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Your best vocabulary learning methods? | ||
Tags: Vocabulary learning | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Learning Techniques, Methods & Strategies |  | |
| Ezy Ryder Diglot Senior Member Poland youtube.com/user/Kat Joined 4349 days ago 284 posts - 387 votes  Speaks: Polish*, English Studies: Mandarin, Japanese | Message 9 of 58 03 June 2015 at 7:58am | IP Logged | |||||
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Try to review as quickly as reasonable. If you can't recall a word in 3-6 seconds, don't
bother, just "fail" it. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Cavesa Triglot Senior Member Czech Republic Joined 5009 days ago 3277 posts - 6779 votes Speaks: Czech*, FrenchC2, EnglishC1 Studies: Spanish, German, Italian | Message 10 of 58 03 June 2015 at 10:40am | IP Logged | |||||
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I am all for tons of input (books, tv series, podcasts etc.), srs can be more digestable in a pone or tablet on the go. Input, both intensive and extensive approach, works. But it takes time and some people have harder time activating the knowledge.
However, there is one thing that is surprisingly rarely mentioned around here, even though it isn't that useful for a very advanced learner. Vocabulary builders. Specific books, usually monolingual, with basic vocabulary (often sorted per level), examples, exercises. Some learners may not like them but I enjoy having a good resource to cover many gaps in the basic and intermediate vocabulary and it seems to work quite well for me. What language are you learning and at what level? As that was more of a beginner/intermediate tip, there is as well something you might like if you are more advanced. Dictionary of synonymes is a good tool once you need to get further away from repeating words like "good" and "interesting" all the time, especially in writing. It is a great thing to use any way you like (read what you need repeatedly, make your own drills/examples, put into srs or wordlist, whatever). And, second tip, a verb guide is not only a grammar tool, it can give you a good list of verbs that are commonly used in the language. This is something many sources (such as quite popular illustrated dictionaries and travel language guides I see in the bookshopes) underestimate horribly. What else wasn't mentioned and could be useful: use the gsearch function of the forum for goldlists. That is one of the paper based srs alternatives. I tried and even though I wasn't able to keep to it, I think it is a good technique. And you might as well like mindmaps. The method can work for vocabulary just as well as for many other subjects. 4 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| chaotic_thought Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 3542 days ago 129 posts - 274 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Dutch, French | Message 11 of 58 03 June 2015 at 11:28am | IP Logged | |||||
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A simple paper-based vocabulary learning technique is to highlight vocabuary words encountered in a text in a specific color (e.g. red) and then use a color transparency sheet over the page which obscures those words. You review these pages in increasing intervals (after 1 day, 2 days, 4 days, 8 days, ...) to make sure you can still recall the words.
If you don't have such a transparency sheet, you can also just use a black marker and black out the words you are learning. Write those words out on a diffent sheet that will become your "answer key" that you can use during your review days (1 day, 2 days, 4 days, 8 days, ...). When you review, set yourself a goal (say, 90% correct) and if you don't achieve that goal, you review earlier next time (e.g. review again the next day to get your accuracy back up). Don't set your goal too high. For example, if you marked 100 words and beat yourself up if you can only remember 98 of them, this is going to be frustrating. If you remember 90/100 words then it's good enough. Those 10 difficult words will come up somewhere else later where they're easier for you to pick up. 4 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| daegga Tetraglot Senior Member Austria lang-8.com/553301 Joined 4521 days ago 1076 posts - 1792 votes Speaks: German*, EnglishC2, Swedish, Norwegian Studies: Danish, French, Finnish, Icelandic | Message 12 of 58 03 June 2015 at 11:44am | IP Logged | |||||
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I'll put in a link to an article about Iversen's wordlist method. It has in turn a few link to other relevant thread on this forum.
Here it is: http://learnanylanguage.wikia.com/wiki/Word_lists 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Monox D. I-Fly Senior Member Indonesia monoxdifly.iopc.us Joined 5135 days ago 762 posts - 664 votes Speaks: Indonesian* | Message 13 of 58 03 June 2015 at 5:56pm | IP Logged | |||||
Well, for learning vocabularies, usually I try to connect them to similar words in another language. Here are some examples which I quoted from my log:
They are Arabic words. Now that I know that the Japanese word for "evil" is "zurui" I also connect it with "syarri": Zurui -> Zurri -> Zarri -> Syarri 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Jeffers Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4909 days ago 2151 posts - 3960 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Hindi, Ancient Greek, French, Sanskrit, German | Message 14 of 58 03 June 2015 at 6:13pm | IP Logged | |||||
I'm a big fan of homespun Leitner systems. My son (14 years old) has a card file box for his French vocabulary from school, which he treats a bit like the 3 box method on the wikipedia page. He has 2 dividers in it: the front section is for new cards he's learning, and theoretically he works on this stack every day or couple of days. The middle section is for words he knows pretty well and reviews every couple of weeks. The back section is for words he knows very well and reviews every 2-3 months. I suppose he should retire the easiest cards to another box and maybe look through those once a year or so. The problem with computer based SRS is that the algorithms are pretty fixed. With a manual system you can decide for yourself when to move a card up or down, and you can decide for yourself if you need an extra review of one of the boxes. Incidentally, Leitner described his system as a "hand computer". Having said all that, nowadays I mostly use Anki because my decks travel with me wherever I go and I can review a few cards at any odd moment. Edited by Jeffers on 03 June 2015 at 6:17pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6703 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 15 of 58 03 June 2015 at 6:48pm | IP Logged | |||||
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My wordlist layout has already been mentioned by Daegga, and I have definitely not become tired of using it yet. Nor of writing about it.
I do one main session where I learn words or simple word groups in groups of 5-7 items - enough to make it a challenge to remember them, but not enough to make me cheat. The important point here is to stop repeating them in your mind and instead train your recall skills. I start out writing those 5-7 words or word groups in a column on a sheet and check that I remember them all, and when I do I write the translations in a second column. Then I check that I can recall all the original words just by looking at the translations, and when that is settled I hide the original words in column one and reconstruct them in a third column. After that I go to the next group of words. This is a fairly simple setup once you have got used to it, and personally I like to have at least one standardized method for vocabulary learning which doesn't call for a lot of preparations or luck, and which doesn't force me to invent the wheel again and again. Learning words from chance encounters is like collecting berries in the woods. Making wordlists is like growing vegetables in a garden. One important, but invisible part of vocabulary learning not only with wordlists, but also other techniques is to establish 'memory hooks' for each word, ranging from observations about related words over imagery inspired by its sound to fond memories about the place you saw it first (including, but not restricted to the textual context). A word isn't just a shiny round thing stored in a cupboard. Nay, it should look like an unwieldy brain cell with lots of neurons stretching in all directions. And each time you touch one of those neurons the cell nucleus should flare up like a light bulb. Ideally you should always ask yourself when confronted with a new word: which clues could help me to recall this word later? And two or three clues are better than one. This spills over into the repetition process. I normally just do one or maybe two repetition rounds, typically a day or two after I made a wordlist, and here I try to remember not only the words themselves, but also the way I tried to memorize them during round one. If I can reinforce the memory hooks along with the words I stand a much better chance of keeping the words alive. And just to stress an important point once again: passive words don't become active without doing something actively with them. Edited by Iversen on 03 June 2015 at 9:47pm 6 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Lucie Tellier Diglot Newbie France Joined 3470 days ago 21 posts - 27 votes Speaks: French*, English | Message 16 of 58 04 June 2015 at 11:48pm | IP Logged | |||||
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First, I want to thank you all for your answers and advice.
I think my language profile wasn't filled out at the time, which might have created some confusion. I'm French, and I would like to reach a very high level in English, strictly for professional/scholastic purposes. I started studying Italian a few days ago, but that particular project is currently on the back burner. Sadly, I don't have a smartphone, and to be honest, I don't plan to ever buy one. Computer-based SRS systems have never worked well for me, and I've injured myself several times by overusing them. I would like to become a translator. I'm currently trying to go back to university to do this, but I'm well aware of the fact that a translator is mostly self-taught. All the classes in the world won't change the fact that I need to become really good at translating on my own. I have a question which might seem a bit weird. For various reasons, I was forced by my old university teachers to learn lists of not-so-useful words, mostly related to fauna and flora. Unfortunately, there are many basic words which I don't know in English. I can't even recognize them in a text. I still have most of the flashcards I made over the years, but I feel like they're not useful to me anymore at the moment. I mean, I'm sure most of them could be useful down the line, but right now I need to (re)learn the basics, so having that many words on flashcards is overwhelming. I'm torn between working my way through rarer words which I may still need at some point and thus not having to make new flashcards, and wasting more time making cards for easier words... Moreover, I'm not exactly sure what the best learning method is for easier words. I have a collection of monolingual vocabulary books in mind and I have access to them, but I'd rather not use the dictionary all the time to make my flashcards. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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