CPOD, how many words have you taught us?

shout out to the Outer Limits!

哈哈！Sounds like a great plot for a 科幻片 or an Outer Limits episode.

Or maybe an Upper Intermediate lesson!

anything swimming around in your brain trying to improve your Chinese is likely to have unpleasant side effects, like turning one hand into a claw, and decreasing testosterone production down to zero.  But maybe that's worth it for fluency :)

哈哈！RJ, your mention of computers becoming self-aware prompts me to do a 4.22am (China time) wild veer off topic and say: ever heard of Ray Kurzweil? For years he's been predicting something pretty much just like that, only he thinks it's quite literally almost about to happen and he refers to it as 'the singularity'. Sceptics just call it 'the rapture for geeks'.

Anyway it'd be cool if he wasn't just talking 废话, all this struggle to learn Chinese could seem rather futile if in 15 years or so you could just have some kind of nanobot swim round your brain for 5 minutes then be totally fluent!

Yea, join the club. But I refuse to give up now. Im sure I will become fluent just after computers become self-aware and right before pigs fly and hell freezes over. 没办法:-)

in this case, i'll probably have four 5-year plans!

pretzellogic

I am a fan of five year plans. Someone like Pete who is very talented, studies formally full time, and lives in China, could be somewhat fluent in 5 years. Myself I have a 20 year plan. You do live in China so go for it. I think you could do it. There are poddies that have been at it for 10 or even 20 years. Tvan and Mark come to mind. Ask them how long it takes.

Hi Changye, I'm sure that most people would acknowledge that with diligent, daily study, you could be "fluent" in 5 years.  A 5 year plan is more realistic anyway.

Hi pretzellogic

The PRC government loves to employ so-called "Five-Year Plan". Do as Chinese do when learning Mandarin. 长城不是一天建成的！

PS. The PRC is now working on the 11th five-year plan (2006-2010).

PS2. The number of words needed for daily conversation is much smaller than that for reading.

zhenlijiang, of course you have a good idea.  I've thought of doing that.  I ended up buying lots of children's books with pinyin, English and Mandarin.  But my main problem is lack of time (family responsibilities and all). 

xiaophil, I suspect you're right.  I spent some time thinking about valid reasons why CPOD should spend a teeny bit of time counting words, but maybe the most compelling reason to the rest of the language universe is to have a cool fun fact.

changye, more food for thought.  The interesting news is that your input points to another metric, which might be that "fluency" is somewhere between 5200 - 8820 words-in-context. The useful metric is then that someone need to focus on learning 120 - 150 new "words-in-context" per week consistently if you wanted to be "fluent" in a year.  To me, that tells me its somewhat unrealistic for anyone but a fulltime student.  I think that's good (but discouraging) to know.

P/S. One thing I forgot to mention in my previous comment. Actually, the "8,822" words contains a lot of "one-character words" (= Chinese characters), such as 吃 (eat) and 睡 (sleep). It's a good news for HSK examinees!!

pretzellogic

Although I don't think knowing the number of words is as important to me as it is to you, I would be curious to know too.  It would be cool to open up the upper-intermediate lessons and see at the top 'total unique vocab words' and then underneath it 'average new words per lesson'.  Besides benifiting us learners, it could bolster CPod's image because I'm sure at this point the number is quite high.

Here are requirements for HSK(汉语水平考试).

.....characters/words
甲级....800.......1,033  (basic)
乙级....804.......2,018  (intermediate)
丙级....601.......2,202  (upper intermediate)
丁级....700.......3,569  (advanced)
总计.. 2,906.....8,822

I happen to have the word lists of 丙级 and 丁级. It seems to me that almost all the words on the lists are "must-know" (不可不知的) if you would like to (managed to) read Chinese newspapers.

Learning words is inseparable from learning Chinese characters. I think there is not much point in arguing which is more important, at least, before you've learned 2,000 ～ 3,000 characters.

Hi pretzellozic

Here is a list called "Modern Chinese Character Frequency List", which contains 9.933 characters. As far as I can see, you would probably get rather frustrated reading Chinese newspapers with only 2,000 characters.

http://lingua.mtsu.edu/chinese-computing/statistics/char/list.php?Which=MO

Ideally speaking, foreign learners of Mandarin should learn more than 3,000 characters for reading Chinese newspapers without much frustration. For the record, "现代汉语常用字表" (1988) contains 3,500 characters (level-1 2,500 + level2 1,000).

Exercise, or Sports, quite often.

pretzellogic, since you're in China and would easily be able to--to learn words (at Ele to Intermediate levels) how about getting one of those ‘多功能’dictionaries for grade-school children? The main entries are characters and for each entry they give you quite a number of words using that character; with a children's dictionary you know you're getting the most important ones--the building blocks--and nothing really obscure.
And I would imagine such a dictionary tells you how many words they're giving you. That could serve as a benchmark.

rjberki, of course you're right.  But i'm deciding to take a different approach to learning mandarin. Not radically different, but I wanted to get a better sense of the language terrain, in a sense.  I think that the question you just asked about how many Chinese words can I make with 2000 characters is a really good one, but I can only imagine how off-topic that might seem. 

I started using Tuttle's Learning Chinese Characters to learn characters explicitly.  I think it actually might be a really good way to learn and retain characters, but i'm noticing that Tuttle's weakness is that it teaches characters, not chinese words, if you try and read a newspaper or magazine, you recognize the character, but that actually doesn't tell you the word you might have read. It doesn't help that knowing that "yun4dong4" when you look at the characters means "transport, move", but you're suppost to interpret that as "exercise".

pretzellogic

how many words can you possibly make with 2000 characters considering all the one, two, and three character words that are possible? 20,000? 50,000? This is what you must "know" to read a newspaper. The fact that it involves 2000 charcters is just a side fact. It really tells you nothing about your ability to read. All they are saying is that 90+% of words needed to write a newspaper article can be built using 2000 characters. Granted you must know them, and I realize your original quest was to count words.

Hi Changye, I heard from my wife that you needed around 2000 characters to understand most of the text in many Chinese newspapers.  But of course, most is not all, and more characters you know is better in this case.

I would also like to know how many characters we've learned, but I really do suspect that it's more that CPOD has never counted.  I wasn't as serious a Chinese language student as I was now that i'm in China drowning in mandarin and finding it hard to catch my breath. Plus, I wasn't sure how to use all the cpod tools when I first subscribed, because if I did, I might have my own answers to the character question, similar to go_manly had in his first post.

Hi pretzellogic

Actually, what I want to know is the number of Chinese characters that have been used (not taught) in all the Chinesepod lessons uploaded in the past.

I hear that Chinese elementary school kids learn about 3,000 characters, and I think it's a good target number for us foreign learners of Mandarin.

With 3,000 of Hanzi, probably you virtually have no problem in reading Chinese newspapers in terms of "characters". For the record, Chinese character code (GB) level-1 contains 3,755 characters.

I guess that the number of hanzi you learn at Chinesepod is (much) less than 3,000, perhaps, since most Cpod lessens are for conversation, but not for reading.

Changye, I disagree that it's more interesting to know how many characters we've been taught, when CPODs approach to characters is even less explicit than CPODs inductive approach toward Chinese.  Plus, Jenny only really gives very few character by character definitions, so we would only learn (my estimate) less than 5% of the characters taught in any individual lesson, and likely less than 5% of the english words. 

In any event, I suspect the data doesn't readily/easily exist to know how many Chinese words have been taught, and this post can head toward obscurity. 

Pretzellogic

I hope John does give you an answer. I didnt mean to get in the way of that.

John???

Haha, tal, I'm glad I've managed to fake having "pretty good" character knowledge... :D

Pretzellogic, I'm not so fussed about quantifying language by the number of words I know. I have no idea how many words I know, but I certainly know the answer is "not enough". I didn't even know the word for "drink" until yesterday (as in 饮料，not 喝！） I am just wondering how long other people find it takes, particularly if they don't live in China. E.g. am I two years away? Four years? A lifetime?

RJ - transliteration is evil.

It might be more interesting to ask a question "how many characters have you taught us?". Is there anyone who counted them?

rjberki, the "hard-to-quantify" and "language-is-more-than-just-words" arguments are why nothing exists worldwide (at least through the google/bing/ask searches i've done) in this area.  I asked the question of CPOD, but my questions are usually the ones that get no answer from cpod at all.  Thanks for your post.

pretzellogic

I dont totally disagree with you but im not sure the benefit justifies the effort. Tal is right. There is a lot more to it than vocab. Mark for example still listens to newbie lessons as do I, to review, but also to catch any new usage patterns or colloquial expressions. Go_manly is building a dictionary so it is understandable that he is counting but I have no reason. Language is tough to quantify. Putting the words together quickly enough to speak and pronouncing them correctly is the more important part. I could memorize thousands of vocab words and still not have a clue how to speak Chinese. Fresh lessons allow me to use the same words in different contexts. This is valuable even if no new words are added. It not only cements the meaning in my mind but teaches me new ways to USE the words.

Another reason cpod might want to take this metric path is to address Henning and Sebire's issues in a systematic, quantifiable way. Without this kind of data, Henning's on his own in trying to decrease the amount time spent learning without losing what he has.  Sebire could be directed to certain exercises to possibly address her question.

I suspect that all of us in China that will eventually return to our home countries will face Henning's problem.  Without attempting to get this kind of information, we'll all end up forgetting a significant amount of language that we've all spent a lot of time and effort acquiring.

sebire - I think I've read that one needs to be able to effortlessly recognize and understand somewhere in the region of 3,000 to 4,000 汉字 to (even begin) to cope with reading newspapers and so on. But I thought your character knowledge was pretty good already?

As for the fluency issue, my impulse is to suggest that it can't necessarily be quantified by something just like number of words. I've taught Chinese students English who I would call very fluent, very able to express themselves and communicate, yet their vocabulary was not vast.

Real fluency comes with using the language to actually communicate, and regular practice doing just that, not notching up 500 lessons studied or deciding that having done so one now has a vocabulary of 1992 words or whatever.

go_manly, so 1992 words.  There are as of 10/18/09, 322 newbie and 267 elementary lessons for a total of 589 lessons. Not sure that your dictionary included all the newbie and ele lessons, but I think this is pretty interesting in itself.

go_manly, Thanks for your input.

sebire

Its a conspiracy I think. No matter how many characters and words I learn, they always seem to choose different ones for the news. The rabbit hole is very deep.

What I want to know is how long it's going to take me before I can even read news headlines. I go on BBC Chinese every now and then in the vague hope I will actually be able to spot a headline I can read. How many words is that? What's the CPod equivalent? Advanced? Media?

rjberki, fair question, and thanks for not taking this thread down the "grammar is needed, not just words" path. My take is that this will quantify what we're learning.  My guts tell me that you're familiar with that saying, "if you're not measuring, you're not managing". I want to start quantifying what is being learned for 2 reasons:

1) I can then start estimating how far cpod has taken me to "fluency".  There's no metric around how many words one needs to be fluent, but that doesn't mean that one shouldn't be created. On the contrary, I think it forces the language community to start giving us real tools to learn efficiently and effectively. 

2)I notice that we get lots of cpod lessons on topics over and over.  Food, travel, love are a few search terms that will bring up almost 100 lessons.  Village or farmer are a few search terms that will bring up 5-10 lessons, but then on further inspection, I find that lessons like this

http://s3.amazonaws.com/chinesepod.com/0498/c611cc9f0dfe1171fa8285f88f10c396aa1f9c89/pdf/chinesepod_C0498.pdf. 

don't actually refer to a village in the text/pdf.  It can be argued what fluency is, but there should be some basic set of words that you should know in order to start communicating.  This is something that I, a language amateur, would expect of pros.  I do note that the language community bags out on this part of the discussion for partially understandable reasons (like, "what is a word?" is "ahhuh" a word, and so on).

Hi Bob

Just having some fun with you, hope you dont mind. Actually I do like the beach. Who doesnt? I think you hit the nail on the head when you said

"the size of my vocabulary is no indication of my ability to put that vocabulary into meaningful sentences"

On the other hand I just asked my wife if size matters and she said yes. So, there you go.

rjberki

My plans are still the same. I just changed my mind and thought it was a bit silly changing my name when this is how I am recognised. Nice twist on my name though - I take it the beach doesn't appeal to you as it does me.

Interestingly, a couple of weeks ago, I took a cab here in Sydney, and the cab driver was a Mandarin speaker. (We seem to go through phases here - ten years ago they were all Indian and Middle Eastern - now they are all working in supermarkets and service stations [gas stations for the yanks amongst you] - at present there are a large number of Chinese driving cabs.) I asked him to test me out with some Mandarin. He first wanted to know how many words I knew - 500, 1000, 2000? I had no idea. I guess some people can gauge your speaking ability by the size of your vocabulary. What I find though with Mandarin (unlike when I was learning German) is that the size of my vocabulary is no indication of my ability to put that vocabulary into meaningful sentences.

Surely you mean shark biscuit RJ? Sounds pretty cool to me! 哈哈！

Anyway when a person gets fed up learning words, counting them might be the way to go! Self-image and all that.

go_manly

I thought you changed your name to "shark bisquit" or something? No longer planning on spending all that study time on the beach? 

pretzellogic

I really dont see how counting words is going to help me or cpod. If they vary the subject (and they do) and they use unrestricted natural colloquial speech (and they do) then you will get what you need. Wont you?

All I can say is my Newbie/Elementary dictionary has 1992 different words from the dialogs. I have only looked at 9 Intermediate lessons, and there are 164 new words so far.