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Best Way to Learn Vocabulary | ||
Tags: Vocabulary learning | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Advice Center |  | |
| dw Triglot Newbie United States Joined 5898 days ago 4 posts - 4 votes Speaks: English*, French, Swedish Studies: German | Message 1 of 4 10 November 2008 at 7:36am | IP Logged |
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What do people find is the best way to learn vocabulary so that it "sticks"? I am so tired of learning words which I think I have mastered, only to come across them a few months later and find I have forgotten them.
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| J-Learner Senior Member Australia Joined 5841 days ago 556 posts - 636 votes  Studies: Yiddish, English* Studies: Dutch | Message 2 of 4 10 November 2008 at 7:43am | IP Logged |
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I remember most words but for those that are difficult I use a mixture of repetition, imagination and perhaps mnemonics.
Context always helps more. I don't really have any techniques sorry. Good luck. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| FrancescoP Octoglot Senior Member Italy Joined 5761 days ago 169 posts - 258 votes Speaks: Italian*, French, English, German, Latin, Ancient Greek, Russian, Norwegian Studies: Georgian, Japanese, Croatian, Greek | Message 3 of 4 10 November 2008 at 9:07am | IP Logged |
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The best way to retain words is... using them. If you're still in a passive stage of your learning, however, consider this: words are like faces. You meet them once, you get introduced, you forget both name and face. You meet the same person somewhere else a week later, the name begins to stick. And so on, until you are able to summon face and name at will. You get to know your new classmates by hanging around with them, not by perusing the school yearbook. The moral is: don't let words be just entries in a list, read a lot of different texts and meet them again and again in different locations/contexts. After you have come across the same word a dozen times in different sentences that you can understand there's no way you'll ever forget it again (hem, almost).
It's a two-stage process: fist, cram as many as you can by repetition, mnemonics or whatever other means you like. Second, read a lot of texts, meet them again and again, shake hands, see how they work, how they combine there and get back to step one. Also, learning how words are constructed, recognizing roots and so on will take it to the next level. That's where you want to go. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| William Camden Hexaglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 6083 days ago 1936 posts - 2333 votes Speaks: English*, German, Spanish, Russian, Turkish, French | Message 4 of 4 10 November 2008 at 9:23am | IP Logged |
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Different methods work for different people. Learning lists of words can work, but in my view only with the most common few hundred words - ones you are going to run into again and again, so it is reinforced in your mind. It is better to learn words in context than in isolation, though learning a word in isolation is not worthless in my opinion. Frequency dictionaries of the foreign language, if available, should be used. Basic readers are also a useful method.
Elsewhere, I discuss my method of copying a foreign language text, then cutting it up and assembling it like a jigsaw puzzle. This can be used to memorise the text but is also helpful with vocabulary and study of the language structure, with or without text memorising. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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