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How many words do you learn per day? | ||
Tags: Word Frequency | Vocabulary learning | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Learning Techniques, Methods & Strategies |  | |
| bnz Diglot Pro Member Germany Joined 5130 days ago 6 posts - 7 votes Speaks: German*, English Studies: Korean Personal Language Map | Message 169 of 213 25 November 2010 at 10:44pm | IP Logged | ||
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Absolutely interesting topic. However, I find most of what I read here to be not very comparable as a lot of parameters influence the amount that you (or I for that matter) are able to learn:
- everyone writes the amount of words, but not how much time they spend on learning the words. I can imagine I can also learn 100 words or ore a day if I do nothing else for a couple of hours. But I usually try to choose the amount that I get by with max 60 minutes. - similarly, learning new words is nothing magical. Memorizing the words long-term on the other hand is the hard thing. Therefore, in the time you spend, how much time do you use on reviews? The more words I learn per day, the more I have to review each day. With a sensible review plan, I notice quickly that even learning just 20 words per day results in a massive accumulation of words to review (respecting the Ebbingshaus curve). - languages which have some relation to each other often have words that originate from the same (e.g., latin) word. Therefore, if you study a European language and you already speak a European language very well, it will be easier for you to memorize the words. I learn Korean, there is no orientation for me with respect to the languages that I speak (German and English). - When you learn words of your base language, do you count learning the word in both directions taget language->base language and base language->taget language or only one direction? (with base language and target language being used in terms of how they are used with wordlists, i.e., the base language is the one you want to learn as far as I understand). - If you learn target language->base language, do you learn the "sound" only or do you actually try to write the word down until you get it correct? That is what I do and it usually takes a couple of tries until I memorize the correct writing even though the writing is phonetically quite near. Given all that (and probably additional parameters that I failed to identify), for me I can say the following: with a sensible review plan (I use Anki for that) I can currently learn approximately 20 words for 4-5 days a week in Korean. Then I usually pause for 2-3 days to cope with the accumulated reviews. So no more than 60-80 words per week on average. For that, I spend between 15 to 50 minutes depending on the amount of reviews. I still have to try Iversons method. The assumptions behind this method sound pretty reasonable to me. Still, I'd like to let a software do my review management and I want to learn when I commute :-) 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| slymie Tetraglot Groupie China Joined 5235 days ago 81 posts - 154 votes  Speaks: English, Macedonian Studies: French, Mandarin, Greek Studies: Shanghainese, Uyghur, Russian | Message 170 of 213 26 November 2010 at 3:40am | IP Logged | ||
Thanks for the answer. I have been speaking Greek since I was young I never actually began to learn to read or write it until recently. I have been doing your lists and while the first time I did them I must have spent about 60 mins on just a block of 5 words, yesterday I was just motoring through an alphabetical list of new Russian words. A bit of a modification was I would do the third section in pencil. Then I would check spelling and if I was incorrect I would erase the word, review it, and just move on to the next block. then after getting the second block I would go back and try the word again, usually getting it. I found doing it in pen I spent way to long making sure I knew the exact spelling and accents, the pencil makes it easier although a touch more self restraint is needed. I'm going to lock myself in a cafe for a good part of this afternoon and see how many words in mandarin I can learn in a span of 3 hours. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6710 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 171 of 213 26 November 2010 at 10:57am | IP Logged | ||
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If you can spend 60 minutes on memorizing just 5 words then you have a problem. But it is a good sign that it apparently didn't extend to your Russian session.
Try using some of the association/reinforcement techniques that have been discussed in other threads. I have written about them in my Guide to Learning Languages and even made a video on Youtube about the subject, but there are many others here who have given good advice about this topic. Even when using a wordlist layout you have to find some memory hooks and use other tricks to remember things, - a layout is just a framework for your activities. This is of course also true for Anki and other systems. Actually your own suggestion about checking and rechecking your spelling is one more useful idea because it forces you to look closely from another angle at the words you want to memorize. Edited by Iversen on 26 November 2010 at 11:02am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6710 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 172 of 213 26 November 2010 at 11:33am | IP Logged | ||
Many relevant points. With RSR Systems like Anki you deliver a word and its translation into the system. All repetitions after that are essentially just controls, i.e. entirely passive. I prefer doing a proper job the first time, and this includes making checks in both directions and letting each word almost slip away, just to be dragged back screaming and kicking into my memory until it stays there. Therefore I only count on doing one 'regular' repetition round. What happens after that is that I expect my regular reading or listening to remind me of those words that are really important, and subsequent repetitions will mostly just consist in skimming old wordlists. I have noticed that deliberately trying to remember words in a language will have a beneficial global effect on your recall. Actually I first got the idea of making wordlists in a systematic way when I did a series of simple word counts in Romanian, spaced with 2-3 weeks between each test. I noted down the words I knew from selected pages, but of course new pages every time. Then I noticed that my vocabulary size apparently grew faster than the number of words I had consciously memorized between each session. Then I started out making simple word lists, which grew into my current system. About non-related languages: the memory hooks used for memorization of target language language words can of course point back to a language you already know if the two languages are related (or if there is a substantial number of recognizable loanwords). So by implication it must be easier to memorize lots of words fast in a related language where these connections abound. But with time your associations should become more and more oriented towards other words in your target language - at least that's what I have found while studying Bahasa (my first non-Indoeuropean language(s)). In this case I try to accelerate this process by systematically looking for word roots in long words and learning these shorter forms together with the long words. I don' know much about the structure of Korean, but even here it must be possible to find some derivational patterns that can be exploited. About reviews done in commuter trains and busses. OK, forget about writing and expect noise and minimal space. What can be done? If you do wordlists and you have a scanner you could scan your handwritten lists both with and without the 'solutions'. Then you can do your reviewing under almost all conditions. Edited by Iversen on 26 November 2010 at 11:38am 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| bnz Diglot Pro Member Germany Joined 5130 days ago 6 posts - 7 votes Speaks: German*, English Studies: Korean Personal Language Map | Message 173 of 213 26 November 2010 at 12:24pm | IP Logged | ||
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Yes, I have noticed that Anki doesn't enforce to learn both directions in one session and also, you cannot give it a simple requirement such as getting a new card right twice before scheduling it at a later point of time.
One major problem that I see with Anki is indeed the fact that you usually schedule a card to one or more days later once you get it right for the first time and it is then removed from the session queue. One thing that I notice to be especially unuseful is that due to the fact that cards are removed from this session queue, the ones you don't know or that you answer repeatedly wrong will stay in the queue until the end. However, in the end, the other "finished" cards are gone and "answers" are easier to find when the pool of possible solutions is smaller. My typical situation is that the last five cards in the queue are the ones I get wrong all the time. Once I boiled down the amount of cards to those 5, answering these 5 cards is easier. I always get the feeling that i betray myself with respect to the last few cards. It would probably be better if the flashcard application simply counted the number of correct answers for a card in a session and only stopped the session when all cards have been answered correctly a sufficient amount of times and more importantly: the flashcard application may rearrange the cards that you show to the more relevant ones, but you should never make the pool of possible answers smaller. And of course, there are word roots in Korean. I think every language has these patterns in some way. I am not getting the discussion about active and passive vocabulary though. To my knowledge it is the amount of time needed to find a word when constructing a sentence. Active vocabulary can only be created by actually using a language by talking and by deliberately trying to use new words in conversations in my (entirely unscientific) opinion. Any kind of word that you study or read only creates passive vocabulary. I imagine that also using your way to learn with wordlists has the same problem. The main advantage I currently see with your wordlist method and with respect to Anki is that you enforce more repetitions (the disadvantage of Anki that I stated above) and that you learn both directions in one session. I can imagine that these two points help. I am not sure about learning blocks, but I guess I'll have to find out for myself. I am pretty sure that there is some validity to your approach and that Anki, despite the fact that I really like it and use it a lot, is not perfect methodically. For example, I keep bugging the author that he should penalize a card if I write down an answer and it is in fact the answer of a different card. In that case, two cards are obviously interfering with each other and I need to review both and not just the one in front of me. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| slymie Tetraglot Groupie China Joined 5235 days ago 81 posts - 154 votes Speaks: English, Macedonian Studies: French, Mandarin, Greek Studies: Shanghainese, Uyghur, Russian | Message 174 of 213 01 December 2010 at 4:19pm | IP Logged | ||
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Just an update, as I said I would try out the lists.
1. For Mandarin, wow. I pull words out of the dictionary into a list of about 100-200 words, then start studying. Today I memorized 200 words (I could have kept going but I switched over to Russian.) Other days I stopped at 100 and was able to go close to 98% the next day from Chinese-English and about 90% from English to Chinese. Mind you I am already at a high level of mandarin and many of the words on my list most average Chinese do not know. (I.E. Some of the words I learned today - 超文本 - Hypertext 超导电性 - Superconductivity - 超度 - (buddhist term) extripate the sins of the dead.) I'm running out of dictionary already. 2. For Russian - Meh. I think my level is still low to really benefit from the lists. Some words just won't stick out of context. I may still do the lists but only from words taken from lessons or podcasts. Maybe I just haven't trained my brain to memorize Russian words yet? Sir. Iverson, at what level do you think word lists should be incorporated? 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| justberta Diglot Senior Member Norway Joined 5592 days ago 140 posts - 170 votes Speaks: English, Norwegian* Studies: Indonesian, German, Spanish, Russian | Message 175 of 213 10 December 2010 at 1:33am | IP Logged | ||
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There is a reason it's called "Word of the day" and not "WordS of the day".
I learn one word per day. I pronounce it, I repeat it, I write it down, I hear it. 20- 50 times. My process is actually more organic than described, so there might be a "word of 3 days" and "3 words of 1 day". However I think it would amount to one word per day. So, to those of you who study vocabulary and learn say 10, 20 or 30 words per day: Do you remember them without referring to your notes or dictionary? Can you write them properly in their native script/alphabet? Are you able to pronounce them flawlessly? Do you use them while speaking your target language at your level? Do you understand their full meaning? Do you REALLY need that many words? 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| hrhenry Octoglot Senior Member United States languagehopper.blogs Joined 5137 days ago 1871 posts - 3642 votes Speaks: English*, SpanishC2, ItalianC2, Norwegian, Catalan, Galician, Turkish, Portuguese Studies: Polish, Indonesian, Ojibwe | Message 176 of 213 10 December 2010 at 1:45am | IP Logged | ||
Depending on where you're at with your language learning, it's pretty inevitable that you're going to be learning more than one word a day. Dictionaries usually aren't necessary after learning the word, no? I would think that one could write the word when learning it too. I would image use would depend on context. Surely you don't use every word you know every day. I know I don't, not even in my native language. As for full meaning, well, what does that even mean? Most people learn a word in a certain context. I don't know a single language learner that blindly picks a word from a dictionary to learn. That would be inefficient. Do I REALLY need that many words? I don't know. Something prompted me to learn them. See the sentence where I mention not using every known word every day. The tone of your post came off as sort of angry at people learning more than one word a day. Why is that? Both the reason to learn words and ability play into it. Some of us may just do it differently than you. R. == Edited by hrhenry on 10 December 2010 at 1:47am 1 person has voted this message useful |
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