The Diaries

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March 24, 2009

How Many Words Do You Know?

Posted by Kelly

Chen, my English language student, is very smart and a great learner! Sometimes she even stumps me with certain questions! For example, she asked me how many English words I know. Well, I have never stopped to count the number of words I actually know. (And even if I tried, could I remember all of them?)

Of course I turned to google to get to the bottom of this question. After consulting a few websites, I found that the average American knows about 20,000-30,000 words and a college graduate knows around 65,000 words.

I think these numbers scared my student. During our previous lesson she explained to me that even if she learns 20 new words each week, it would take her 35+ years until she knows 20,000 words. I tried explaining that learning a language shouldn’t be about how many words you know, but learning should be about communicating with others and understand others effectively. I’m not sure if this made sense to Chen, but hopefully it made her feel more comfortable learning English.

I always learn something new when talking with Chen about Chinese culture. She explained to me that her class and school form groups to enter a dubbing competition. Each group picks a 5-10 minute scene from a movie and then re-create the scene with elaborate costumes and perfect pronunciation that matches the actor or actress. The competition is very expensive to get into: The students have to pay for their costumes, have the movie “dubbed”, and lots of time is spent on perfecting their parts. Chen’s group picked a scene from Madagascar 2. Hopefully I can watch her group’s performance. The whole idea of this competition sounds very interesting!

Chen also explained that summer the students spend a week at a “boot camp” where they have to practice running and marching among other fitness activities. It sounds very intense and she said she dreads going every year. I would too!!!

This morning it was snowing here in Dalian’s Development Area. I thought I left the snow in Iowa, but nope! It found me! Today ended being an alright day. My air mattress came in the mail today!! How exciting! No more plywood for me! :)