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Selective vocabulary learning | ||
Tags: Vocabulary learning | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Learning Techniques, Methods & Strategies |  | |
| Kami_77 Diglot Newbie Italy Joined 3893 days ago 11 posts - 13 votes Speaks: Italian*, English Studies: Japanese | Message 1 of 15 13 October 2013 at 3:49pm | IP Logged |
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I have been reading the dictionary in the last few months (some pages every day)
looking for unknown words to put into anki and eventually I got bored halfway. My idea was to learn virtually every English word in it, but now I have changed my mind. This is a waste of time. I guess that most people would have reached the same conclusion without even trying to start this lofty quest, but since I am a perfectionist I could not stand coming across unknown words when reading a text. Then I realized that I am still learning my native language as well (even just one new word a day) and this made me reflect that master a language is such an elusive and daunting task that we should take it more lightly in order to not going crazy. I have decided to change my approach to vocabulary learning. I will read the dictionary again from page one, but this time I will be more selective in choosing the words that I want to learn. For instance, I could select only words like 'wallow', 'shrivel' and 'shrubby' and skip words like 'mackerel','cruet' and 'dais' that I personally deem 'useless'. Of course, everthing I said applies only to advanced students of the language.Below that level,extensive reading alone is good enough to pick the most important words. After that, I personally feel the need to polish up my vocabulary because reading alone becomes inefficient as I stated in another thread. What do you think? How do you deal with the problem of 'too much information'? Edited by Kami_77 on 13 October 2013 at 4:00pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |
 jeff_lindqvist Diglot Moderator SwedenRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6707 days ago 4250 posts - 5710 votes  Speaks: Swedish*, English Studies: German, Spanish, Russian, Dutch, Mandarin, Esperanto, Irish, French Personal Language Map | Message 2 of 15 13 October 2013 at 6:34pm | IP Logged |
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Regardless of whether you use a vocabulary software (such as Anki) or not, there are two sides of the coin.
1 You can never be prepared enough. You can never know which words might be useful later today, tomorrow, next week, next month, next year, in 10 years. Apart from frequency lists, there are also ideas suggesting that you should know certain words (e.g. shoelace), that you you should be able to discuss certain topics and so on. 2 It's important to know what you can ignore. Learning every single word in a dictionary can be useful, but very time-consuming. You say that you want to understand what you're reading. You could save time by looking up words along the way. You may even be able to deduce the meaning from context alone. I'm sure I've seen a number of threads on the same topic. Hopefully other members will chime in. Edited by jeff_lindqvist on 13 October 2013 at 11:53pm 3 persons have voted this message useful | |
| juman Diglot Senior Member Sweden Joined 5016 days ago 101 posts - 129 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English Studies: French | Message 3 of 15 13 October 2013 at 8:16pm | IP Logged |
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If you feel that you want that kind of control why not just pick a source (like a book, a
movie etc). Filter out all words and go through the list. Focus on unknown words and learn them and then read the book, watch the movie etc. That way you have created a controlled environment 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| s0fist Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 4844 days ago 260 posts - 445 votes Speaks: Russian*, English Studies: Sign Language, German, Spanish, French | Message 4 of 15 13 October 2013 at 9:26pm | IP Logged |
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You should reexamine what your end goals are.
For example if you know for sure that after learning all the more frequent words you'll still want to know all the other really rare words you might as well start now. On the other hand if you know you only want the more useful words you can adjust your strategy better based on that knowledge. Since you don't know words like wallow, shrivel, shrubby, mackerel, and dais, you should consider getting a slightly smaller dictionary to peruse. There's a wide variety sizes of dictionaries, anywhere from 10/20/30/40/50/60/70/100/300k range for advanced learners. Another solution is to find a "good" frequency list. That will allow you to learn more words, in proportion to their frequency in spoken or written language. However, after about 30-40k most common words, it might be too hard to correctly assess how useful words will be to you. You can either find a list with a larger corpus or switch to learning words manually after that. After you've learned the most common X thousand words through a frequency list and perhaps amended your knowledge by reading a more focused dictionary you can then decide what to do. If you still want to learn the more rare words, there are lots of lists on the web catered specifically towards rare words, or you can choose to only learn words you personally encounter in your preferred media sources. Edited by s0fist on 13 October 2013 at 9:28pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| montmorency Diglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4626 days ago 2371 posts - 3676 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Danish, Welsh | Message 5 of 15 13 October 2013 at 11:42pm | IP Logged |
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@Kami_77,
Were you talking about the "reading is inefficient" thread? Well, anyway, I think reading is effective. Whether you consider it to be efficient is more difficult to judge. One question is: Can you really learn words from a dictionary (even via Anki), better, or as well as if you learned them from context? That you can learn words from context is presumably proved by the experience of most of us in our native language. All the common words, and a lot more besides were learned from context. Of course we have all had to look up some words in our native language in dictionaries, but that tends to be specialised or unusual words. So, now can you learn words in your target language from context? The answer it: it depends. You need to know sufficient number of words already in your source (whether it be reading or listening, or listening and reading together, or watching TV/films) to give you sufficient context. The proponents of the "reading is inefficient" school of thought would argue that fine, you will learn some new words, but will have "wasted" your time reading over and over again words you know very well. At the risk of going over the old thread again, I'd strongly disagree with that argument, since the more you read (or listen to) your TL, the more you reinforce it. However, I'm also not against reading dictionaries. I do it myself for pleasure sometimes. But at the stage you are probably talking about, it might be best to be reading monolingual TL dictionaries, although that has also been discussed elsewhere on HTLAL (and not a small number of times). Edited by montmorency on 13 October 2013 at 11:45pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Bao Diglot Senior Member Germany tinyurl.com/pe4kqe5 Joined 5564 days ago 2256 posts - 4046 votes Speaks: German*, English Studies: French, Spanish, Japanese, Mandarin | Message 6 of 15 13 October 2013 at 11:56pm | IP Logged |
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A Swedish friend once told me: "We have a word that you really should learn. It's lagom, which means something like 'just right'. It's like doing something perfectly, not because you do everything possible, but because you do just enough to do it well."
She was, of course, right. I'm working on getting that balance between my aspirations, my effort, and my fears of not being good enough. Thankfully I'm not only generally perfectionistic, but I also have a short attention span. I might memorize the first two pages of a dictionary and then ... oh, shiny~! As things are, wallow, shrivel, shrubby and mackerel should be part of my active vocabulary, I have a general idea that dais must be a kind of platform and no clue what a cruet is. I learnt those through extensive exposure and mostly not even bothering to look up words. So my conclusion is that it certainly is possible to pick up relatively low-frequency words from exposure, even though I don't know under which circumstances other people profit from exosure in the same way as I do; and whether they would profit more from themed vocabulary or looking up any unknown word they encounter. I personally tend to not remember much when doing either of those. Why? I remember one day with my host mum in Spain when I was desperately trying to find a word for the small bowls they used for salad and soup, and she simply called them 'platitos', small plates. It completely confused me, because in my mental blueprint, plates are mostly flat, whereas bowls are mostly round. There are of course Spanish words for a bowl shape, but in that family, the members didn't make a distinction of the type of vessel by shape like I did, but by size. Since I made that experience I noticed many little differences in the way people categorize things in their environment. And for me, trying to spot them and memorize them means I try to *reason* with the way a language is used. I want to know the exact boundaries between different expressions, and people can't tell them to me because they use their gut feeling, not exact definitions - most of the time. Of course that's different with scientific and legal terms, but those are relatively easy to learn when you understand the concept behind the word. Even though it's fun to do that every now and then, simply accepting that one word is used to mean something in a certain context, and collecting the ways a word is used by different people in different contexts is more efficient for me. Meaning: I sincerely doubt that learning rare words from a dictionary is something you should try to perfect; IMHO it might even do harm when not supplemented by enough exposure before trying to use those words actively. Try to be reasonable about it. And if you need to learn those low frequency words, why don't you try freerice to find those words you believe you should be able to know, and then look them up properly? Edited by Bao on 14 October 2013 at 12:03am 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Raincrowlee Tetraglot Senior Member United States Joined 6500 days ago 621 posts - 808 votes Speaks: English*, Mandarin, Korean, French Studies: Indonesian, Japanese | Message 7 of 15 14 October 2013 at 8:40am | IP Logged |
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I think there's also the problem of choosing the words based on the English translation of them. Native speakers have a general idea of how common a word is because of their existing knowledge base, but that doesn't transfer over to the new language. For example, wallow is used idiomatically in a phrase like wallowing in misery, but that usage might not be permitted in the target language. I feel you might be painting yourself into a corner by having such an Anglo-centric view of vocabulary acquisition.
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| Andrew C Diglot Senior Member United Kingdom naturalarabic.com Joined 4988 days ago 205 posts - 350 votes Speaks: English*, Arabic (Written) | Message 8 of 15 14 October 2013 at 1:39pm | IP Logged |
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Agree with raincrowlee.
I am a native English speaker and can't recall ever hearing the word shrubby. And although I can have a guess at what it means (like a shrub, right?) I can't think how It would be used in a sentence. I think it is much better to learn from context and not from a dictionary. It might seem inefficient, but actually I think it is the only way. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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