Quality of Words, Not Quantity, Is Crucial to Language Skills (2014) | Hacker News Reader

Quality of Words, Not Quantity, Is Crucial to Language Skills (2014)

nytimes.com

15 pointsCarolineW10 comments

I've believed this for a long time. In fact I think this same idea would drastically help adults learning a new language too.

How so?

Understanding concepts will always be more valuable than a superficial familiarity with the content.

"Less is more."

To the contrary, a bigger vocabulary expansively used is more.

It is much easier to make significant headway by understanding a smaller vocabulary well rather than a larger one relatively poor. It will require some ingenuity but usually a description of the word you're looking for will prompt the 'natives' to supply the missing word, which you can then add to your vocabulary in that particular context. It's a bootstrapping process. Knowing complicated words and terms before you've mastered the simpler ones is in my opinion a wrong allocation of resources.

Here's a quote from you: "Knowing complicated words and terms before you've mastered the simpler ones is in my opinion a wrong allocation of resources."

Now look at it again only from the point of view of someone who knows just a few common words (but knows these well): "Know### (maybe the past?) ### words and ### before you've (you have? maybe) master## (what's that slavery stuff about?) the simpler ones is in my opinion a wrong ### of ###. (a wrong what?)"

I'm no longer a beginner in English. But once upon a time I was (and in Polish, French and German too). English is just about a second native language to me now.

One other trick I've found very useful in finding out the meaning of words is to reduce them to something even less than a stem, simply drop all the vowels and pretend all the d,t and v,w and c/s pairs and so on are equal. If you know a word in another language of the same family chances are that you can figure out what a word means. It's surprising how often that method yields results (and some spectacular failures as well!).

Its is indeed a bootstrapping process which is why it is better to know what you call more "complicated" words "poorly" - at least you are aware of them and one does not need to know the dictionary definition of a word to use it.

I was taught to read with a dictionary beside me so that I could look up any word I did not know the meaning of. Do it long enough and you can build up quite a vocabulary.

These two comments are ironically accurate self-descriptors.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com