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Super-fast vocabulary learning techniques | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Learning Techniques, Methods & Strategies |  | |
| frenkeld Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 6942 days ago 2042 posts - 2719 votes  Speaks: Russian*, English Studies: German | Message 49 of 255 13 March 2007 at 12:50pm | IP Logged | |||||
I am used to thinking of it in terms of knowing one's grammar rather than as "passive" versus "active", but in some respects it may mean same thing. If I just read for a while, speaking or writing even moderately correctly can be a problem, but if I read novels, yet periodically set them aside and just read with attention though a grammar book, after several such cycles I will stand a much better chance of ramping up my writing or speaking skills relatively quickly, even if I haven't done any grammar drills/exercises, except for finding a way for various endings to sink, perhaps by just writing them out a number of times.
Well, that's what I mean when I say that many of the arguments are about sequencing. One can prelearn and then read a lot; one can skim the fundamentals, then read a lot, and then study things with more care. There are any number of sequences possible. The thing is, not all choices are equally efficient, and there are many specific tricks with any sequence that can make it more productive, so I hope our top forum polyglots will share and continue to share the details of how they do things - these details are very important for the rest of us. Edited by frenkeld on 13 March 2007 at 12:52pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| MeshGearFox Senior Member United States Joined 6694 days ago 316 posts - 344 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Russian | Message 50 of 255 13 March 2007 at 6:11pm | IP Logged | |||||
I got into this idea from the Russian self-teaching guide thing I picked up last week. The lessons are short, have word lists of under 20 words, and only cover two to three points. If the lessons were long, this would probably impede progress, but they're short -- they cab be done in, say, twenty minutes each. Likewise, this forces a certain word/space/layout economy. Very few pictures (which will probably annoy some people, but honestly, some textbooks have WAY too many), tables are kept to the minimum of what yo need to know, and the explanations are just written out, instead of, "Dative case exists. Here is a chart with the endings. Memorize. Bye." The tradional approach in classes seems to be long lessons spread out over a week or two, with a lot of backtracking and review in between. The end payoff is only, say, a few more points being covered. I'm thinking that if you spend twenty minutes in a class explaining the grammar point, than another 20 points just using it in context, along with whatever 15-20 focus words were designated for the day, it'll be a lot more likely to stick. This means less reviewing (Or rather, just... straight up review. Instead, reviewing stuff in context of new material seems preferable), and more actual progress. And, in general, the language classes I've had never really focused on learning vocabulary. Some additional notes on word lists and vocabulary: I've noticed that, in my very brief attempt at using word lists, the primary thing I forget is what words I'm working with, and not the translation. Therefor, having to memorize the lists might make the translations themselves a sort of go-between, intermediate step, thus making it more automatic. Pure speculation here. As for just learning a lot of vocab as a whole, I see it less as a way of learning the words through and through, and more of a way of building a dictionary in your head, so that what you're reading/listening to becomes comprehensible. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Linguamor Decaglot Senior Member United States Joined 6617 days ago 469 posts - 599 votes Speaks: English*, German, Italian, Spanish, Swedish, Danish, French, Norwegian, Portuguese, Dutch | Message 51 of 255 14 March 2007 at 3:20am | IP Logged | |||||
I wanted to point out to others what you seem to already know.The subject of the thread is learning vocabulary, and for many, if not most language learners, this implies active use of the vocabulary. Some language learners do not recognize that learning vocabulary means learning how to use target language words the way native speakers of the target language have learned to use them, not the way their "equivalents" are used in the language learner's native language. Edited by Linguamor on 14 March 2007 at 6:22am 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6702 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 52 of 255 14 March 2007 at 4:53am | IP Logged | |||||
I almost agree. You should end up with a situation where you don't translate anything inside your head when you use the foreign language. But this doesn't mean that you cannot benefit from what I call structured vocabulary learning, even though native speakers didn't pass through this phase. Knowing a word or expression even in the rough form of a translation is better than not knowing it at all when it comes to reading or listening to authentic stuff. You can let a language seep into your mind through years of graded exposure like the natives do, but for me the use of word lists is a shortcut to the proficiency level that permits me to use authentic material effectively now. Edited by Iversen on 15 March 2007 at 5:26pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6702 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 53 of 255 14 March 2007 at 5:21am | IP Logged | |||||
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Yesterday I was speculating about the use of thematic word lists as a means to getting an active vocabulary. The idea would be that if you made them in short blocks and with inbuilt memory training you could learn the words more effectively than if you just wrote a long list of thematically related words in your native language, looked them up in a dictionary and wrote them down with their translations on a sheet of paper.
I spent several hours last evening on that experiment. It failed. It failed miserably. It went so-so in Greek where I have spent months learning words, but then I tried Russian, where I'm currently at the letter Г. Because I apparently can't look up 7 Danish words in a dictionary and just remember 7 unknown Russian words (shame on me) I notated all the Russian words on a separate sheet of paper. Well, I had foreseen that, but in reality it meant that I was still using my three-column scheme, just spread on two sheets of paper. Furthermore it broke my concentration that I had to change between laboriously looking 5-7 new words up and then laboriously learning them in a setting that didn't function as smoothly as my usual three-column setting. So I'm back at making thematic word lists in their entirety and only then proceeding to learn them through my usual methods. However there is one thing more I can try out. Every wordlist should be reviewed after a couple of days, both to consolidate the newly-learnt words and to identify the words that escaped. I have until now done that by reading through one of the columns with foreign terms to see whether I remembered them, and if not I would read the whole wordlist thoroughly, write out the foreign words and then try to write the corresponding Danish translations. This is in fact only a control of whether the foreign words have entered the passive vocabulary. It is much harder to use the native column as the basis and then try to recall the foreign words, but it can be done and would certainly mean that a larger percentage of the words would become active. So that's my next project. Edited by Iversen on 15 March 2007 at 5:29pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Linguamor Decaglot Senior Member United States Joined 6617 days ago 469 posts - 599 votes Speaks: English*, German, Italian, Spanish, Swedish, Danish, French, Norwegian, Portuguese, Dutch | Message 54 of 255 14 March 2007 at 6:07am | IP Logged | |||||
You should also end up with a situation where, when you want to say something in the foreign language, you are able to say what a native speaker would say, to mean what you want to mean. Using the grammar AND the vocabulary correctly. When do you get to this stage? And how do you go about it? 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6702 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 55 of 255 14 March 2007 at 8:07am | IP Logged | |||||
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I personally think that wordlists as such become less and less useful when you approach the advanced fluency level. There will always be words you don't know, and I have even made wordlists in French for specialized subjects like bird names. But when you know maybe 70-80% of the words in a standard dictionary then those lists become a marginal activity you make for fun or to deepen your knowledge within a narrow field. If you can read ordinary texts more or less without a dictionary, then there is no reason any longer to prepare systematically for the task.
This is not necessarily the stage where you stop making errors when you use the language actively, and I still make too many of those in most of my languages to claim to be advanced on the active front. But would I have made fewer errors if I had spent more time reading and listening to real life material instead of collecting words and reading grammars? I doubt it. I would just have had more trouble reading and understanding those texts, and I would have had to wait longer to come to the point where I could appreciate the finer points of native speech. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| frenkeld Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 6942 days ago 2042 posts - 2719 votes Speaks: Russian*, English Studies: German | Message 56 of 255 14 March 2007 at 10:10am | IP Logged | |||||
On a few occasions, I wondered if certain learning styles may be faster, but leave long-lasting or even permanent "damage", and so far I haven't found any reliable answers. Usually one hears what seem to be personal preferences, so it's hard to know if these questions have been properly investigated. Take the reading only issue. People will just read for a year, then find that they don't understand spoken speech, and will claim that by not doing both at once, they have done a lot of damage, which will now take a long time to undo. My question is then, if someone reads for a year and then just listens for a year, will his comprehension be really hopelessly behind someone who's been evenly dividing the same daily study time between reading and listening for two years? One can ask many questions of this sort on various skills and aspects of language learning, including vocabulary acquisition. Edited by frenkeld on 14 March 2007 at 10:17am 1 person has voted this message useful |
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