
Quality of Words, Not Quantity, Is Crucial to Language Skills (2014) - CarolineW
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/17/us/quality-of-words-not-quantity-is-crucial-to-language-skills-study-finds.html?_r=1
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mrfusion
I've believed this for a long time. In fact I think this same idea would
drastically help adults learning a new language too.

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bl4ckdu5t
How so?

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

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gooserock
"Less is more."

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

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jacquesm
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.

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erikb
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?)"

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jacquesm
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!).

