thurd Wrote:崩御

Oh em gee. Since I first learnt this word yesterday, I have encountered it about 5 times already...Seriously why does that always seem to happen?

Apparently that's been dubbed ‘The Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon’ and related by Wikipedia to the ‘recency effect’, which this paper mentions when speaking of spaced retrieval as an explanation (via ‘primary memory’) for why an initial delay of retrieval is most effective.

nest0r Wrote:Apparently that's been dubbed ‘The Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon’ and related by Wikipedia to the ‘recency effect’, which this paper mentions when speaking of spaced retrieval as an explanation (via ‘primary memory’) for why an initial delay of retrieval is most effective.

Yet again, I'm well satisfied with the time spent reading a thread because nest0r said/linked something interesting. Thanks.

"Thus, we can estimate that Shakespeare knew approximately 66,534 words".

I laughed when I read this nonsense. How can anyone use the word 'approximately' followed by '66,534' with an implied accuracy of 1 or 2?

Putting aside the rationale for the number, it would be in order to say 'approximately 65,000 words' or similar.

I laugh similarly when reading reports in Australian or British press of aviation incidents. The original report will say something like 'a rapid descent from 30,000 feet'. The dopey sub-editors will change that to 'a rapid descent from 9,144 metres', implying that altitude can be measured to a metre or so. And forgetting that the original 30,000 feet is only accurate to a couple of hundred feet or so.

@overture - No problem! ;p

I don't put much stock in the analyses people do of Shakespeare, or estimations of vocabulary overall, but I like David Crystal for the most part and respect a lot of their work, so: “Well, it depends on the person's education. People who read a lot know more words than people who don't. Most people have an active vocabulary of around 50,000 words and a passive vocabulary about a third larger.” - http://books.google.com/books?id=C1BNmYhs87cC

Crystal has been cited as having made other estimates as well, like 60,000 active and 75,000 passive, I think for graduate level vocabularies.

Different languages have different amounts of words too. I'm pretty sure English has significantly more words than Japanese. They come from all sorts of other languages and stuff, and we have like 30 different adjectives describing the same thing sometimes. Japanese seems more organized. Like in English if you wanted more emphasis, you might change the adjective to a different word (gigantic instead of big), but in Japanese you might use the same one along with another word that implys heavier emphasis. Just an example I guess, I'm not fluent so it's not like I can say this as a general fact. But you gotta take stuff like that into account too!

Kuma01 Wrote:I think it's ridiculous to keep memorizing words after you've reached a certain level. Once you're able to read most things new vocabulary should come from immersion, not from obsessively striving to reach a magic number of words in your SrS.

But I really want to reach that magic number that I don't know yet..