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Vocabulary without flashcards! | ||
Tags: Vocabulary learning | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Learning Techniques, Methods & Strategies |  | |
| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5435 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes  Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 9 of 18 17 January 2013 at 5:10pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I am of the school that you do whatever works for you, period. I am a great fan of paper flashcards because I find them useful as memory aids. But I don't go around preaching the gospel of flashcards. That said, I argue that when learning a language to actually speak it we should not think in terms of isolated words, i.e. how many words, but more in terms of word meanings in use.
I recognize of course that we can learn isolated words for specific terminologies but when you look at things like verbs, prepositions and idioms, the notion of word becomes more complex. I think we have to move away from this notion that learning a language is a question of learning a set of words. It is actually more about learning how to connect words. You can have a great vocabulary and not be able to carry a simple conversation. The problem for most people isn't vocabulary; it's how to connect everything properly. For this you have to think in "linear" fashion or syntactically. In that sense I agree totally with the last part of the OP when it talks of learning entire sentences. 4 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| leosmith Senior Member United States Joined 6555 days ago 2365 posts - 3804 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Tagalog | Message 10 of 18 17 January 2013 at 6:22pm | IP Logged | |||||
Thanks mon! I will add the link to Super-Fast vocabulary learning techniques
I don't know who you're talking about specifically here. Iversen with his word lists? Steve Kaufman who has expressed language = words? It's pretty hard to argue against people who are clearly very accomplished polyglots; obviously, their philosophies work for them despite your warnings. The OP does make an interesting point though. If you had no other way to learn than listening, you would become better at memorizing things you hear. This rings true to me. However, I still believe that your memory wouldn't be good enough to do better than if you use other learning tools part of the time. So for me, and probably for most, a more balanced approach is more effective. Edited by leosmith on 17 January 2013 at 6:37pm 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5435 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 11 of 18 18 January 2013 at 3:37am | IP Logged | |||||
I agree that language = words and that to learn a language you have to learn words. And, as I said in my previous post, do whatever works for you. I am certainly not against wordlists, mnemonics, visual dictionaries, Anki, srs or whatever works. That said, my position as I have stated is that learning a language is more than learning a set of words. I'm not saying that one should not learn words. What I alluded to in my post and what I have outlined numerous times in various threads here is my belief that how to use words or more specifically how to string all the components of the language into meaningful utterances is just as important as the number of words. More specifically, this position has led me to state that in the spoken language of everyday use only a small number of words are commonly used. I have gone on record as saying that for languages like English, Spanish and French an active vocabulary of 300 to 500 tokens is all you need to be able to speak fluently with native speakers about everyday subjects. I hope nobody believes that I'm saying that learning 1,000 or 10,000 words is useless. Heavens no. All I'm saying is that if your goal is to actually speak the language quickly, a small vocabulary well mastered is all you need. Since I believe in that sweet spot of around 500 words I tend to not be interested in long wordlists or learning 100 words a day. I'm more interested in learning key grammar structures or mastering the 10 most important verbs. Once I've mastered the basics for communication then I'll move on to bulking up my vocabulary with the appropriate techniques. 4 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| BaronBill Triglot Senior Member United States HowToLanguages.comRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4694 days ago 335 posts - 594 votes Speaks: English*, French, German Studies: Spanish, Mandarin, Persian | Message 12 of 18 18 January 2013 at 8:51pm | IP Logged | |||||
I agree to an extent. I believe that 500 words well learned along with appropriate sentence patterns and grammatical structures would indeed allow you to speak (dare I say the "F" word?) fluently with native speakers. I agree that almost anything I would have to say in normal conversation could be said within the confines of those 500 core words. The problem for me becomes listening comprehension. I may be just fine communicating with my preset list of 500 words but native speakers (or intermediate to advanced non-natives) will not be saddled with that same vocabulary limitation. Of course, in survival type situations, this will work itself out as both parties attempt to communicate in the most basic of ways. However, in a social setting, this vocabulary limitation could become very discouraging as you are able to express yourself, but may not be able to follow the other speaker's conversation due to their expanded vocabulary set. I know we have had our conflicts in the past about being able to speak better than understand, but in this situation, it is exactly what is happening. I'm not trying to re-hash any old arguments as I very firmly agree with you that a smaller vocab set learned well with good grammar can be just as effective (if not more so) as a large vocabulary faintly grasped with little structure. 4 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6708 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map | Message 13 of 18 18 January 2013 at 11:43pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I agree that 500 words will make it possible for you to survive typical touristical communications and other situations where you have a sympathetic native conversation partner with a keen sense for what you can expect of a person with a vocabulary of 500 words. And if you desperately need to prepare yourself for a trip next week then it wouldn't be a bad idea to learn a few basic words and expressions.
But if you include written texts in your study program you will soon discover that you can't even read simple newspaper articles without a quite large vocabulary, and with recorded speech it is even more urgent to get your vocabulary boosted as fast as possible because you haven't got time to look anything up. It is however imperative to stress that we are speaking about passive vocabulary here - you can get far with few words in a shop in Malawi where you choose what to say and you can use gestures for the rest. And that's lucky because it takes a lot of time and practice to pump up your active vocabulary, and it is difficult to do this in a very structured manner. You simply have to think, write and speak a lot while keeping a dictionary within reach (and maybe some 'green sheets' with summaries of morphology). I have a hard time seeing how you can absorb the necessary passive vocabulary fast enough without using some kind of structured technique - whether it be wordlists, flashcard og ANKI etc. But maybe some learners have a more 'sticky' memory than mine. Edited by Iversen on 18 January 2013 at 11:52pm 5 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5435 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 14 of 18 19 January 2013 at 1:46am | IP Logged | |||||
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Since we have been down this road many times before, I don't want to hijack the thread and get into a discussion about the minimal or optimal size of one's vocabulary. Let me stress, however, that I have been talking about an everyday conversation. I'm not talking about reading a newspaper or disciussing technical subjects.
But I do want to counter this idea that a small vocabulary means that one is limited to simplistic touristy phrasebook-type interaction or that one will have difficulty understanding other speakers who are not "bound' by a 500-word vocabulary. I think the reason people hold this position is because they fall prey to what I call the "all or nothing" syndrome. Basically, this idea says that you have to be able to understand the entire newspaper, everything that you hear on the radio and the television, all the possible utterances that native speakers can make before you can speak properly. Therefore you need 5,000 or 10,000 or 20,000 words to speak the language. But suppose you think in terms of what do I need to have a five-minute conversation with my neighbour about the family, going shopping at the market or in a store, ordering in a restaurant, talking about the weather or speaking about certain events, just how much vocabulary do I need? When you run into a neighbour and her daughter and you want to say "Oh, look how your daughter has grown. She's almost as tall as you. Oh my God, I remember when she was just this high...What's your name, young lady? Do you remember me? What year are you in at school? What school do you attend? Do you like school? What do you want to become when you grow up? etc." This is not touristy language. And it's not necessarily simplified language either. It's the language of everyday interactions. I'm not talking about technical topics. I'm not talking to a car mechanic or a lawyer about a technical problem. What happens is that many learners know all kinds of fancy words but cannot have a simple dialogue fluently and idiomatically - the way a native would say it - with good pronunciation after studying the language for years. Obviously, we don't want to limit ourselves to 500 words. Ah, now we can use all the structured or unstructured techniques that the OP and others have discussed. At this point I think we can agree. 4 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| LaughingChimp Senior Member Czech Republic Joined 4704 days ago 346 posts - 594 votes Speaks: Czech* | Message 15 of 18 21 January 2013 at 5:27pm | IP Logged | |||||
I guess it's more about what sticks in our memory. I keep trying to experiment with Anki, but it just doesn't seem to work for me. When I look up something I heard, it often sticks immediately. But with Anki it seems that the words can't penetrate my skull. I do remember the words, I do remember the meanings, but I can't remember which word means what unless I've heard the word somewhere else. 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| stifa Triglot Senior Member Norway lang-8.com/448715 Joined 4878 days ago 629 posts - 813 votes Speaks: Norwegian*, EnglishC2, German Studies: Japanese, Spanish | Message 16 of 18 21 January 2013 at 6:39pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Have you tried sentence cards?
Translating word by word is quite a painful task, so reading a sentence and trying to understand it might be easier. You simply have a sentence with one (or two) unknown words on the front, and then the definition of the unknown word(s) on the back. At least that's been working for me with Japanese. :) 5 persons have voted this message useful |
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