also habe ich mich irgendwie um dieses Thema herum bewegt und mich mit Wortzahl, benoteten Lesern, eingebettetem Lesen, wie viele Wörter Sie brauchen, um fließend zu sprechen, was fließend bedeutet, aber es ist alles Teil desselben Themas. Por isso, tenho andado um pouco à volta deste assunto, abordando a contagem de palavras, os leitores graduados, a leitura integrada, quantas palavras são necessárias para ser fluente, o que significa fluência, mas tudo faz parte do mesmo tema.

The language that you are learning is rich and vibrant. There is no shortcut to fluency or being comfortable in this new environment. Não existe um atalho para a fluência ou para se sentir confortável neste novo ambiente. You have to put in the time and you have to make a certain amount of effort and, at times, that effort might mean stepping out of your comfort zone and moving into the real language environment.

With that, if I can move my cursor to where the stop on this thing is. Damit, wenn ich meinen Cursor dorthin bewegen kann, wo das Ding aufhört. Com isso, se eu puder mover o meu cursor para onde está a paragem desta coisa.

This is a problem. Now, where am I? It's kind of warm here, there's more light outside than inside, but I cannot find my cursor and so you'll have to bear with me. Es ist ziemlich warm hier, draußen ist mehr Licht als drinnen, aber ich kann meinen Cursor nicht finden, also musst du mich ertragen. Aqui está um pouco quente, há mais luz lá fora do que cá dentro, mas não consigo encontrar o meu cursor e, por isso, vão ter de me aturar. I might cut this off at the end, but where did that stupid cursor go.