Bismillah alhamdulillah.
Language learning is a continuous process and without realising it by the time a student reaches university they have a very wide ranging vocabulary. One of the major problems that learners of a new language face is vocabulary acquisition, getting new words into their receptive and expressive memories. There is an interesting PhD Research proposal which looks at this problem and offers some interesting ideas and vocabulary acquisition strategies.
The good news is that by just knowing 2000 word families a person will understand 80% of the words he reads. The bad news is that the 20% of words that remain are the key to understanding the meaning. Also guessing the meaning of the new words from context is not possible when you only know 80% of the words. The silver lining to the cloud is that if you understand 95% of the words then you can have a much better chance of successfully guessing the meaning of the remaining words. You can achieve this by having a vocabulary of 3000 word families. Though a guess it is probably not a bad estimate that this applies equally to knowledge of Arabic roots.
Though quite long it is a valuable read for anyone interested in the topic or struggling to learn those elusive 20,000 word families that will give university level proficiency in a target language!
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Assalamaleikum Wa Rahmatulah
ReplyDeleteDid you ever find a decent word list so you could systematically work your way through memorising the words?
I remember when doing GCSE languages that there were GCSE vocab lists which we memorised week in week out for years - I found one for Arabic which was reasonable.
In Arabic, the vocab lists I have found which seem to be reasonable are Obeikan's 3 volume children's picture dictionaries which have about 2000 words in them (650 words each) and are broken down by topic area and have pictures which always helps in association.
Muntada/al-Jumuah published a dictionary of Islamic Word and Expressions of about 1800 words which would help to fill a gap in your vocab, considering that reading Islamic books is the main reason people study in the West and acquiring these into your passive vocab would help. Though these are in alphabetical order so you literally would be memorising a dictionary.
Hans-Wehr has I think 2000 odd words in their appendix, but these seemed to be randomly listed and thus harder to acquire.
There are a few English for Arabic speakers - like Berlitz which have a reasonable set of modern arabic vocab lists, and of course the 80% of the word's in the Qur'an 16 page PDF which seems to float around the internet.
Have you found any other decent resources?
I have not found any good frequency lists but there is a nice book available at www.islambasics.com which has the entire vocab of the Quran. The link is here. It is called The Easy Dictionary of the Qur’aan by Shaikh AbdulKarim Parekh
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