We've been discussing vocabulary and its relation to fluency in Irish on another thread (Pronunciation Guide), so I thought I would start a new thread to avoid further cluttering the Pronunciation Guide thread.

I know that there are other factors that need to be considered when determining fluency in a language, but my first question is:

How many words must one know before being considered fluent in Irish?

In order to make an attempt at determining how many words I know in Irish, I came up with the following theory: Take a few pages from an Irish-English dictionary and determine how many words are known on those pages. Then divide the known words by the total words on those selected pages. This will give a percentage of words known for those pages. That, I theorize, is the percentage of words that one knows of all the Irish words. Of course I'm not considering esoteric words found in dictionaries devoted to technical fields or other specialized fields of study.

So I conducted my little experiment with Foclóir Póca and here are my results: I took two pages at random. For the page that starts with "cían," I knew 10 of the 65 words on that page. For the page starting with "mair," I knew 9 out of the 56 words on that page. So the total for both pages is (10+9)/(56+65) = 19/121, which is 15.7% of the total words sampled.

Although the dictionary claims to have over 30,000 words, let's just say there's exactly 30,000 words. That means I know 15.7% of 30,000 which is 4,710 words.

My next question is:

How many words exist in the Irish Language? Again, I wouldn't need to consider words in technical fields or other specialized subjects.

I'd love to hear input on these questions above and whether my approach to determining one's vocabulary has any merit.

Go raibh maith agaibh

There's no set number. For either question. There's more words been constantly added and taken away.

Má's Mac Léinn le Gaeilge thú, faigh freagra led thorthaí féin...

A Dhomhnaill,

I thought it would be obvious from my questions that I meant for an approximate number. It's like asking "How many people live in the USA? I think a reasonable person familiar with the question would answer "about 300 million." and not respond with "There's no set number...... there are more people constantly added and taken away." It just sounds like you don't know the answers and that's fine. Maybe somebody else knows?

Furthermore, am I correct in translating your other statement

quote:

Má's Mac Léinn le Gaeilge thú, faigh freagra led thorthaí féin...

as: "If you are a student of Irish, then get an answer by your own efforts?" If so, I don't see your point. Are you suggesting that I don't ask questions on this forum???

I think I like these questions...because I myself have often wondered if being fluent meant a mastery of the language or just a working knowledge of it?

For instance, if I only have a base vocabulary of a few hundred words, however, I can function in just about every situation one can encounter in the language...am I not fluent?

Personally, I feel that if the size of one's vocabulary is a factor in the fluency of a language...then there is not a fluent speaker of any language in this world. Because the average person only knows a small fraction of the words of their language...and that would be the base vocabulary needed for everyday situations...which if I am not mistaken was determined to be around 5000 words plus or minus technical terms...nerds are still fighting over this one...

Yeah they had a thread about naitive speakers vs. fluent speakers. Fluent people know something like 5,000 words and speakers know something like 50,000 words. PLEASE correct me if I'm wrong.

I think this is a great question because of the psychological aspect of it as well.

Telling someone that they need to learn 30,000 words to be fluent is really discouraging to a learner. But telling someone that they can be very functional with 5,000 words makes it seem much more attainable.

Also, simply having a number, even just a ballpark estimate, as a goal is helpful, too. It is a clear target.

Mac Léinn na Gaeilge, I think your theory is quite good...

A Mhic Léinn,

I'm not a statistician, but I don't think the experiment is valid until you do alot more sample pages. I'm sure there are lots of pages where you don't know any words at all and also alot of pages where you know every single word.
The experiment itself is fine, it just needs many more random samples.

As far as I know, in most languages 10,000 words would give a non-native speaker a good proficiency, ie fluency, but not native speaker level. Let me give an example: 1) There is a Russian Learner's dictionary, which gives 10,000 words by order of approx frequency. This is compiled by Nick Brown of London University SSEES. He explains in the forward that words not in the list occur less than 10 times per 1 million words. They include words like "woodpecker" - this is a word a native speaker would definitely know, but it is also a word that you could read English (or any other language) every day for 10 years and not come across. So according to him, words beyond the 10,000 limit are not worth learning for foreign learners. 2) The Chinese government has published a list of 8,840 words for foreign learners of Chinese to master in order to pass the Advanced Chinese Langage Test. A book I have gives another 1000 words or so because the author thought the 8840 was not quite enough. Once again, 10,000. 3) The Barrone series on French and Spanish vocabulary, organised by topic, both contain around 10,000 words each.

Now, the question of "what is a word" and "how many words does a language have" is quite complex. Languages like German for example have long words that run a lot of words together, but do they count as separate lexical items? There are languages like Chinese that are not inflected, so "zuo" means "do", but in English we have do, does, did, done, doing, and it would seem unfair to count them all as separate lexical items. I notice the Russian frequency dictionary just gives the infinitives, it does not count every inflected form as a separate lexical item. But anyway, suffice to say that 10,000 "headwords" would be a fluent level in most languages.

Now: what is the size of the vocabulary of native speakers? Although English is said to have the largest vocabulary, of course no individual English speaker can know them all, and it is probably true that the average native speaker of English and the average native speaker of say Irish have the same vocabulary size. I have read often that native speakers of languages, tend to have vocabularies, depending on their educational level of between 20,000 and 50,000 words. Only the most educated speakers would have the 50,000 words. There desperately needs to be a vocabulary book for Irish, organised by topic, setting out 10,000 words, such as are available for most languages. Once you have 10,000 words, you should know enough of any text to understand 95%, and then you could guess/easily pick up the additional vocabulary you meet, and can leisurely expand your vocabulary up to 20,000+ as you read Irish every day.

I made a small vocab of Irish myself based on Irish examination paper requirements (for Foundation level) - they gave a core list of some 1000 words. When I expanded it to include all combinations with prepositions (like adding "buin amach" because "buin" was on the list) I ended up with some 2000 words. Believe me - you will be able to conduct simple conversation on any topic with those. Of course the list has only couple bird-names, some 4-5 wild animals, but do you really need more in everyday situation?

So I presume I will be able to get along after mastering those.

And by the way - one of the biggest challenges in dialectal variation. You may know "dúsigh", but not recognise "múscail". Even if you know what "madra rua" means "sionnach" will remain mystery. So it is a good idea - to learn a couple of alternatives for the most widely used words not to be stunned by something like "déideadh" if "teinneas fiacla" is meant!

Roman,

Is it possible to get the Irish examination paper requirements core list of 1,000 or so words? Is it available on the Web?

Thanks,

Mike

A John a chara, thanks for your input. In regards to your idea above:

quote:

Personally, I feel that if the size of one's vocabulary is a factor in the fluency of a language...then there is not a fluent speaker of any language in this world.

I think that there must be some thresold that someone can be considered fluent based on the number of words in the person's vocabulary. Of course, there are other pre-requisites to fluency, such as understanding grammar, but, for example, if I only knew 10 words or 100 words of a language, I think that would preclude me from being considered fluent.

A O'Dywer a chara, in your quote above, repeated here:

quote:

Fluent people know something like 5,000 words and speakers know something like 50,000 words.

Are you referring to native speakers knowing something like 50,000 words? Forgive me for my grasp of what may be obvious in your posting above but I would appreciate your confirmation. Your 50,000 number is interesting to me, and seems to concur with David's remarks, which makes it further interesting. Not as it compares to any other language, including English, but it's a number that I think estimates something very important in understanding a language, that is, the size of one's vocabulary.

A Aaron, a chara,

Your point of encouraging someone to know 5,000 words is well taken. And then one can expand that vocabulary over time.

A Wee Falorie Man, a chara,

Yeah, you're right I should do more pages. But when you consider the two pages that I selected at random, the percentages of known words were approximately 15% and 16% respectively. So there may be a trend here with the percentages quite close. So where's a statistician when you need one? . I read somewhere that taking 5 samples gives one over a 99% confidence level. I wonder if that's true. I know some folks well versed in statistics so I'll ask them when I return to work after the fireworks. In the meantime, I will sample of few more pages and compute those pages' percentages and also the cumulative percentage.

I could always cheat and just use the single-line entry for "Y," which is the word yóyó, which I happen to know and gives me a score of 100%. Therefore, I can use statistics to my advantage and claim that I am 100% fluent in the Irish language (just kidding!)

A David a chara,

There are so many good points that you mention in your posting; I enjoyed reading all of them and they will be of great support in my latest adventure in this subject of vocabulary and how it relates to fluency.

A Róman a chara,

I see your point: There's a minimun number of words that one will want to learn in order to get by. But based on my yet-to-be validated experiment, I estimate that I know about 4,000 words. When I listen to Irish speakers, or read Irish books, there's very few paragraphs that I understand completely. It's not due to syntax or grammar; it's due soley to lack of a large enough vocabulary. I would like to read Irish books. I can read English books because over the years, just like most other English speaking persons, I developed a vocabulary that I think is in the tens of thousands. I'm no smarter than the average bear, I just think that the vast majority of English speakers know tens of thousands of words, including the word "woodpecker."

I appreciate all the input above, and would love to hear from others also. I think that the more serious we get about the Irish language, the more emphasis we would naturally put on vocabulary.

But when it comes to learning Irish, I know I can't be fluent knowing only 3 words, or just 300 words. It's my speculation that it's not just 3,000 words, but probably closer to 30,000 words. My next step is to get to the 10,000 word vocabulary level, which is based on David's posting above. I plan on periodically sampling random pages from the dictionary and assessing my vocabulary and hopeful improvement.

Another important factor that I have not included in this thread is how the words go together and that effect on fluency. That's another big challenge for me. But there's no doubt that I will persevere. I've been working on one piece of piano music by Fats Waller (One never knows, do' one, until one finds out, but then can be sure can one?) for about 10 years now, and I'm almost fluent with it, so I know that gradually over time I will become fluent in Irish and I think that vocabulary has a lot to do with how good I become at Irish.

Thanks for all the input and I hope to read more of your comments.

Go raibh maith agaibh!

Well said a chara,

Your experiment is certainly an interesting one as I mentioned in the other thread. It is true that you ought to perhaps take a wider sample in order to have a more accurate picture of the situation, being your vocabulary level. Its nice that grammar was finally mentioned because if one can't put all those words together correctly then one just isn't fluent.

Beir bua agus beannacht.

A Riona, a chara,

At the expense of boring everyone to near death, I've been focusing on just vocabulary in this thread. Of course, as you put it very well, there are many other things that are needed to achieve fluency.

I just made a discovery; when Foclóir Scoile and Foclóir Póca indicate over 30,000 words they're counting both the Irish and English headwords. I confirmed this by reading the prefixes of both dictionaries which indicate that there are 16,000 Irish headwords. I also counted the number of Irish words on one page and multiplied by the number of pages and came up with close to 16,000. So that means I know not 4700 words but about 2,400 words.

I've also repeated my experiment with a few other pages and got similar results percentage-wise.

My next step is to focus on one of the points that David Webb made above, that is, a topic-based vocabulary. I think I'll start looking at must-know verbs and then consider must-know nouns, based on particular topics. The one thing I find frustrating with dictionaries is that everything is in alphabetical order. Now I know this is a good thing when looking up a word. But I want to be able to go the other way, that is, have words organized by topic or perhaps importance and learn those words first.

Mac Léinn na Gaeilge,

I did the same thing that you did today and came up with a similar result. I estimated about 60 entries to a page in the English section in Foclóir Póca times 253 pages to get 15,180.

At a book sale yesterday, I picked up a copy of Merit Presents: The "Must" Words. It contains 6,000 essential English words that "are those words you need to know in order to understand and communicate - no matter what you do or how you live."

The introduction goes on to say that:

"One way to think about vocabulary is to divide it into three zones. The first contains a few thousand words that enable a person to understand and be understood on the simplest level."

"The second zone enables one to understand more fully and to communicate with precision and clarity. It is an ivaluable asset in personal relationships, occupational success and intellectual satisfaction."

"The third zone is not necessary in developing a solid, precise vocabulary. Important as many of these words may be, they are generally acquired as a result of extensive reading, specialized interests, or the requirements of a particular profession."

The words in this collection deal with the second zone.

The edition I picked up was published in 1979. A slightly different list might be done today. It goes without saying that words that were not in existence then and that most people would not bat at eye at today are not included.

Mike

A Mhíchíl, a chara,

Thanks for the information. I think I would place myself in the first zone, in that I could be understood at the simplest level. It's wishful thinking, but it would be nice if there was such a Merit-type resource available for the second zone applicable to Irish.

I agree; it would be great if there were such books for Irish. Or, if they do exist, if someone could direct us to them. For instance, there are books on the 1001 most useful words for Spanish and French.

I took a look at my copy of First Steps in Irish by the Christian Brothers to see about how many words they covered.

Here is what I found when checking the entries in the vocabulary in the back:

English / Irish

A ... 13 / 35
B ... 29 / 26
C ... 21 / 48
D ... 17 / 21
E ... 10 / 10
F ... 15 / 19
G ... 8 / 16
H ... 22 / 1
I ... 4 / 11
J ... 5 / 0
K ... 8 / 0
L ... 13 / 15
M ... 13 / 22
N ... 5 / 6
O ... 10 / 9
P ... 18 / 12
Q ... 2 / 0
R ... 7 / 4
S ... 40 / 45
T ... 34 / 30
U ... 5 / 8
V ... 0 / 0
W ... 24 / 0
X ... 0 / 0
Y ... 7 / 0
Z ... 0 / 0
Total ... 330 / 338

I also looked at The Hippocrene Children's Illustrated Irish Dictionary which has around 500 entries and is designed for children aged 5 - 10.

Even accounting for plurals and expressions, these two works would seem to represent a minimun level to build upon. Taking a look at these books supports the notion that it takes more than a thousand words to speak more than a rudimentary conversation.

It would be interesting to look at Buntús Cainte, Learning Irish, Teach Yourself Irish, etc, to count the vocabularies contained within them.

I have an old version of TYI, Copyright 1993, the one with the drawings / paintings on the front, including the horse and the pint of Guinness.

There are about 600 words listed in the index of TYI.

However, TYI has many additional words listed in the "vocabulary boxes" in the chapters. Many of these words are, inexplicably, not included in the index in the back. For example the box on page 244 has 7 words, but only 1 is in the back. In flipping through the book, and having used TYI in the past, I don't know if I could really give a good estimate of the actual number of words without counting each one. Many of the words in the boxes are actually phrases, and some of those words are listed in the back.

An suimiúil a Mhíchíl!

I now plan to ratchet up my vocabulary analysis and upgrade to Ó Dónaill's Foclóir Gaeilge-Béarla, since it's more comprehensive and contains idioms and phrases galore. I also estimate that Ó Dónaill's dictionary contains approximately 50,000 Irish headwords, as compared to the 16,000 headwords in Foclóir Scoile or Foclóir Póca.

I may also be taking this approach in the completely wrong direction. In other words, I may want to think in terms of my level of ignorance, rather than my (meager) level of knowledge. Since there's no need to dwell on what I already know, it's probably better to focus on what I don't know, and then minimize that ignorance.

I know for some this focus on ignorance rather than knowledge may appear as potentially damaging to one's self image, etc., but since my training is in engineering, it's second nature for me to be constantly aware of what we don't know about something in our designs. So, I think after getting started with my copy of Ó Dónaill's, I start computing my personal ignorance factor and work on reducing it to some acceptable level.

Thoughts and comments are greatly appreciated.

You're quite a scientific sort of person it seems. It is interesting the way that you are approaching all this, I never would have thought of it. It seems like a really benificial project for yourself because of your inclinations toward the scientific. Well done you.

Beir bua agus beannacht

a Mac Léinn Fachtóir Ainbhios,

Sílim go bhionn sé an rudaí gan fhios duit, agus más féidir é sna himthosca, b'fhéidir leat an croí a bhaint as duine. (help me here please Aonghus, Lughaidh, etc..)

I bet it's what you don't know that you don't know that keeps you up at night. Ignorance IS bliss.

Sílim gurbh iad na rudaí, nach eol duit nach eol duit iad, a thagann idir tú agus codladh na hoíche.

A óráid, ní thuigim baileach céard a bhí a rá agat i'd abairt, mar sin ní tig liom é a leasú!

Aguisín

"The trouble with people is not that they don't know but that they know so much that ain't so."

http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/j/josh_billings.html
Josh Billings

Go raibh maith agat a Aonghuis,
Is seanfhocal nua é. I was trying to say in the first sentence something along the lines of "I think it is the things that you don't know, and if the circumstances are possible, could scare the life out of ya."

I'm afraid I don't follow your english version either!

Hmm.. how else can I say this. "I think it is the things that you are not aware of that could scare the life out of you WHEN YOU FIND OUT ABOUT THEM. That is of course, if the unknown circumstances were possible and actually could occur."

=) I've confused myself now.

Ah.

Is iad na rudaí nach eol duit a scanródh an t-anam asat dá bhfaighfeá amach futhu; sin, ar ndóigh más amhlaidh go bhfeadfadh sé tarlú.

I bhfad ró chasta! Is fearr liom nath Billings.

Go raibh maith agat arís!
Tá claonadh agam aontú leat faoi sin. Tá sé ró-chasta.

Nach bhfuil "seanfhocal nua" saghas oxymoron?

You do need a larger sample size, a Mhic, but not much bigger. I did a quick estimate of the sample size needed by Mac Léinn na Gaeilge to be 95% confident that his estimate of the number of words he knew in Irish was within 50 words (plus or minus) of the actual value.

Assume	16,000	words in Foclóir Póca
Estimate 1	2,462	words known by MLnaG
Estimate 2	2,571	words known by MLnaG
Standard Deviation	78	words
Confidence Interval	50	words plus or minus
Confidence Level	95%
Z =	1.96
Necessary Sample Size =	9.28	pages

You only need to get a sample from about nine pages of An Gum's pocket dictionary. The two estimates above multiplied the percent of words you knew on the two pages times the 16,000 assumed words in your dictionary. We assume your sample is a set of independent, identically distributed random variables. This would give us a binomial distribution that eventually converges to the normal distribution. A Z score for the 95th percentile of the standard normal distribution is 1.96 to the right of population mean.

If you do another estimate for nine pages let me know. This will give me a better estimate of the standard deviation of the estimate, and hence, a better estimate of the necessary sample size. Perhaps more interesting, I could calculate the confidence level you do get with 9 samples.

(Message edited by lúcas on July 08, 2006)

A Mhic,

For the above calculation to be valid, the pages from your dictionary must be randomly chosen. I used the random number generator embeded in Microsoft Excel to create ten random numbers between p. 255 and p. 508 of Foclóir Póca, the first and last pages of the Irish section of the dictionary. So, if you want a statistically valid estimate of the size of your Irish vocabulary, test your word knowledge from the following pages of Foclóir Póca:

257	387
280	412
294	418
295	465
339	496

That gives me an idea. I did the estimate of your vocabulary on an Excel spreadsheet. I could easily make it a tool so anyone could estimate the size of their vocabulary and know the confidence level of the estimate. Anybody interested?

(Message edited by lúcas on July 08, 2006)

Another thought.

One could write an Excel front end to Easy Reader's on-line dictionary that would estimate the size of your vocabulary in near real time. It could iteratively calculate the confidence level after every random query of the database.

I do not know Microsoft Access as well as I know Excel, but I suspect you could write this application in Access VBA. It would be an interesting programming exercise, if anybody were interested in the results.

Lúcas, that sounds like a nifty feature to have for any language learning tool. It'd be an neat way to track your progress. Have you considered getting a patent?

quote:

Nach bhfuil "seanfhocal nua" saghas oxymoron?

Tá, is dóigh liom go bhfuil sé!

Nach bhfuil saghas oxymoron "seanfhocal nua" ?


TáSea, is dóigh liom go bhfuil sé gurbh ea!

---

Tá na focail seo ann leis:
nath
cora cainte
rá

Imagine: If you just learnt 3 words a day, then after only a year, you would know 1095 words!

Sure and I think we've found our own resident rocket scientist and mathematician/computer genious in Lucas. Not to say that the others of you aren't computer geniouses, I can think of a couple off hand.

Beir bua agus beannacht.

"Sure and"

What does that exactly mean? They don't say that in America.

I'd like to know what that means as well.

I say that when I want to put emphasis or leverage behind what I'm about to say, like "I think this is really important" or "Mark my words" or "I feel strongly about this" or wow, this is really exciting" one can figure out which one I mean from the context, though that sort of thing is harder when your reading than when you're listening.

Beir bua agus beannacht

grma!

A Riona, a chara,

Genius? Rocket scientist? Thanks, but I don't think so. I am just a math teacher and an erstwhile systems analyst, with barely enough math and programming skills to be dangerous. Anyway, I am putting together a todo list for July and August, and I was wondering if anyone might be interested in an application to estimate the size of their Irish vocabulary.

Óráid_thoirní is interested. Anybody else? Any other features you'd like to see? If you are interested, do you have a license for Easy Reader? If not, would you rather use Foclóir Póca instead?

(Message edited by lúcas on July 11, 2006)

A Lúcas, a chara,

I greatly appreciate your information above. I didn't have my Foclóir Póca at home this weekend so I wasn't able to get started on the statistics until yesterday. I got one page done - page 256, which resulted in 13 out of 56 known words, that is, 23 percent.

I plan on continuing with the pages you've listed above and am also very interested in your "todo" list.

On a separate but possibly related note, I'm looking to switch my focus to O'Donaill's Foclóir, which is a more comprehensive dictionary. That's the good news. The "bad" news is that my percentage of known words per page seems significantly lower. Sometimes I know but one word on a page. I say "bad" news because, as an engineer, I revel in what I don't know, since it means I have that much more of an adventure ahead of me - more things to learn and new phrases to meet.

So, go raibh míle maith agat freisin, and I will get back to this rocket science ASAP! :)

On another separate note, I can't find my name (Mac Léinn na Gaeilge) in either FP or O'Donaill. I hope I don't have to change my name. :)