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Efficacy in retaining vocabulary | ||
Tags: Vocabulary learning | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| tristano Tetraglot Senior Member Netherlands Joined 4044 days ago 905 posts - 1262 votes  Speaks: Italian*, Spanish, French, English Studies: Dutch | Message 1 of 11 10 June 2014 at 12:19am | IP Logged | ||
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Hi everyone.
After some months and different experiments I see a certain trend on what concerns vocabulary retention: (1) Proximity to my language set helps ma to retain the information (2) Exposure also helps me to retain the information, since I'm used to how the language sounds. In particular, in this moment I'm like a sponge with Dutch which I'm exposed to and has some shared vocabulary with English and French. Also in French and English is really easy to me to learn new vocabulary. In the other extreme, by the way, there is Icelandic: I'm really struggling to learn 25 words per day (that was my initial target; I can double this amount with Dutch), with the result that I had to stop adding new words and I'm having a lot of troubles in retaining the ones I already learnt. It is quite painful to observe your brain refusing a language even though you sincerely want to learn it. I feel like the efficacy of the vocabulary retention lowers if the distance to your language set increases. Did you observed the same or similar phenomena? Is it a common issue? Thanks! 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| sillygoose1 Tetraglot Senior Member United States Joined 4633 days ago 566 posts - 814 votes Speaks: English*, Italian, Spanish, French Studies: German, Latin | Message 2 of 11 10 June 2014 at 12:36am | IP Logged | ||
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I certainly have. Even with a language that many say is so easy because it's apparently close to English. German. After learning French, Spanish was easy for me in terms of vocabulary retention. After Spanish, Italian was just as easy. After I mastered the main grammar points, which is basically identical to French, it was cake to retain vocab.
German, for me, is another beast of its own. While pronouncing the words does feel natural, I cannot for the life of me remember a vocab word that I even looked up 30 seconds prior. Even after repetitive reading and seeing the same words over and over, I still find myself having to look up the words again. What I'm excited about however, is that I know that once I get comfortable with German, the other languages I want to learn will come easier. Mainly Swedish, Norwegian, and like you, Icelandic. (Maybe not so much with Icelandic). 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| hrhenry Octoglot Senior Member United States languagehopper.blogs Joined 5127 days ago 1871 posts - 3642 votes Speaks: English*, SpanishC2, ItalianC2, Norwegian, Catalan, Galician, Turkish, Portuguese Studies: Polish, Indonesian, Ojibwe | Message 3 of 11 10 June 2014 at 3:12am | IP Logged | ||
I suppose this happens to all of us. I've found that if I'm having trouble remembering a word, it's because I don't need it. Doesn't mean I won't need it in the future, just not at the moment. I have a love/hate relationship with Anki and the likes, so when I really want to learn something, I'll look for ways to learn it outside of it. This is a really simplistic example, but numbers are always a chore for me to learn, outside of romance languages (and Germanic, for that matter). So, instead of using Anki, I've discovered that I'll retain numbers by playing Solitaire (and colors, if using a computer, since I can change them in the program). I solidly knew them within a couple days - in a single day with Indonesian, because of the randomness of the game. And I like playing Solitaire, so it's not a chore, really. Yeah, the first few games take forever to complete trying to remember everything, but it quickly starts to flow. It's much the same with days, dates and time just by looking at random blog post titles in the language, although it's taken me longer since it's not ad-hoc like playing a game would be. I've also written out my grocery shopping list items in the target language. I have to travel about 20 miles each way to the grocery store, so it's in my best interest to learn and remember them. I know those are really simplistic examples, but they work for me. I guess my point is, find ways to make the vocabulary relevant to what you are doing and you'll have less trouble remembering them. R. == 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| shk00design Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 4441 days ago 747 posts - 1123 votes Speaks: Cantonese*, English, Mandarin Studies: French | Message 4 of 11 10 June 2014 at 7:08am | IP Logged | ||
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In order to retain a vocabulary, you have to drill yourself everyday. Personally I can only learn about 5
new words / phrase a day. Some people suggested if you learn 30, within a year you would learn enough words & phrases to cover most situations. However, you have to keep repeating the ones you learned earlier so that you wouldn't forget. Learning enough words is 1 thing but getting the correct context is more a challenge. A language such as French has many common words & phrases with English. Yet you can't always translate 1 by 1 and get the correct context. A while ago I was watching a video where a Chinese teacher was teaching English to some Chinese students. In the beginning of the video she said something like: "First we will introduce ourselves and then we will meet each other". Basically the sentence is grammatically correct but the last half of the sentence sounded a bit odd. When everybody is in the same room you wouldn't say: "we will meet each other". 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Elenia Diglot Senior Member United Kingdom lilyonlife.blog Joined 3853 days ago 239 posts - 327 votes Speaks: English*, French Studies: German, Swedish, Esperanto | Message 5 of 11 10 June 2014 at 11:50am | IP Logged | ||
I find it quite difficult to retain German vocab as well, although I know in part it's due to a lack of exposure. I find that I'm better at retaining Swedish vocab and sentence structure. So once you're comfortable with German, Swedish will probably seem like a walk in the park! 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| AlexTG Diglot Senior Member Australia Joined 4635 days ago 178 posts - 354 votes Speaks: English*, French Studies: Latin, German, Spanish, Japanese | Message 6 of 11 10 June 2014 at 1:13pm | IP Logged | ||
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I'm not sure it's so much about it being more difficult to learn vocab from more distant languages but rather
we're just pushing ourselves to learn more actually new vocab. Most of the words we learn in close languages are just variations of words we know, and then when we get to the actually new words we have brain power left to easily suck them in. Learning 25 French words a day with no etymological relation to known vocab would surely be difficult. Edited by AlexTG on 10 June 2014 at 1:26pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| tristano Tetraglot Senior Member Netherlands Joined 4044 days ago 905 posts - 1262 votes Speaks: Italian*, Spanish, French, English Studies: Dutch | Message 7 of 11 10 June 2014 at 2:21pm | IP Logged | ||
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Ok, so I guess it is quite common.
To complete the languages I'm studying right now, I can say that German and Norwegian are not so complicated to me (but I have worse results than with French, English and Dutch). Since those are the language I'm more exposed to this is not surprising. Ok, the shared vocabulary of Dutch is the smaller in this group and the width of the dictionary is amazing (I read that Dutch is the language with the biggest vocabulary, like four times English's one), but probably the motivation is the highest and the extensive reading I'm doing probably is leading a boost in vocabulary retention; but why is Icelandic much more difficult to me to retain than Norwegian? The distance is more or less the same from English/Dutch/German. And I have the impression that English and Dutch are helping me with German that otherwise can be more difficult to retain. Does it make sense? 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| daegga Tetraglot Senior Member Austria lang-8.com/553301 Joined 4518 days ago 1076 posts - 1792 votes Speaks: German*, EnglishC2, Swedish, Norwegian Studies: Danish, French, Finnish, Icelandic | Message 8 of 11 11 June 2014 at 3:29pm | IP Logged | ||
Because it isn't. Norwegian is full of loan words, Icelandic isn't (except for some old Latin loans). Also the choice for preferred synonyms seems to be more continental in Norwegian than Icelandic (ie. Icelandic retains Germanic words that other Germanic languages don't use anymore). In consequence there is a higher share of words in Icelandic you really need to learn (as opposed to just becoming aware of the similarity to a word you know). Take a list of the most common 2000 words in Icelandic and Norwegian an count all the words you could guess with your knowledge of German/English/Dutch. You'll get a much higher score for Norwegian. to illustrate, let's assume we learn word pairs vente - wait --> easy to remember bíða - wait --> hard to remember bíða - bide --> somewhere between Most would put "bíða - wait" into Anki because they have about the same frequency, ie. a similar prominence in the respective language. "bíða - bide" would be a better match because they are very similar in appearance. Yet it would still not be as easy to remember as "vente - wait", because of the huge frequency gap (and as an L2 speaker of English you might not even know its existence). It's probably easy to establish the lexical link between "bíða" and "bide", but hard to establish the conceptual link, which is much more important especially if you want to speak the language, not just read in it. Edited by daegga on 11 June 2014 at 4:02pm 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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