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Learning Vocab without Studying Vocab | ||
Tags: Vocabulary learning | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Learning Techniques, Methods & Strategies |  | |
| Volte Tetraglot Senior Member Switzerland Joined 6238 days ago 4474 posts - 6726 votes  Speaks: English*, Esperanto, German, Italian Studies: French, Finnish, Mandarin, Japanese | Message 33 of 67 18 July 2013 at 3:15pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I can't stand using an SRS. I'm not too keen on using dictionaries either - I do, but rarely. For vocabulary acquisition, I prefer extensive comprehensible exposure. As an absolute beginner, this usually means L-R (possibly with a pop-up dictionary, but I usually use it without one; certainly without tedious paper-dictionary lookups); having a parallel text to aid comprehensibility makes dictionaries a lot less important. Later, simple texts on known subjects are quite good - magazine articles, science books for children, etc. Alternatively, using Assimil works tolerably; traditional coursebooks can work, but are slow, tedious, and expensive for vocabulary acquisition. I don't like cramming vocabulary in isolation early on; aside from concrete nouns, it's hard to feel comfortable about using it without sounding like Tarzan, even with isolated grammatical study performed at the same stage.
A useful tool can be frequency lists or graded readers: not to learn from in the first place, but to skim to fill in the occasional gap after you do have a basis. If you know most of the words in them, the rest will pop out, and you'll start noticing them in context everywhere. 4 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Cavesa Triglot Senior Member Czech Republic Joined 4808 days ago 3277 posts - 6779 votes Speaks: Czech*, FrenchC2, EnglishC1 Studies: Spanish, German, Italian | Message 34 of 67 18 July 2013 at 3:49pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I got my vocab to DELF B2 and to my today's level of English. But for some reasons, I use SRS.
How I got that far without an SRS: Enlish: 1.text based computer game that taught me about 95% of my English 2.movies and books, extensive activities 3.some small part came from the obligatory classes but that was the least efficient and least enjoyable way. English is very different from my other languages because just the amount of possible and easily found exposure is many times higher than for my other languages. I am unlikely to live for 4 hours a day in a computer game anymore no matter the language. It is harder to get so much video/audio. I constantly fail in my attempts to find target language forums as addictive as my favourite English ones. I don't need any tool for English vocab now. I will use anki when I want to learn a few thousands much rarer words. French: 1.classes (the last teacher was really good but it was an exception) 2.textbooks with exercises (like Vocabulaire Progressif) 3.books, extensive reading 4.movies, extensive listening I got to pass DELF B2 with this vocab but it was one of my weaknesses there in the active skills. Why I chose to continue the French learning with anki: 1.I got stuck. The words I needed to learn were no longer those I enountered nearly every time I did something in French and therefore the exposure was not sufficient. 2. Huuuuge gap between passive and active vocabulary. And learning by doing active things, especially speaking, was difficult and stressful. I can't tell the native speaker "wait until I find it in my dictionary", because they'll just switch into English. I need the vocab ready right away. 3.The same words just wouldn't stick again and again. I could find a word for the twentieth time in a book, know I had seen it, look it up and forget it again. And it is not true that you always better remember the words you need than the other ones. These were words I really needed and I felt like a moron without them! Just avoiding it and using an explanation or a basic word instead is possible but really stupid. why I use anki for my newer languages: 1.It is just faster. I will never get the amount of English exposure unless I move to another country. So, this is how I can progress the most efficiently. 4 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Hampie Diglot Senior Member Sweden Joined 6458 days ago 625 posts - 1009 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English Studies: Latin, German, Mandarin | Message 35 of 67 18 July 2013 at 5:10pm | IP Logged | |||||
I scored 19,400 on that one, and I've never been abroad. I'm not sure how good those estimates really are :/ 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Cavesa Triglot Senior Member Czech Republic Joined 4808 days ago 3277 posts - 6779 votes Speaks: Czech*, FrenchC2, EnglishC1 Studies: Spanish, German, Italian | Message 36 of 67 18 July 2013 at 8:14pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I scored 10600 in this one. In another, link is buried somewhere in the forums, I scored over 40000. It really depends on what kind of words they choose to represent the advanced vocabulary. In the one I ended up really well, there were quite many words from medical terminology. In this one, there were many description words and the authors obviously avoided words with romance origins.
2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6502 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 37 of 67 19 July 2013 at 12:19am | IP Logged | |||||
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37,300 words - which actually is fairly close to my own estimates based on dictionary counts. Do I do wordlists in English? Well, only with English as a base language. And no Anki. With English stuffed bown my throat every day through the media I don't need to do anything special to learn more English words - everything I deliberately set out to learn in that language comes from specialized articles and books, and TV and the internet takes care of the idioms. But in other languages I can still feel a positive effect from my intensive vocabulary studies, and in my weaker languages I can't even see how I should be able to learn enough words without doing some intensive vocabulary studies.
By the way, the test FAQ and other attached documents are quite interesting. According to their information I should have lived at least 10 years in an Anglophone country and be an avid reader of fiction (they don't find non-fiction nearly as good). But no, I just live in a country with easy access to interesting non fiction, and I travel once in a while. Edited by Iversen on 19 July 2013 at 12:37am 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Cavesa Triglot Senior Member Czech Republic Joined 4808 days ago 3277 posts - 6779 votes Speaks: Czech*, FrenchC2, EnglishC1 Studies: Spanish, German, Italian | Message 38 of 67 19 July 2013 at 1:05am | IP Logged | |||||
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And while they seem to be gathering data to compare various kinds of learners, they make distinction between people still attending classes and those out of classes but have only one group for non classes learners. I put myself there because while I had 8 years of classes in past, their impact was minimum (at some points even negative) and I learnt most without them.
Another thing about the test. This test obviously counts knowldege of "pure English" words as more advanced and more worthy of the attention. While other tests consider the words of romance origin to be the more advanced as usually the romance synonyme is considered to be sign of higher education than the pure word. Two totally different approaches. I don't think I have knowledge of only around 10 600 words. Since I am an avid reader of fiction (unlike Iversen) and I have learnt 3000 words just for the medical terminology exam, I really don't think the number to be any close to truth in my case. I think a test like this would start being reliable had it included at least 500, or rather 1000, examples of various kinds. Original and romance words, words of general language, technical, scientifical, economical etc. terms that a usual educated native would be likely to know, literary words, archaisms and so on. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5229 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 39 of 67 19 July 2013 at 7:11am | IP Logged | |||||
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I think we should keep in mind that these vocabulary tests do not measure active vocabulary. At best they
measure the ability to recognize a certain number of word tokens. Being able to really use these words is something else. Edited by s_allard on 19 July 2013 at 11:55am 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| patrickwilken Senior Member Germany radiant-flux.net Joined 4332 days ago 1546 posts - 3200 votes Studies: German | Message 40 of 67 19 July 2013 at 9:09am | IP Logged | |||||
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This English test based on Paul Nation's work seems pretty good:
http://my.vocabularysize.com/ It estimates number of word groups known, rather than number of words per se, which can lead to less accurate estimates. There is a nice write up of the logic of the test here: http://my.vocabularysize.com/blog/the-challenge-of-vocabular y-testing To get back to the original question: I used Anki for a year to get from A1 to low B2 in German. I have found it very useful, but after a year of drills I am going to let it run down slowly by not adding any new words (but still practice those that I know as I can't quite give it up fully yet). In the course of a year I learnt about 9500 cards, which is plenty. Many of the cards were sentences, and so I was able to be exposed to language in bit-sized pieces at a time when I wasn't able to tackle real books. Now that I can read real books, I am seeing lots of sentences all the time so the only advantage to Anki would be to show me the same sentences repeatedly. This might be useful for low frequency words or unusual phrasings, but at least for the moment I am happy to learn at a slightly slower, but more enjoyable pace. There is an interesting review by Waring and Nation (2004) "Second Language Reading and Incidental Vocabulary Learning" URL: http://www.robwaring.org/papers/various/waring_120304.pdf The paper estimates that people learn at the rate of about 3-6 new words per hour of reading. Not sure how much I buy into this (as they go into detail 'knowing' a word can mean many different things - and tests are usually pretty bad at estimating partial knowledge, which is important as most studies use laughably short amounts of text and time periods so most of the gains are probably only partial). Still if the estimate is accurate it would suggest that Anki or some other method of acquiring lots of words early is a really useful way of bootstraping the learning process, until you can acquire vocabulary more naturally. Edited by patrickwilken on 19 July 2013 at 9:14am 3 persons have voted this message useful |
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