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Learning Vocab without Studying Vocab | ||
Tags: Vocabulary learning | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Learning Techniques, Methods & Strategies |  | |
| Retinend Triglot Senior Member SpainRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4307 days ago 283 posts - 557 votes  Speaks: English*, German, Spanish Studies: Arabic (Written), French | Message 9 of 67 17 July 2013 at 2:25pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
Nice thought. Is it your experience? (serious question). I have found that - when working extensively with SRS - that if I saw a familiar word on the page, which I had circulating in my SRS system, I would inevitably: scratch my head; squint; think about some mnemonic I have stored; and in all take - at best - a few seconds to recognise it - at worst - not remember it at all and slap my forehead when I looked it up and "knew it all along." That said, every learns differently so maybe there are some fluent speakers who ANKI'ed their way up the mountain. I would however like to hear from just one of them. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| kujichagulia Senior Member Japan Joined 4846 days ago 1031 posts - 1571 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Japanese, Portuguese | Message 10 of 67 17 July 2013 at 2:45pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
Retinend, thank you for your comment. Perhaps it's my fault because I wasn't clear enough, but I think you misunderstood what I said in the first post. I understand completely that not everybody uses Anki/SRS. You said that you don't use Anki or flashcards, but you shadow, write sentences, do Scriptorium - all fine techniques, in my opinion. But you have a technique. That was my hypothesis. Everyone does some sort of activity to remember what they learned, so they don't have to keep going back to a dictionary every time they encounter a word/phrase. Even something as simple as writing the definition of a word in the margin of a page of a novel would count as a "technique". What I was wondering is if anybody who is at a beginner or intermediate level in their language does this: (1) Read a book/newspaper/magazine/website, or watch TV/movies/dramas, or listen to the radio/music/a podcast, or talk with people in the target language. (2) While doing (1), use a dictionary or the Internet to look up unknown words and sentences. (3) Without doing anything else other than looking up definitions, return to what you were doing in (1). (4) [Optional] Redo what you did in (1). (5) Move on to another book/movie/conversation. That's it. No writing notes to remember words and sentences, nothing other than reading/listening/speaking "naturally" to reinforce new words. The Real CZ said he does this, and Bakunin mentioned his techniques which are sort of along these lines, so those are two examples of how my hypothesis is broken. LWT mentioned reading A LOT, and that is the only way I can think of to accomplish this. I mean, read ALL THE TIME. Besides that, I for one would be driven crazy by having to look up the same word 20 times in the dictionary, especially at my level, and I'm a B1 in Japanese. Edited by kujichagulia on 17 July 2013 at 2:48pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| tarvos Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member China likeapolyglot.wordpr Joined 4706 days ago 5310 posts - 9399 votes Speaks: Dutch*, English, Swedish, French, Russian, German, Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Afrikaans Studies: Greek, Modern Hebrew, Spanish, Portuguese, Czech, Korean, Esperanto, Finnish | Message 11 of 67 17 July 2013 at 3:01pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
I Anki'd my way up two mountains. I like Anki in the beginning stages for getting from beginner to conversational. Once I can read texts properly I drop it 4 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Amun Triglot Groupie Netherlands Joined 5057 days ago 52 posts - 72 votes Speaks: Dutch*, English, French Studies: Spanish | Message 12 of 67 17 July 2013 at 3:02pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
Yes, it has been my experience. Practically all the words I add to Anki tend to go into my long term memory after a couple of reviews, especially when the review gaps become wider and wider. When I encounter those words in native material, I don't even think about them, the meaning just comes naturally. I have to add that I use the 'AwesomeTTS' addon in Anki. This addon pronounces the words very naturally (TTS software has really advanced - especially the ones from IVONA). This significantly helps with sticking words into my LTM. Also, some here have said that they find Anki to be boring. I don't have the same experience, I see Anki as a memory game and for short periods of time it can be fairly captivating. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
 emk Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5531 days ago 2615 posts - 8806 votes Speaks: English*, FrenchB2 Studies: Spanish, Ancient Egyptian Personal Language Map | Message 13 of 67 17 July 2013 at 4:19pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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I learn most of my vocabulary just by reading and listening, without even looking words up. If you read enough, most words will sooner or later "give themselves away"—they'll appear in a context where the meaning is clear. And once I understand the basic meaning of a word, I can refine it through further exposure.
But then again, my level is well above B1, and I've got an Anki deck with about 2,000 copy-and-pasted sentences (and I once studied a Mnemosyne deck with about 1,000 words). And if I could buy legal French ebooks, I'd happily use a pop-up dictionary when I read. But natural vocabulary learning is a slow process. You might want to take a look at this graph of native speaker vocabulary by age. There's a similar graph with non-native speaker vocabulary by years in the country. If we take a look at those charts, we see:
You can take the test and get your own numbers. I scored 36,700 on this scale, which is several thousand words higher than before I learned French (which helps with obscure English vocab). For me, "natural" vocabulary learning was most frustrating at two different points: 1. When I first started reading native media. This was frustrating because I was several thousand words short of what I needed to read the books I wanted to read. SRS helped a lot, as did extensive reading. 2. Now. There's still a lot of words I don't know, but they're increasingly rare, so they don't get reinforced efficiently. This is probably why it takes native speakers a good 15 years of consistent immersion to make it from 12,000 to 25,000 words. I mostly reserve SRS for words which I recognize but which I still can't define after multiple encounters. Words like tergiverser, for example, which pops up fairly often but always in uninformative contexts. 4 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| mike245 Triglot Senior Member Hong Kong Joined 6971 days ago 303 posts - 408 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Cantonese Studies: French, German, Mandarin, Khmer | Message 14 of 67 17 July 2013 at 4:23pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
I am currently using Anki to learn ~200 new words per week while studying Cantonese in Hong Kong. It has been very successful, and my retention and active ability to use of new words is around 95%. For me, SRS is not only useful but also necessary. I have to use Cantonese every single day for various reasons, often with people who speak no English. I need to have lots of words ready to go, and the best way to do that is to stockpile them ahead of time. When you are living in a TL country, you can't afford to be contantly asking people what things mean or trying to circumlocute around words you don't know. Just this past week, I had to use the Cantonese words for stapler, asthma, local anesthesia, electric shaver, security guard, mayonnaise, mop, and remote control, among others. These were all words that I learned through my vocab lists and Anki, and which I was able to use immediately in context. Knowing these words kept me from feeling like an idiot when put on the spot. Edited by mike245 on 17 July 2013 at 4:24pm 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Retinend Triglot Senior Member SpainRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4307 days ago 283 posts - 557 votes Speaks: English*, German, Spanish Studies: Arabic (Written), French | Message 15 of 67 17 July 2013 at 4:34pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Well I suppose that's that then. My incomprehension only shows my lack of imagination.
Hearing the word spoken while you flip cards at least makes the system seem that much more efficient. But, now ...maybe I'm making myself seem even more ignorant, but I just feel that if you're flipping cards to learn words individually then you're just giving yourself more work to do later when you have to internalize everything other than the dictionary translation.
I've already once on this forum been told that I've misinterpreted a post entirely... so for my own sanity and to defend my misreading, this is what I, in fact, read:
So my response followed. Nope - I don't used SRS, wordlists, "Goldlists"[?], etc. I (more importantly, other more successful learners) have "no techniques or methods to remember" specifically "vocabulary." I sometimes make a note of certain things I come across so that I can revise and re-write the until naturalized... but these are usually odd structures, not individual words.
Well... you said that "everybody" had a technique for "vocabulary," and learning sentences isn't a technique "for vocabulary." But since I'm only arguing about whether I should have disagreed I'll leave it there. Regarding the rest of your post, I think that keeping dictionaries to a minimum is a matter of grading your learning material. Don't exposure yourself to any material where you don't know 95% of the vocabulary (or whatever the number is). For German I was lucky to have a very rich literary language which has classics for a low reading age such the Brothers Grimm and Hoffman's Struwwelpeter. I can't read Berlin Alexanderplatz or Der Zauberberg yet but I can read Die Verwandlung and Siddhartha, which don't have very large vocabularies and aren't overly long. Edited by Retinend on 17 July 2013 at 4:53pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| iguanamon Pentaglot Senior Member Virgin Islands Speaks: Ladino Joined 5261 days ago 2241 posts - 6731 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Portuguese, Haitian Creole, Creole (French) | Message 16 of 67 17 July 2013 at 4:50pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
Yes, that pretty much describes what I do and what I have done. I've never used anki, paper flashcards, memrise, srs, word lists or gold list methods. As you know, in using a multi-track approach, including speaking, listening and reading, I am very likely to come across the word again. It may take me two or three times of the word coming up for it to take hold but it usually does. For lesser used words, I'll say the word aloud five times in sets of five, with either the English equivalent or the TL meaning then move on. I also like to try to write it down once. The next day I may, or may not, go over it again. If it's a word or phrase I think I'll want to use, I might on a rare occasion, repeat this process for two or three days. Someone mentioned the word "tadpole". As a native English-speaker, I came across the word as a boy and asking my mom or dad what the things were that were swimming in the water. "Tadpole" is not a word that is likely to come up very often, but yet I know what it means in English by having had it explained to me with a visual reference. That's one reason why I like Google Images as an aid for definitions. In my opinion, not enough people are using this wonderful resource as a dictionary. It can really help to give you some context in addition to a written definition. Google Images will work for not just nouns but also some verbs, adjectives, and even some phrases as well, to some extent. There will obviously be some extraneous results thrown in but the similar images that get repeated tend to seal the deal. Google Images can be a great way to reinforce a written definition, not all of the time but a lot of the time. I also use the bilingual linguee.com for Portuguese words/phrases I don't know and Dicionário Informal. Reading is so much easier if you have an e-reader with an integrated dictionary. It significantly reduces the disruption of looking up a word and your reading flow. Figuring out a word or phrase by context, works quite well, also. In which case a dictionary look-up will primarily serve as confirmation. I've never used LWT but it looks to be a good resource along similar lines. My method is less dependent on formal "study" and highly dependent on reading, listening, speaking and writing- interacting with the TL rather than "studying" it- which is why I have my difficulty understanding how multiple, simultaneous language learners find enough time to devote to three or more languages. That being said, I have seen proof that multiple simultaneous learning can be and is being done successfully. I don't think, though, that I could (or would want to) find enough time to do it using my methods as effectively. I know jack about Japanese. It's so different from the Indo-European language family that maybe my methods won't work as well. I don't know because I haven't tried it with a non Indo-European language, but I most likely would go with what I know to be effective for me until I would be proven wrong. I don't want to cause a ruckus among anki devotees. I am not putting anki down or intending to patronize anki users. If anki works for you, great! Keep using it! I have seen evidence on the forum of its successful use by learners. Where I think it can become a problem for learners, in my opinion, is when anki gets out of hand. When you are spending more time creating cards, reviewing the cards, worrying about the cards and obsessively counting words than you are actually interacting with the language outside of an anki context. That's when the balance swings to working for anki rather than having anki work for you, in my opinion. Is your goal in learning a language to be able to interact with native-speakers, to read TL books, to listen to TL content, to enjoy TL films or series? If so, why not incorporate that, in a comprehensible way, as early as possible? Then, if you so desire, use anki or some other method to further reinforce what you've come across natively, not the other way around. Learning by incorporating comprehensible native material from the start means that I am already seeing idiomatic constructions, slang, vocabulary and phrases. I'm getting accustomed to fast speech, different accents and variants of the TL. The learning materials help to reinforce what I see/hear natively and vice versa. The intermediate stage is less trouble because I'm already accustomed to the language as it is used in the real world outside of courses. As an illustration, I remember that what got kuji going on blowing out his anki decks was the realization that some of his sentence cards were just flat out wrong. When you see that sentence in a reading context, hear it or a similar variation spoken and then have it come up again somewhere else, maybe in a podcast, article or movie, you are less likely to get it wrong- in my experience. Then, maybe that's a good time to reinforce that phrase with some method, be it anki, srs, gold list, word list, saying it aloud in repetition, etc. If you don't see that phrase or usage again after continuing to interact with the language widely, maybe you don't really have to have that particular word or phrase at the tip of your tongue. Most learners tend to use anki in moderation and have the balance right. A few, however; do not. It's a tool, not an end in itself. So, if you think it is becoming more than a tool and more of an end in itself, that's when you should probably reevaluate your anki situation. Just some thoughts for folks, especially beginners or those who have yet to learn a language to basic fluency, to ponder. Good luck and good studies to all who are learning a second language. It will gain you a wonderful new perspective on a lot of things in life. Edited by iguanamon on 17 July 2013 at 7:50pm 5 persons have voted this message useful |
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