Keeping Score
Learned Vol. 7, Issue 7
One of the most difficult part of learning a second language is learning all the damned words. It is, literally, an impossible task. Take, for example, English: by some counts there are over a million words in the language. If you’ve got a high school education you probably know between 15 - 20,000 words with another 30,000 or so in reserve, i.e. words that you know but probably have questions about.
That said, you don’t need anywhere near that many words in order to speak another language. Depending on the langauge, you need between 1500 to 2500 words to get through most situations and to read books, magazines, and simplified newspapers. Beyond that, when you’ve got north of 5 to 6 thousand words, you’re an advanced speaker / student of the language.
Now, those numbers are reaaaalllllyyyyy flexible. Depending on your sources and how those sources determined the number and for which language, you’re talking about a subject that is open for lots and lots (and lots) of debate. If you’re really curious, I’ve put some links to some papers down below. They’re not comprehensive, but they’ll get you started.
Back to my point - I’m an upper intermediate speaker of Japanese. In practical terms, I can get my car repaired, talk to my doctor, and file my taxes without a lot of preparation or drama1. But I still get stymied when someone uses a word outside my carefully hoarded store of daily vocabulary. Which is what happened this week.
It’s grading season for me. For the most part, it’s tedious but not difficult. I plug some numbers into my spreadsheet and, voila, everything is taken care of for me. Only this year, I have a new contact at one of my schools. So, when it came time to transfer my grades from my spreadsheet to the official school spreadsheet2 I did all my copy and pasting only to find that there was a new column. One that used a word I wasn’t familiar with: 素点.
In the grand scheme of things, this little incident just doesn’t rate. 15 seconds of googling and I knew exactly what it meant, “raw score.” Still, it irked me because I know both kanji, I just had never connected them in this formation before. (I learned the first kanji as “raw” as in “raw silk” so to see it used in connection with “points” seems odd to me3.)
But now, let’s reverse the situation: what is the poor student of English to make of both “grade” and “score”?
By grade, do you, the teacher, mean the final results of an exam? Or which sequential school year the student is enrolled in? Or perhaps you’re trying to make a new road and you need to decide on what angle you should place it? Ok, maybe not that last one, but…
How about score: do you mean points? Or maybe lines carved into clay? Music used in a film?
Over the past few years of Learned, we’ve talked a lot about synonymy, the degree to which two English words can mean the same thing. With “grade” and “score,” the fact that they can be fully synonymous in one usage only complicates things. When we talk about the points received on an assignment or test, score and grade are perfectly synonymous. Well, maybe not perfectly. After all, a grade can be a letter, can a score? I’m honestly not sure. It doesn’t sound right to me but I can’t find anything to disallow it in the dictionary, so…I don’t know?
But here’s what we do know about “grade” and “score”:
By the time “grade” arrived in English in the early 1500s, it had already shifted meaning from its PIE-root of “walk” to its French via Latin meaning of “measure of degree.” From there, it began to broaden semantically to be more indicative of rank or standard than specifically of mathematical degree.
Score, on the other hand, meant and means “twenty.” As in “four score and seven years ago.” And yet, if we go back to the PIE-root, we find a word meaning “to cut.” How we got from one to the other is a little unclear but the end result is that “score” began to equate to “tally” and then to “financial record” and then, around the 1870s it began to be used in sports context we know and use today and from there to schools around the world.
Of course, that’s not the end. When we get into the near synonymy of “grade” and “score” we run into “marks,” “points,” “results,” and “count.” But that’s a number for another day. For now, I’ve got to get back to grading-scoring-marking-resulting-or-something.
Further Reading
I mentioned above that word counts and how many words you need is a subject of much debate. Here is nice write-up followed by a couple of formal, academic papers to get you started.
Nickee Leon Huld, writing at Word Counter has a well-rounded take on the subject: How Many Words Does the Average Person Know?
Ryan E. Peters, Theres Gruter, and Arielle Borovsky have a paper called Vocabulary size and native speaker self-identification influence flexibility in linguistic prediction among adult bilinguals that brings a lot of background information up in a very digestible way.
Paul Nation and Robert Waring have one of the original papers everyone quotes from, called Vocabulary Size, Text Coverage and Word Lists.
Enjoy!
Fine, when I file my taxes there is, in fact, a shit ton of drama. I am, after all, a messy bitch. But the drama is not linguistic in nature.
Do not even get me started on the absolute shit show that is the state of technology at Japanese universities. At one of my school’s there is state of the art 3D printing lab that you can only get access to by filling out a form by hand and marking it with your hanko (name stamp).
Also, for the curious, I am more used to using 成績 to mean grade.