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Frequency vocab method | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Learning Techniques, Methods & Strategies |  | |
| Glendonian Bilingual Diglot Newbie Canada Joined 5505 days ago 26 posts - 37 votes Speaks: French*, English* Studies: German, Italian | Message 1 of 55 26 September 2009 at 12:00am | IP Logged | ||
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Would anyone interested be so kind as to judge my method:
I think of myself as a weak intermediate in German. I've studied essentially all of the grammar (or that's what our professor said - I'm currently not in a class, btw). What I need to do now is learn the conjugations of all the verbs in all their tenses, and learn vocabulary. In my university German courses we were given texts to read, but I knew hardly any of the words in them. Slogging through several pages of text looking up virtually every noun and verb seems pretty tedious and ineffective. So I've bought the Routledge Frequency Dictionary of German (about 4,000 words). I'm drilling the vocabulary using SRS, planning to work through all 4,000 items in order of frequency in the language. A problem with this is that I'm learning them without any context. I could include at least one example sentence for each vocabulary word, but the problem, in turn, with this, is that I'd have to learn a couple of new vocabulary words that would happen also to be in each example sentence. That would be good for some learners, but in my case it would defeat the purpose of using a frequency dictionary in the first place and learning words in that order, since only perhaps 1/3 of my vocabulary items would come from the order of frequency. So finally, I've decided to drill 4,000 words almost without any context, merely as a first step. I do not expect to be very competent with these words after this first stage, except for being able to spit them out in front of the SRS. Then as a second phase, I'll go back to the beginning, and add thousands of (perhaps 10,000) sentences to my SRS. I hope that these sentences will be much more effective that way, since I'll already have some knowledge of the words that are within them in the first place. See what I'm saying? Basically: 1) Phase 1: thousands of words with very little context 2) Phase 2: thousands of sentences My written explanations are a little incoherent sometimes, so please forgive me and ask questions if I'm unclear. I'd be interested to hear what you guys think of this idea. I'm a native bilingual so it's my first time learning a language as an adult. I'll figure out something for verbs somewhere during Phase 1. I consider vocab my biggest problem right now. Best regards. Edited by Glendonian on 26 September 2009 at 12:02am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Paskwc Pentaglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5465 days ago 450 posts - 624 votes  Speaks: Hindi, Urdu*, Arabic (Levantine), French, English Studies: Persian, Spanish | Message 2 of 55 26 September 2009 at 1:13am | IP Logged | ||
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Just out of curiosity, but do you attend Glendon College?
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| Glendonian Bilingual Diglot Newbie Canada Joined 5505 days ago 26 posts - 37 votes Speaks: French*, English* Studies: German, Italian | Message 3 of 55 26 September 2009 at 1:23am | IP Logged | ||
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I do! The internet's not so anonymous when you give yourself away in your user name.
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| jimbo Tetraglot Senior Member Canada Joined 6082 days ago 469 posts - 642 votes Speaks: English*, Mandarin, Korean, French Studies: Japanese, Latin | Message 4 of 55 26 September 2009 at 9:00am | IP Logged | ||
Langenscheidt publishes a "Basic German Dictionary" ISBN 3-468-49400-9 using the 4000 most frequently used words. It has sample sentences so you can learn words in context and it translates these into English. One of these days I need to get around to working my way through this thing. Personally, I never get very far trying to memorize words I've never seen in context. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Glendonian Bilingual Diglot Newbie Canada Joined 5505 days ago 26 posts - 37 votes Speaks: French*, English* Studies: German, Italian | Message 5 of 55 26 September 2009 at 9:12am | IP Logged | ||
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I'm not worried about finding contexts when I want them. I have a frequency dictionary already, and if I need any
more clarification than it provides, the TU Chemnitz has a very good Wörterbuch online. When I fail a vocab item over and over again I put in some sentences. One approach I could take is still to work my way down the list of words - 631, 632, 633, 634 - but also make half of my items verbs. I would skip ahead to get all the verbs in the 4,000 list ahead of time, while doing the rest a little more slowly. This would be one way to boost basic comprehension. Edited by Glendonian on 26 September 2009 at 9:13am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| maaku Senior Member United States Joined 5362 days ago 359 posts - 562 votes Speaks: English* | Message 6 of 55 26 September 2009 at 10:18am | IP Logged | ||
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Phase 1: Learning ~4000 words is the right thing to do at your level. Ordering them by frequency is about the worst possible way to go about it, however. Group them thematically, ideally, or at least grammatically. Even alphabetically would be an improvement. Before continuing any further you should read Iversen's recent thread on the subject from start to finish.
EDIT: There's a book "Mastering German Vocabulary" that lists about 5k words by theme. Haven't used it though, so can't comment more than that. Phase 2: Drop it. This would be a pointless endeavor at your level. If you have grammar and vocab you can start reading and speaking. Don't go spending all your time in an SRS. Edited by maaku on 26 September 2009 at 10:21am 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| draoicht Groupie Ireland Joined 6101 days ago 89 posts - 146 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish | Message 7 of 55 26 September 2009 at 1:29pm | IP Logged | ||
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Hi Glendonian
If I were you I wouldn’t aim for the whole 4000, I would work on the first 1000. The reason I say work on the first 1000 is that after this you could move on to native texts. I would use the “Part of Speech Index” section that’s in the book, I have the Spanish version of the dictionary and out of the first 1000 entries, 84 are function words, 677 are nouns and verbs and 239 are adjectives and adverbs. The function words you probably know already, so you could alternate between nouns and verbs one day and the next do adjectives and adverbs. I wouldn’t bother with Phase 1 and instead use the example sentences to learn the words in context. You could type them into Google Translate to get a rough translation and then enter the sentence into your SRS. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Lizzern Diglot Senior Member Norway Joined 5697 days ago 791 posts - 1053 votes Speaks: Norwegian*, English Studies: Japanese | Message 8 of 55 26 September 2009 at 1:50pm | IP Logged | ||
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First thought: Why? OH GOD WHY?
:-) Most language courses, even the bad ones, would take care of the first 1000 words for you, easily. Assimil would be a good place to start, and would probably give you the top 1500-ish. You will probably learn them better this way, with some context around, than just trying to learn the same words in isolation. Then once you have the first 1000+ more or less down from something less boring than simply SRSing them, just move on to real material that you enjoy. TV, music, reading, whatever floats your boat. Actually, start that straight away and continue with it while you study - it will drive you to learn more, reinforce what you already know, and give you a somewhat measurable sense of actual learning going on, because you will quickly see that you understand more and more. I can't even imagine the mind-numbing tedium of SRSing 4000 words... There are plenty of ways to do it that are more enjoyable, and likely more effective. Liz Edited by Lizzern on 26 September 2009 at 1:51pm 4 persons have voted this message useful |
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