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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 |  | |
| justberta Diglot Senior Member Norway Joined 5585 days ago 140 posts - 170 votes  Speaks: English, Norwegian* Studies: Indonesian, German, Spanish, Russian | Message 177 of 213 10 December 2010 at 1:59am | IP Logged | ||
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I'm angry at vocabulary freaks who cannot seem to pronounce anything correctly or speak
to natives. They think they have mastered a language because they have studied it at home or at university, but all they do is make lists of vocabulary and grammar. Do you remember them without referring to your notes or dictionary? Can you write them properly in their native script/alphabet? Not so important maybe. 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? Maybe I will scratch this one. I didn't mean full meaning, just... do you even know what they mean. Do you REALLY need that many words? The rest of my questions I stand by. If I learn more than one word per day I don't learn a word the next day etc. I firmly believe that excess vocabulary and grammar can only harm the process. I am tired of seeing people on this forum who claim to study/speak 3+ languages at the same time, but are complete noobs and have no insight into language learning. They merely want to be so called polyglots and START their 2 and 3 and 4th languages at the same time. They then go on complaining about being burned out, not finding motivation, having chosen Arabic, Chinese or some far from English language. The most annoying thing is reading their L logs of endless grammar and vocabulary studies. Go out and speak it. Chose one language. Please... 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| hrhenry Octoglot Senior Member United States languagehopper.blogs Joined 5130 days ago 1871 posts - 3642 votes Speaks: English*, SpanishC2, ItalianC2, Norwegian, Catalan, Galician, Turkish, Portuguese Studies: Polish, Indonesian, Ojibwe | Message 178 of 213 10 December 2010 at 2:09am | IP Logged | ||
Just out of curiosity... I notice you are currently studying 4 languages. Does that apply to you? Feel free to get as angry as you like over number of words learned each day, but realistically, we all learn more than one word a day while we're actively learning our languages. If we only learned a single word each day, we'd never be able to string together a meaningful sentence. It's just not so black and white. R. == 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| justberta Diglot Senior Member Norway Joined 5585 days ago 140 posts - 170 votes Speaks: English, Norwegian* Studies: Indonesian, German, Spanish, Russian | Message 179 of 213 10 December 2010 at 2:43am | IP Logged | ||
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Ops, this is because my profile won't allow me to list a language as simply learned/speak
at a medium level. I don't study German and Spanish at all. I did however. My point is that a newbie who only knows English cannot possibly learn 3 languages from a beginner level at once, simply by finding the right "methods" on this website. If you have a base of a few languages at an intermediate and fluent level of course it's possible to learn new ones. I'm doing this myself. I see from your blog that you are a translator, what languages do you translate to? Or from? What kind of translating do you do, is it written or spoken? Are you fluent in the 6 languages listed under "Speaks"? 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| hrhenry Octoglot Senior Member United States languagehopper.blogs Joined 5130 days ago 1871 posts - 3642 votes Speaks: English*, SpanishC2, ItalianC2, Norwegian, Catalan, Galician, Turkish, Portuguese Studies: Polish, Indonesian, Ojibwe | Message 180 of 213 10 December 2010 at 3:27am | IP Logged | ||
I translate from ES and IT to EN. I've also on occasion translated from EN to ES, although that's definitely not my preference. Mostly legal and business/financial documents. I also interpret ES<>EN, both directions and am certified at the state level. Yes, I am fluent in the languages I've listed under "Speaks". I live with some combination of ES, IT and EN every day through family, friends and work. I use Catalan and Galician a couple to a few times a week, and Portuguese the least (much less so than the other Iberian peninsula languages). Portuguese is used strictly for work purposes, as are Catalan and Galician for the most part (although I do converse with friends in both those languages). You didn't ask about the languages I am studying, but I'll explain anyway. They are all at different levels, Norwegian being the highest (I would currently rate it at B1, Polish (lowish-A2) and Turkish, which I've just started studying this last month. Somewhere in another thread I posted that I try to keep the method in each level different (meaning listening in one, reading in one, writing/speaking in one), and that's very dependent on the language course being used. Anyway, back to number of words learned per day. Because I'm just starting with Turkish, I'm learning more words per day by far than the other languages. I'm going to say I'm picking up around 15-20 words a day with the Pimsleur course, maybe slightly less. However, I'm about to finish the 30 lesson course and will be starting "Teach Yourself". I expect that number to go up to about 40-50, depending on the lesson, if past "Teach Yourself" courses are any indication (and glancing at the course it appears to be thee case). With Polish I'm picking up around 10 or so by reading. Norwegian is by far the least number of words. To reinforce learning these words, I repeat whatever introduces them, whether it's the course, re-reading, or re-listening or rewatching the audio or video program. I try to give myself 3-4 hours a day to learn. It sounds like a lot of time considering I work full time, but realize that some of that time is passive learning, so I'm not tied to a desk/book for that number of hours. You can reinforce vocabulary/phrases with passive learning. It doesn't always have to be active time. Wow, I didn't mean to ramble on so. R. == 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| justberta Diglot Senior Member Norway Joined 5585 days ago 140 posts - 170 votes Speaks: English, Norwegian* Studies: Indonesian, German, Spanish, Russian | Message 181 of 213 10 December 2010 at 4:26am | IP Logged | ||
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My point is that 20 words per day aren't automatically retained simply by writing them
down and pronouncing them one time, you must still "learn" them again tomorrow. Write lists etc. Refine that list, and so on. To learn a word I must repeat it 10-50 times. I may do this in a day or every day for a month, depending on how often I hear it and it's usefulness. Translation seems interesting. I would like to do live translation that seems like such a blast, on TV or something. I don't really remember what a B1 or B2 level entails anymore, I remember having it in Spanish class at one point. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| ellasevia Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2011 Senior Member Germany Joined 6142 days ago 2150 posts - 3229 votes Speaks: English*, German, Croatian, Greek, French, Spanish, Russian, Swedish, Portuguese, Turkish, Italian Studies: Catalan, Persian, Mandarin, Japanese, Romanian, Ukrainian | Message 182 of 213 10 December 2010 at 5:15am | IP Logged | ||
I understand what you mean. I may go through and study a list of vocabulary for a lesson in my coursebook, but by tomorrow I will probably have forgotten many of the words. This is what SRS programs like Anki are for, and many forum members take advantage of these. Once you input words, it feeds them to you as new words each day at your specified pace and you repeat them in increasing intervals according to how easily you remember them. You should try it. :) 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| zerothinking Senior Member Australia Joined 6372 days ago 528 posts - 772 votes Speaks: English* | Message 183 of 213 10 December 2010 at 6:34am | IP Logged | ||
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I think someone can learn 70 words a week easily in about 30-45 minutes a day. That's 10
a day and 3650 in a year. That's what I've found is an easy pace at the beginning with reviewing and everything. Once you reach a higher level though words stick easier so you can start learning something like 100 or more words a week. This is taking reviewing into account until they enter long term memory. This is in about 30-45 minutes of study. I also do both ways, passive and active. When I review I just recall actively. (Think of the L2 word from L1) And eventually you can recall them while speaking especially when you get to reading extensively since you are constantly reinforcing words you know and they eventually bubble up into your active vocabulary. Edited by zerothinking on 10 December 2010 at 6:51am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| bnz Diglot Pro Member Germany Joined 5123 days ago 6 posts - 7 votes Speaks: German*, English Studies: Korean Personal Language Map | Message 184 of 213 10 December 2010 at 8:33am | IP Logged | ||
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Good discussion. It basically continues where I left off with my questions and that a proper definition with respect to what "learning a word" means is missing and that even word from different languages may not be directly comparable. I was also a little hesitant to believe the numbers posted here in general, because there was so much information missing that is necessary to put the numbers into context.
I certainly do believe that there are exceptional talents out there who do speak many languages fluently and who are able to remember words better than others. In principle, my opinion would be to restart this thread with a given number of questions to be answered which allow an evaluation in a more "normalized" way to make the values better to compare. I think this would be really interesting. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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