unfamiliar words in your native language

[Lost_Soul]

Hi !

I address all native speakers (the language doesnt matter) in this post.
Could you tell me how often you encounter words which you 1. havent heard before 2. have heard before but have no idea of their meaning while reading books, newspapers, internet sites and so on...

My mother tongue is Russian and I did a lot of reading in the past and maybe ran into a dosen of strange words to me (in my whole life), but I know an American guy who told me once that he had come across 2-3 or more unknown words in each page while reading a book written by an English writer (he's a native american English speaker). That really shocked me. Does this mean that English has a lot bigger dictionary than Russian?

[Jamie (K)]

Russian and English are reputed to have the two largest vocabularies of the world's languages, so that American's problem wasn't that the English vocabulary is so big (although it is big).

If this American was in his 20s or early 30s, the most probable reason is the deterioration of basic education in many American school districts. He was probably never taught much vocabulary in school. When I was 9 years old, in the mid-1960s, our spelling book in school explained to us all the major stems, prefixes and suffixes used in English; told us which were Germanic, which were from Latin, and which from Greek; and it taught us to decipher words we'd never seen before. Because of this, and a lot of reading required in school and at home, by the time we were 14, we ran into one unfamiliar word every 10 or 20 pages. Some of the words we'd never seen before still did not seem unfamiliar, because we could automatically interpret them based on their parts. By college, unless a text was very technical, we would run into maybe five or six unfamilar words in 300 pages.

Many younger Americans don't read this well, or know this many words, because in the late 1960s a trend started toward "dumbing down" American education. That means that they made the material easier and less challenging, didn't require kids to memorize much, and they didn't stress things like spelling, grammar and vocabulary building. Some schools don't even give kids any reading homework. The result is that a lot of younger American adults who seem educated, actually have very small vocabularies. It's mainly the people who went to school in the best municipal districts or who went to private schools who don't have this problem.

[Jamie (K)]

Just to give you an example of what I was talking about in my previous post, I can tell you that last week a young American-born woman in one of my classes didn't know what the word "arithmetic" meant. She claimed she'd never heard it. This is bizarre, because generally every 7-year-old understands and uses this word.

The difference in education is seen in a family I know. The mother enjoyed reading Dostoyevsky novels when she was 14, and found them so fascinating she couldn't put them down. Her daughter, who supposedly went to "good" schools, found Mark Twain novels too hard to read, mostly because of the vocabulary, and sometimes the mother had to read to the daughter the novels she was assigned as homework, and explain words as she went along.

[Lost_Soul]

[Aydincelenk]

Hi lost soul,
I think one of the oldest languages is Turkish and as all the languages do, it changes in time. So it is very difficult to understand old Turkish which was used during the times of Ottoman Empire. For me, as for everyone at my age, it is very difficult to understand the books written at those times. But modern books do not have too many unknown words for me. I can easily say that I never come across any unknown words while I am reading a book written in the last century (as Jamie (K) says "Unless it was technical").
And I think any language on Earth produce new words if there is a need for it. If you lived in a desert, you would probably need no word for SNOW. But anyone who lives in Antarctica would probably have at least ten or more.
Vocabulary is a matter of needs.
Love,
Aydın