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Is there an easier way to learn vocab? | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| JohnPaul Diglot Newbie United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5711 days ago 28 posts - 63 votes  Speaks: English*, French Studies: Spanish | Message 9 of 16 01 June 2013 at 3:09am | IP Logged | ||
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Just read. Its the original vocab builder. Bonus: Interesting story included!
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| Cavesa Triglot Senior Member Czech Republic Joined 5010 days ago 3277 posts - 6779 votes Speaks: Czech*, FrenchC2, EnglishC1 Studies: Spanish, German, Italian | Message 10 of 16 01 June 2013 at 3:18am | IP Logged | ||
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A nice article which seems to be based on quite an interesting research. But I don't
agree with most conclusions. I am in favor of dividing the subject into two related but separed areas. New vocab introduction and the vocab learning. 1.The New Vocabulary Introduction. There are many ways to find new words or groups of them. And the theme based approach is actually one of the best in my opinion. My only complaint usually is, that the course includes far too few words in such an introduction to the topic. For two reasons. a)That's cute that I can buy an apple or a pear. But what if I want a watermelon and some cucumbers? Giving me just a few of these in the lesson just makes me do their job, take a dictionary and think "what else could I need," or to buy a specific vocab textbook or thematic dictionary when those are available. b)Little practice for the new grammar and sentence patterns. Sometimes I want to say the sentence ten or twenty times to get it perfect but substituting a key word with others would help the drill. (I don't want to bore myself to death with perfectioning "I like wine." and later stumble on "I like beer.") And we get thematic vocab even in real lives. An awesome beginner learning live lesson is to go shopping. Or intermediate: go to a museum and read the notes on objects in the target language (you are often provided even with more languages side by side). Or when you read an newspaper/wiki/whatever else article on wild life or economical consequences of a law or a new movie. So what is so unnatural or wrong about getting a comfortable list? 2.The Vocabulary Learning Most words just don't stick after we've seen or heard them once. There is no point in crying over it. Therefore seeing the words in the course lesson is not the same as learning it. I believe that learning by rote reading a list (which is very common among students as it is, at first sight, the least time demanding way) can lead to confusion and pairing up the words the wrong way. But so do, following other articles I have read but can't remember where, alphabetical lists or quite any lists. There are people who have much less trouble with this and people who have much more. Another problem related to learning these lists wasn't mentioned at all in the article but it is, in my opinion, a more serious one. I have seen and heard so many people who developed a kind of inner support structure in the list (unconciously) so they could easily use the vocab inside the learned context (and pass the test) but were out of luck when it came to other contexts and when they needed to quickly remember one word from this theme, one from another and so on. (an example: can remember apples, pears and even apricots when shopping. Can't remember apples when they want to compliment the host on the perfect Strudel in between discussion about movies) I think the best way to trully learn the words, for most people, is an SRS. Not only anki and similar ones. Even a "primitive" way to put aside paper cards/lists/thoughts concerning those I know can work as this elimitation breaks the inner structure and puts together new lists with new order of the words and mix of themes or beginning letters. Even the Gold List method does this, perhaps other lists can as well, depends on the active learner's choices. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| mike245 Triglot Senior Member Hong Kong Joined 6973 days ago 303 posts - 408 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Cantonese Studies: French, German, Mandarin, Khmer | Message 11 of 16 01 June 2013 at 5:15am | IP Logged | ||
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I have been using SRS software (Anki) to study new words, and I find it extremely
efficient. I set the new cards to be presented in random order, so they are not clustered according to themes. I find this is helpful because I don’t associate words just with a particular context or its neighbors. If the words are phonetically similar or synonyms, I prefer to have them on a single Anki card so that I can either associate them together or learn to distinguish the differences between the words. In creating my Anki cards, I prefer to work off of thematic lists because I can see what I’m missing. If I just relied on reading and other sources to cull vocabulary, it might take a long time before I come across the words I need. I have often found myself in situations such as that described by Cavesa, where I need the word for “screwdriver” but I only know the word for “hammer” or I need to say “zucchini” but I only know “cucumber,” etc. Using thematic lists to fill in those gaps is incredibly helpful for me. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| yong321 Groupie United States yong321.freeshe Joined 5543 days ago 80 posts - 104 votes Studies: Spanish | Message 12 of 16 01 June 2013 at 5:38am | IP Logged | ||
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Personally I heavily rely on etymology. I have Friedrich Kluge's German etymological dictionary, Auguste Brachet's French, and Gómez Guido's Spanish. I consult them on a daily basis. Very helpful. Without French etymology, I would always get confused between attendre, atteindre, étendre, éteindre... But if etymology doesn't help at all, then I resort to wild, mental, association or mnemonic. (Speaking of that, by the way, I recently made a conclusion that this mental association trick works for adults only; the younger the child, the less effective.)
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| luke Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 7206 days ago 3133 posts - 4351 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Esperanto, French | Message 13 of 16 01 June 2013 at 10:51am | IP Logged | ||
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The article seems to support what Professor Arguelles calls the "inductive approach". That is, Assimil like courses which have a story or theme in each lesson and words are learned in a context. This also gives a Listen/Reading approach some scientific support.
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| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6598 days ago 9753 posts - 15779 votes 4 sounds Speaks: Russian*, English, FinnishC1, Latin, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Danish, Romanian, Polish, Belarusian, Ukrainian, Croatian, Slovenian, Catalan, Czech, Galician, Dutch, Swedish | Message 14 of 16 01 June 2013 at 12:22pm | IP Logged | ||
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Yeees etymology ftw!
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| schoenewaelder Diglot Senior Member Germany Joined 5561 days ago 759 posts - 1197 votes Speaks: English*, French Studies: German, Spanish, Dutch | Message 15 of 16 01 June 2013 at 4:22pm | IP Logged | ||
You need to start using Assimmil. To be honest, I agree with your conclusion, but I think it's a "straw-man" argument (as they always seem to say on the Gaurdian forum, but I don't see the term anywhere else. Anyway: "present a false agrument as statement of fact, and then proceed to disprove it). Most books, classes and course I have used or attended use the "related vocabulary in a themed story" format that you conclude as being helpful. If I look at the 1000's of books on the library shelf, only a handful are dedicated to pure "thematic" vocabulary. I personally hate thematic lists for the reasons you conclude, but mainly just because I find them boring. Edited by schoenewaelder on 01 June 2013 at 4:32pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6704 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 16 of 16 02 June 2013 at 12:44am | IP Logged | ||
My experience is exactly the opposite: when I learn words from a L2->L1 dictionary the alphabetical sequence gives me some kind of cohesion within the words I learn during a session, and I have experimented enough with L1->L2 dictionaries and language guides (which are predominantly thematic) to know that these alternatives don't function nearly as well. However you can get too much of even a good thing - trying to learn twenty words with minimal differences leads to confusion and boredom, but luckily iot is easy to avoid by spreading the relevant parts of the dictionary over several sessions. The cause of such sequences is almost always a very commonly used prefix, and luckily the number of such 'system'prefixes is limited. I could now write a lot about wordlists versus SRS, but I have recently added a chapter to my Guide to Learning Languages IV, based on a post ion my log thread, so I think I'll leave it at that. Edited by Iversen on 02 June 2013 at 12:50am 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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