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Frequency vocab method | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Learning Techniques, Methods & Strategies |  | |
| maaku Senior Member United States Joined 5359 days ago 359 posts - 562 votes  Speaks: English* | Message 17 of 55 27 September 2009 at 8:42am | IP Logged | ||
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@Cainntear I don't find that to be the case. By grouping words thematically, I am able to focus on the differences and solidify them in my mind.
@tommus that's a really cool hack! @Crush I +1 that experience. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| doviende Diglot Senior Member Canada languagefixatio Joined 5771 days ago 533 posts - 1245 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Spanish, Dutch, Mandarin, Esperanto, Hindi, Swedish, Portuguese | Message 18 of 55 27 September 2009 at 8:57am | IP Logged | ||
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Just so that you see another alternative, I'll explain how I'm currently learning German. You sound like you've got a strong grasp of the basics, so i'll assume you can jump right in where i am.
The first thing i want to mention, is that my German level jumped dramatically when i accepted the idea that i could try to read a real German book before i knew all the words, and that i shouldn't use a dictionary while i'm reading. I heard about this idea from some japanese students who were trying to read 1 million words of English, and didn't use a dictionary while reading. Previously i had tried to read German novels, but i used a dictionary to look up every word i didn't know (which was a lot), and it got totally draining so i quit. Since i started reading without using a dictionary, it actually became much more enjoyable, and i learned much more. So, what i do now is i pick up a book that sounds interesting, and i grab a highlighter pen and start reading. When i find an interesting word or sentence, i highlight it. Or if there's something i don't recognize, i highlight it...but i try to only highlight 2 or 3 things per page. I just keep reading, skipping over anything that gives me trouble. I try to get as much as i can, and that's it. Later, i go back through and put all the highlighted stuff into my SRS, looking up the hard stuff as i go. This allows me to investigate things and advance my vocab systematically, but i've found that i also learn a lot just from massive exposure to the language, whether or not i highlight anything. This is preferentially done with a book that has an unabridged audio version, so you can Listen and Read ("L-R") at the same time. This has also done wonders for my listening ability. The other thing i do, is i use Barron's "Mastering German Vocabulary" that someone mentioned, and i add some of the example sentences to my SRS. I focus on the really abstract words, because those are the ones that a) are very generally used, and b) are hard to guess from context. So i preload a lot of those, and it helps me read better. So i guess my big piece of advice is that you can start reading at any level. It sounds like you know more than enough to pick up a book and start. It helps tremendously. I started about 3 months ago with Harry Potter #1 in German, with the German audiobook, and i barely understood a thing. but i kept on going, exposing myself to it even though i wasn't getting much. it got easier quickly. Now I'm reading The Hobbit (in German), and enjoying it quite a lot. Please don't wait until you've done 4000 words before you start reading real books :) I'll also point out once again that Steve Kaufmann says that he learns mainly by reading native books and listening to podcasts. Khatsumoto stresses using native materials as soon as possible because it's more interesting and fun. I agree strongly with both of these guys, and this is working well for me. Edited by doviende on 27 September 2009 at 9:00am 6 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Glendonian Bilingual Diglot Newbie Canada Joined 5502 days ago 26 posts - 37 votes Speaks: French*, English* Studies: German, Italian | Message 19 of 55 27 September 2009 at 9:08am | IP Logged | ||
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I'm not sure how highlighting stuff, looking it up, and putting it your SRS is different from what you were doing
before, when you were looking up many words. Are you just looking up fewer of them and guessing more from context? By "abstract" do you mean you're avoiding objects and most verbs? I suppose one idea is to use books in translation, that you already know very well in English. Perhaps Harry Potter in your case. The Wizard of Oz comes to mind for me. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| doviende Diglot Senior Member Canada languagefixatio Joined 5771 days ago 533 posts - 1245 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Spanish, Dutch, Mandarin, Esperanto, Hindi, Swedish, Portuguese | Message 20 of 55 27 September 2009 at 9:50am | IP Logged | ||
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mostly it's about interrupting the flow. stopping and using a dictionary all the time kills any possibility of understanding the sentence/paragraph/page generally. When you only know 1000 or 2000 words, a regular novel is almost entirely words that you don't know.
Once you start reading as if that didn't matter, then you stop worrying as much and just try to get the general idea. Then slowly, the grammar and a lot of the vocab seeps into your head. highlighting occasional phrases feels like it speeds up the process for me, without losing that parallel-processing approach of absorbing everything. Also, i guess i'm sorta going in frequency order too, because the more often the words come up, the sooner i know them. Much more fun than a frequency wordlist, imho. I chose Harry Potter merely because it had an unabridged audiobook, and sounded mildly entertaining. I'd seen two of the movies, but i'd never read any of the books in English. I just knew the general plot and characters. For TV viewing, i choose stuff that i know well...in my case, Star Trek: Deep Space 9. I've seen many of the episodes, and i know all the characters so it's easier to guess what they should be saying. Anyway, try whatever you think works best for you, which may be the extensive SRS cramming method you mentioned, but i highly recommend reading since it's improved my German skills way faster and way further than any other strategy i've used for any other language. I really wish i could go back in time 8 years and tell myself to put down the dictionary and just read ;) 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Sunja Diglot Senior Member Germany Joined 5870 days ago 2020 posts - 2295 votes 1 sounds Speaks: English*, German Studies: French, Mandarin | Message 21 of 55 27 September 2009 at 12:00pm | IP Logged | ||
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I've tried order of frequency lists. There were too many economics words. Great for perusing the internet, bad if I'm trying to communicate. I have no real system for acquisition. I have enough language books full of words that I can study. I usually try to make sentences with the same patterns outlined in my books. I run it by my penpals and they give me (if I'm lucky,) real-life examples of how to use those words. The disadvantage is that I usually have to wait a week for feedback.
I just say "am I using these words correctly" and give them a batch of sentences to check. For those of you learning German, feel free to pop by the German discussion room. It seems pretty lively (the past week, at least) and you'd probably get some good feedback. Might be quicker than emailing with a tandem partner! I'm thinking about doing that with my new language (French) as soon as I'm finished with Assimil. Edited by Sunja on 27 September 2009 at 12:14pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| vb Octoglot Senior Member Afghanistan Joined 6207 days ago 112 posts - 135 votes Speaks: English, Romanian, French, Polish, Dutch, German, Italian, Spanish Studies: Russian, Swedish | Message 22 of 55 27 September 2009 at 3:09pm | IP Logged | ||
I also think that this approach, with the post-session vocab check is a great way to go about things. Stopping every line to look up words in the dictionary can hamper understanding as, as you've said, you lose the flow. Just think about how many words you revise in only one page of a novel: 250? And that could be done in 2 or 3 minutes. Given that the words are also contextualised, this is a far better approach than revision-by-flashcard. That said, I did attempt to memorise the 4000 top words in my first couple of weeks of study of German and it *kinda* worked - I knew 79% of them after the first week. There were areas that were very hard to commit to memory - verbs beginning with 'v' for one - but it was reasonably effective for nouns. One caveat I would add is that when I study language atomistically, it seems to harm my language skills. For example, if I spend a day producing sentences by translation, I will find it easier to write posts in the evening than if I had focused on individual words. Edited by vb on 27 September 2009 at 3:17pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6488 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 23 of 55 27 September 2009 at 6:48pm | IP Logged | ||
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I don't use frequency wordlists. I have given my reasons in more detail in my guide part 4 (6. entry), but they can be summarized as follows:
The most common words (maybe 1-1000) are so idiosyncratic in their use and so irregular in their morphology that you have to learn a lot about them from the start. On the other hand you will automatically meet them in genuine texts, so you should ideally learn them from a combination of reading/listening and grammar studies. The words that follow may partly be found in frequency lists, but most frequency lists don't contain translations or morphological indications or examples, so they are less informative than any reasonably good dictionary. If you don't like dictionaries and wordlists and things like that, then by all means learn them from your texts - I prefer harvesting a good dictionary, using my own common sense to decide which words to learn. The only situation where a frequency list could in any way be justitified would be during a 'mopping-up' operation for a learner that already know most of the basic vocabulary. But even there a common dictionary would be vastly superior. Forget about frequency lists! Edited by Iversen on 27 September 2009 at 6:49pm 4 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| irrationale Tetraglot Senior Member China Joined 5835 days ago 669 posts - 1023 votes 2 sounds Speaks: English*, Spanish, Mandarin, Tagalog Studies: Ancient Greek, Japanese | Message 24 of 55 28 September 2009 at 6:47am | IP Logged | ||
I agree with using native materials as soon as possible, but when going through a book, highlighting, and merely knowing 2000, 3000 words, wouldn't there be more yellow than not? Below a certain percentage of the material being understood, you simply can't grasp the meaning. You are not really "reading" at all. Therefore, you need to learn (or recognize) the number of words in the language to make around 80 to 90% of written material according to various studies, to get the overall context and meaning. Before this, wouldn't your time be better off getting to that point? This is the point of the beginner level. And it seems Harry Potter is the book of choice in this regard, which I think, isn't a good choice at all with all of the made up fantasy words you will never see beyond such a context. Young adult drama would be a better choice. If I recall from AJATT, he listened to Japanese music a lot and watched anime. This is all well in good for entertainment and breaks in study, but I think it is a waste of time compared to listening to real native speech, because you aren't getting the correct rhythm and word frequency spectrum, as well as space fillers. You are better off listening to talk shows or perhaps the news (this is debatable in my eyes for the beginner). Music especially, is particularly a waste of time, however interesting it is. Regarding freq lists, I agree with Iverson. The glosses in my Chinese freq dictionary are HORRIBLE and very misleading to the learner. The should be used with extreme caution by an advanced learner, especially with a language far from English. Pick the first 2,500 from various programs and move on from there with SRS, perhaps with a freq list. Edited by irrationale on 28 September 2009 at 6:51am 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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