Efficacy in retaining vocabulary (General discussion) Language Learning Forum

Efficacy in retaining vocabulary
Tags: Vocabulary learning
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11 messages over 2 pages: 1 2

albysky
Triglot
Senior Member
Italy
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Joined 4181 days ago
287 posts - 393 votes

Speaks: Italian*, English, German

Message 9 of 11

12 June 2014 at 2:05pm | IP Logged

I wonder how one can retain vocab using word lists , as it seems you are doing since you said you had
set the
Goal of 25 words per day . In my opinion the best way to acquire passive vocab is simply lots of reading
and listening , as you progress some of the passive will turn into active too just through exposure . If you
want to retain words actively , you have to use them , make sentences , use them in conversations and so
on .
1 person has voted this message useful

Retinend
Triglot
Senior Member
SpainRegistered users can see my Skype Name
Joined 4101 days ago
283 posts - 557 votes

Speaks: English*, German, Spanish
Studies: Arabic (Written), French

Message 10 of 11

12 June 2014 at 2:10pm | IP Logged

Doesn't the whole "context" problem of word lists imply that you ought to be memorizing
words and phrases IN some context, rather than going through one "learn vocab" stage and
then eventually going through a completely different "find vocab in context"/"use in
context" stage?

The alternative would be to memorize some continuous text, or list of unrelated sentences
with some clear meaning. I'd like to know what disadvantages this has over
memorizing individual word items.
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tristano
Tetraglot
Senior Member
Netherlands
Joined 3840 days ago
905 posts - 1262 votes

Speaks: Italian*, Spanish, French, English
Studies: Dutch

Message 11 of 11

17 June 2014 at 9:58am | IP Logged

daegga wrote:

Because it isn't. Norwegian is full of loan words, Icelandic isn't (except for some old
Latin loans). Also the choice for preferred synonyms seems to be more continental in
Norwegian than Icelandic (ie. Icelandic retains Germanic words that other Germanic
languages don't use anymore). In consequence there is a higher share of words in
Icelandic you really need to learn (as opposed to just becoming aware of the similarity
to a word you know).
Take a list of the most common 2000 words in Icelandic and Norwegian an count all the
words you could guess with your knowledge of German/English/Dutch. You'll get a much
higher score for Norwegian.

to illustrate, let's assume we learn word pairs
vente - wait --> easy to remember
bíða - wait --> hard to remember
bíða - bide --> somewhere between

Most would put "bíða - wait" into Anki because they have about the same frequency, ie.
a similar prominence in the respective language. "bíða - bide" would be a better match
because they are very similar in appearance. Yet it would still not be as easy to
remember as "vente - wait", because of the huge frequency gap (and as an L2 speaker of
English you might not even know its existence). It's probably easy to establish the
lexical link between "bíða" and "bide", but hard to establish the conceptual link,
which is much more important especially if you want to speak the language, not just
read in it.

Really clear, thank you. So it is not entirely my fault :D

albysky wrote:

I wonder how one can retain vocab using word lists , as it seems you
are doing since you said you had
set the
Goal of 25 words per day . In my opinion the best way to acquire passive vocab is
simply lots of reading
and listening , as you progress some of the passive will turn into active too just
through exposure . If you
want to retain words actively , you have to use them , make sentences , use them in
conversations and so
on .

Well I use spaced ripetition so I will eventually retain it.
Reading and listening is something I can do when I already have the vocabulary or is so
similar to Italian (like Spanish) that I don't need to memorize vocabulary first. But
in some alien language like all the not romance ones and partially Romenian, I can not
simply start to read. When I have between 3000 and 5000 words I can stop learning
vocabulary in this way (if I don't care too much about the language even 2000). But I
start to read when I have at least 700 words (I use always high frequency lists),
otherwise it is tough to understand what is written...
About the number, let's say that my goal is 100 per day, but I cannot do it because I'm
not studying only one language.

Retinend wrote:

Doesn't the whole "context" problem of word lists imply that you
ought to be memorizing
words and phrases IN some context, rather than going through one "learn vocab" stage
and
then eventually going through a completely different "find vocab in context"/"use in
context" stage?

The alternative would be to memorize some continuous text, or list of unrelated
sentences
with some clear meaning. I'd like to know what disadvantages this has over
memorizing individual word items.

Well reading helps to understand the usage of the vocabulary in context.

1 person has voted this message useful

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