One Way to Reduce My Language Learning Inefficiencies, Maybe?

From the Smithsonian Blog: Seeing Pictures of Home Can Make It Harder to Speak a Foreign Language

"If you’ve ever attempted to move to a foreign country and learn to speak the local language, you’re aware that successfully doing so is an enormous challenge.

But in our age of widely distributed Wi-Fi hotspots, free Skype video calls from one hemisphere to another and favorite TV shows available anywhere in the world over the web, speaking a foreign language may be more difficult than ever. 

That’s because, as new research shows, merely seeing faces and images that you associate with home could make speaking in a foreign tongue more difficult. In a study published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers from Columbia University and Singapore Management University found that for Chinese students who’d recently moved to the U.S., seeing several different types of China-related visual cues measurably reduced their fluency in English."

Lingua Francas

An image by reddit user /u/delugetheory.

"How Many Words Do I Need?"

I read a nice entry about reaching native fluency by Lang-8 user Lotokot, a Polish speaker studying English. Clicking on the text below will take you to the actual entry.

"This is the question asked by many language learners.When will I be able to talk fluently and to understand native speakers?  

Of, course the answer is uneasy.

There are two types of vocabulary: active and passive.Active vocabulary is a range of words you use in a conversation or in writing. 

Passive vocabulary is a range of words you can recognize reading a text or listening to the speaker. Average active vocabulary of English native speaker is about 20.000 words and there is about 40.000 words in his passive vocabulary. 

 I think that I reached the level of about 6.000-7.000 words knowing passively and about 3.000 words knowing actively.

I know it because I use “Learning with Texts” - program which is very helpful in reading texts.There are some statistics about number of words used in texts which I put into the program.Numbers looks frustratingly. 

Every thousand words to learn is a really hard work for me.Luckily 3.000 words provides coverage for around 95% of common English texts. 

Some of this few percent I don't know is possible to recognize from context, but these rare words very often are crucial in the texts I read or listen. 

I read somewhere that about 5.000 actively known words allow to speak the language quite fluently. 

When I reach this level (if this happens) I will be able to recognize probably about 10.000 words. 

However the way to be fluent as native speaker looks infinite.

I took some data to this post from the website http://www.lingholic.com"

水無月 みなづき June

So in school they teach you that 六月・ろくがつ　is June, but at the library in one of my schools the display board clearly says that it's 水無月. I saw it just today as I walked past on the way to class.

Ha, I thought. How silly. June is the rainy season. That kanji literally means water-none-month! PREPOSTEROUS! Go home, library display board. You are clearly drunk.

But I was intrigued so I later googled 水無月　意味　由来 and good ol' Gogen Yurai Jiten 語源由来辞典 pops up with this:

「水の無い月と書くが、水が無いわけではない。水無月の「無」は、神無月の「な」と同じく「の」にあたる連体助詞「な」で、「水の月」という意味である。」
"The kanji is written "Month Without Water", but this does not necessarily mean "Without Water". The “without" 「無」 in "Month Without Water" is like the "without" 「無」 in "Month Without God", an "attributive particle" similar to "of" 「の」, making the meaning "Month of Water"."

OK, library display board. I apologize.