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How do you learn words? | ||
Tags: Vocabulary learning | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Learning Techniques, Methods & Strategies |  | |
| irrationale Tetraglot Senior Member China Joined 6042 days ago 669 posts - 1023 votes  2 sounds Speaks: English*, Spanish, Mandarin, Tagalog Studies: Ancient Greek, Japanese | Message 9 of 19 13 November 2010 at 6:00am | IP Logged | |||||
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I have a 4 field card system with Anki. L2 word, L2 sentence (context), L1 gloss (or L2 definition if more appropriate), L1 translation of sentence. Everything and it's context/sentence gets thrown in the deck.
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| Cainntear Pentaglot Senior Member Scotland linguafrankly.blogsp Joined 6003 days ago 4399 posts - 7687 votes Speaks: Lowland Scots, English*, French, Spanish, Scottish Gaelic Studies: Catalan, Italian, German, Irish, Welsh | Message 10 of 19 13 November 2010 at 12:04pm | IP Logged | |||||
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"Learning words in context" is a good start, but I tend to think about "learning the words you need".
Your brain will only remember something if it's useful. When you use it, it will appear in a particular context. People conclude that it's the "learning in context" that matters, and then try to construct artificial contexts to help memorise material that the learner's brain doesn't see the need for. If you pick words that you know you're going to need, or that you have needed in the past, they should stick regardless of how you choose to learn them. Say you've been away on holiday, and you're meeting a language exchange partner in a few days' time -- just stick things a few like "holiday", "beach", "hotel" etc into lists, SRS, whatever, and just memorise them so that you can use them in the conversation, and having used them in the conversation, they'll stick better. I know the word for "exam" in almost all my languages, simply because it's a topic that dominates several months of every year.... Edited by Cainntear on 13 November 2010 at 12:04pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| mrwarper Diglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member Spain forum_posts.asp?TID=Registered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5218 days ago 1493 posts - 2500 votes Speaks: Spanish*, EnglishC2 Studies: German, Russian, Japanese | Message 11 of 19 14 November 2010 at 2:30am | IP Logged | |||||
You know we tend to agree, but not always. First, I'd choose other words, because you don't really control what you'll actually learn, but just what and how you want to study. Retention is still unconscious - so we can only try to help. Anyway, it is obviously much sensible to go for words you'll probably need, so I always tell my students to keep separate decks of words, according to their importance.
And this is what I really wanted to comment on. I agree that you _should_ remember useful things more easily, as well as more recently learned ones, etc. However, the brain often behaves in unexpected ways, and you should never forget that. For example, years ago I heard the word 'magpie' and despite it being 99.99% useless in my case, I had the feeling I'd remember it for years. So long it has stuck with around 0% usage. OTOH, I used 'crossbeak' a lot when doing some translations earlier this year, and it took me a while of conscious effort to remember it just to write it here. For those particular examples I had the feeling of how things would go, and I was right (and reviewing my class notes from my uni years I think I'm pretty good at predicting what _I_ would remember and understand later and what would need some clarification, remarks, etc.). But my point is, many times you just don't have a clue. As with everything else, be scientific: think about it, try different things and stick with what works better for you. Edited by mrwarper on 14 November 2010 at 2:31am 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| leosmith Senior Member United States Joined 6542 days ago 2365 posts - 3804 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Tagalog | Message 12 of 19 14 November 2010 at 2:55am | IP Logged | |||||
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Super-fast
vocabulary learning Techniques 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| RealJames Diglot Newbie Japan realizeenglish.com/ Joined 5116 days ago 37 posts - 42 votes Speaks: French, English* Studies: Japanese | Message 13 of 19 14 November 2010 at 4:57am | IP Logged | |||||
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I take a slower approach I guess.
I write the word down, with it's meaning. I find the act of writing itself helps a lot. Then I put it away for a week, and look at the word again, test my memory, then repeat for a few weeks. It works well :) 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| divexo Groupie Australia Joined 5183 days ago 70 posts - 74 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Japanese, Latin | Message 14 of 19 27 November 2010 at 9:17pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I learn words (doing it with ~30 Latin words/day), by putting them into iFlash (find it easier to work with than
Anki/others). Each one I put in, I either can learn it quickly if similar like "videre" sounds like video so must be 'to see', or use a mnemonic, as 'fur' is nothing like its meaning 'thief '- so I imagine a thief covered in fur and visualise this and repeat 'fur thief' so when i see fur, I think also of thief! Also you can also memorise by randomly connecting the word to its meaning (not as good as above), like 'ad' means 'to' so I repeat 'add to' and remember that ad=to, or make a sentence 'I will add two more' or something. Use your imagination! As anything can be memorised if making connections, I'm not bad at it so it doesn't take more than a few minutes to memorise most of the ~30 words I do each day. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| jmagyar Triglot Newbie SlovakiaRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5369 days ago 16 posts - 21 votes Speaks: Slovak, Hungarian*, English Studies: German | Message 15 of 19 29 November 2010 at 8:31pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I have some questions.
1. How do you find the words you learn? (from books, dictionaries, you come along) 2. If you're learning vocabulary of two different languages, how much break do you have between learning? 3. How do you repeat the words you've learned? 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6695 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 19 30 November 2010 at 1:28am | IP Logged | |||||
1) intensive word with books/articles ---> words jotted down ---> three-column wordlists or wordlists directly based on dictionaries. I don't deliberately try to learn words from extensive activities, though they can be useful for learning longer expressions. 2) approx. 1 second (the time it takes to grasp a dictionary in another language) 3) my three-columns wordlists (target-base-target) include a two column section (base-target) for repetition. Later repetitions: just reading through the wordlists. Supplementary repetition method: if the wordlists are based on texts rereading the texts will imply a repetition of their vocabulary 1 person has voted this message useful |
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