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Building Up Active Vocabulary | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| JiEunNinja Diglot Groupie United States Joined 4203 days ago 64 posts - 115 votes  Speaks: English*, Korean Studies: Spanish, Japanese | Message 9 of 19 10 September 2013 at 6:54pm | IP Logged | |||||
I grew up in a city with a ton of Spanish speaking immigrants. I studied Spanish a lot when I was a kid and when I was in high school. I also grew up dancing. Salsa is one of the dances I did a lot. I sort of just picked up on stuff from the lyrics. And you can only read bilingual ingredient lists for so long before you start to remember stuff. And most Spanish words look really familiar to me. My mother made me study etymology for most of my childhood so I can guess at most Spanish words. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| JiEunNinja Diglot Groupie United States Joined 4203 days ago 64 posts - 115 votes Speaks: English*, Korean Studies: Spanish, Japanese | Message 10 of 19 10 September 2013 at 6:57pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Thanks guys!~ I'll try that. I shouldn't have any trouble trying to find people to
practice with. My manager is a native Spanish speaker and she's going to start using Spanish with me. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| montmorency Diglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4827 days ago 2371 posts - 3676 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Danish, Welsh | Message 11 of 19 10 September 2013 at 9:03pm | IP Logged | |||||
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On the subject of self-talk, and as recording oneself has been mentioned, I think a
good thing to do would be to record oneself while out on the move. It depends on your circumstances and how extrovert you are, but if you are not inhibited, you can talk away to yourself into a voice-recorder (and if this happens to be your mobile phone, you won't look odd at all of course). Whether saying sentences to yourself, having imaginary conversations, and noting any words you can't think of in the TL for later lookup, "Collecting" new words you happen to find along the way, thinking of words to look up or find out how best to use....etc. I'm thinking of doing this myself, just as soon as I can work out how to do it with my new, cheap and underdocumented MP3 player! 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Teango Triglot Winner TAC 2010 & 2012 Senior Member United States teango.wordpress.comRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5555 days ago 2210 posts - 3734 votes Speaks: English*, German, Russian Studies: Hawaiian, French, Toki Pona | Message 12 of 19 10 September 2013 at 9:27pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I like to break the process of "building up active vocabulary" into a couple of stages:
i) learning new words and phrases in context (i.e. passively and/or actively), which can break down further into a) words we think we'll need to know in anticipation of some monologue/dialogue/text, b) words we need to know well to communicate or understand right now in real-time, and c) words we wish we knew upon reflection after having had those conversations or delved into new input in the target languages; ii) activating these recently learnt words further through ongoing review and a range of meaningful activities (i.e. using, developing, and becoming generally more comfortable and fluent with the newly learnt vocabulary and the context in which these new phrases occur). There are so many different ways of initially encoding and learning vocabulary that I'll leave that discussion to other threads for now. It's also readily conceivable that listening to and noticing vocabulary over and over as a passive activity (especially in a positive immersion environment) can lead to or at least help learners develop stronger active skills in the long run. This is what partly underpins methodologies like ALG (Automatic Language Growth) in Thailand, what Krashen refers to as the emerging "djinn in the head", and psychologists like to try and explain away with reference to mirror neurons. I certainly believe ongoing review and consolidation of what we seem on the surface to learn just passively, and subvocalisation (and other mico-movements of the eyes, hands, and even body) during listening to and reading extensive input, must play a helping hand here (excuse the pun). What I'm more interested in today is how we can activate what we already passively know but have difficulty in saying or writing quickly when the occasion requires it (i.e. it's on the tip of our tongue, or we just draw a complete blank). In answer to JiEunNinja's original question, I think we already have some great suggestions here that cover a wide spectrum of techniques to try and retrieve what we already may at least partially know! Here's a list to summarise and extend some of those ideas so far: - chat with others in the language you're learning (ideally native speakers); - practice self-talk and thinking in the language (especially building up dialogue "islands" on specific themes in advance of conversations); - test your knowledge of vocabulary from L1 to L2 (remembering to write or repeat out loud); - practice free-writing (without a dictionary or translator); - record weekly or monthly video blogs/podcasts without a transcript; - sing along with mp3s and music videos (especially anticipating the chorus); - listen to podcasts, videos, and audiobooks, and occasionally repeat phrases you understand well passively but haven't used much actively after the native speakers. To this list I'd also like to add a few more ideas: - try to connect everything around you in your environment, as well as what you're currently physically doing, with the target language during an activity (e.g. Zumba dancing whilst mimicking the instructors on the Spanish audio track; describing everything around you in Russian whilst waiting to meet someone in a café; preparing spaghetti carbonara and singing snippets of Italian from memory whilst you cook). - use time-boxing with your free-writing and self-talk exercises in a concerted effort to focus on and develop fluency (e.g. set up a timer for 5-10 minutes to write or talk freely on a new topic each day). - think of exploring online gaming and 3D virtual worlds which are set up for text/audio chat and interaction, especially virtual environments (or specific islands within that environment) that promote dialogue in your target languages and engender positive encouraging exchange. Edited by Teango on 10 September 2013 at 10:07pm 6 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 13 of 19 11 September 2013 at 11:55am | IP Logged | |||||
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I play video games in foreign languages if the option exists. I still want to play Skyrim
in French. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| James29 Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5374 days ago 1265 posts - 2113 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: French | Message 14 of 19 11 September 2013 at 9:35pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Do a lesson of FSI every day. That will fix your problem within a few months.
4 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Theycalme_Jane Diglot Newbie United Kingdom theafrikaanschalleng Joined 4124 days ago 28 posts - 48 votes Speaks: German*, English | Message 15 of 19 14 September 2013 at 4:28pm | IP Logged | |||||
Thank you! I've been so involved in collecting tipps and tricks to language learning that I've postet quite a few things on vocabulary recently. What I did not mention, however, is that I do believe that reading out loud actually does something for you to remember vocabulary. I don't think doing that and recording yourself is only about getting comfortable with the pronounciation. I mean, there's nothing like speaking in real life situation to help your improvisation skills and the development of your active grammar, and yes, of course, the vocabulary...but I am not sure I believe real life conversation is absolutely necessary, as such, to obtain more active vocabulary. For me, what appears to be working well in any case is to - both visually and audibly - be exposed to words and to use them - and that doesn't have to be with people. Writing words down and hearing myself pronounce them (as well as knowing their meaning) seems enough for me to start the learning process. You may not be forced to "pull words out of your head", but you may nonetheless squeeze more words into it. Just actively using your mouth to pronounce them, I believe, helps your brain memorize how it formed words and sentences. If it's got anything to do with motorics or the like(e.g. like learning to play the guitar), I'd imagine just repetitively saying words out loud should help getting them into your active memory to a certain degree. I'm still an Afrikaans beginner, so if I don't want to end up being either very monosyllabic or taking 30 minutes instead of 10 of video footage to put on my blog, I have to compromise by reading texts out that I produced in advance. I'm sure I'll be moving away from that soon. At least, though, I produced the texts myself. The good thing about that is that I can talk about any subject I find relevant and people end up correcting my grammar along with everything else I might do wrong. I produce texts that I want to be able to produce in the future without having to think about them. In the past, when I produced texts for classes, I'd write them down, but they didn't seap through to my memory as much as with the way I do it now: writing text down that I have an emotional connection to and then reading it out aloud really helps me personally. For the recording, I end up repeating sentences so many times, because the pronounciation and intonation is still foreign to me, and because I work towards just saying sentences without looking at the text all the time, to make it feel more fluent and authentic, that by the time I've produced a coherent sentence, I've said the words so many times that they stick quite well. I haven't been learning Afrikaans for long, but I already find myself quite naturally making up conversations in my head, because I feel that I'm already using the language and that I'm not just passively listening. Singing along with songs - I agree - helps as well. And to be honest, when I've had conversations with foreigners - be it on skype or in real life - people weren't so thorough in correcting me, as my followers are now. Because they can do it any time. Because in normal conversations many feel less inclined to interrupt. So by doing that you also learn whether or not you use words in the right context, grammatical correctness, they suggest synonyms etc. I've got so much information, I can hardly process it all. Edited by Theycalme_Jane on 14 September 2013 at 5:21pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| BlaBla Triglot Groupie Spain Joined 4128 days ago 45 posts - 72 votes Speaks: German*, English, French Studies: Nepali, Spanish, Dutch, Mandarin | Message 16 of 19 15 September 2013 at 9:57am | IP Logged | |||||
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One thing that has certainly helped me a lot is to focus on my own, ideosyncratic way of
expressing myself in typical everyday situations. Standard textbooks like Assimil et al. contain a lot of material that might be helpful in regard to understanding and reading (passive) but more often than not I'd pause and think - heck, I'd never ever use this (content) or I'd never express myself this way (style). So I just keep monitoring my own everyday language in those typical situations and what others have to say and take regular breaks to jot down those expressions in a little notebook. Once back home, I translate and add them to my ever growing collection of bilingual A6 sheets and finally start to practise them in my virtual chat room or back in Spain "cara a cara" in whatever situation they might fit into. No big surprise that I use and hear some expressions far more often than others and that they're not necessarily covered by standard textbooks. No surprise either that these ideosyncratic high frequency contents stick to your active L2 vocab much easier than some irrelevant standard fare provided by some textbooks. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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