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How much time studying vocabulary? | ||
Tags: Time to learn | Vocabulary learning | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Learning Techniques, Methods & Strategies |  | |
| chaotic_thought Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 3355 days ago 129 posts - 274 votes  Speaks: English*, German Studies: Dutch, French | Message 289 of 350 26 May 2015 at 12:58pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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Part of this discussion reminds me of my experience when I was learning Japanese. I started with a book that was written using romaji as the teaching script and I supplemented this with some other audio-only materials until I had a basic understanding of how the language works and a basic vocabulary. I never bothered to count the vocabulary except to learn the specific words mentioned in my word lists in my book (which didn't include all words mentioned in the dialogues, but it was enough to understand them).
Afterwards I wanted to be able to read Japanese writing, so I learned (memorized) the table of Hiragana and Katakana. These symbols are fairly straightforward to learn, and are limited in number - approximately 50 Hiragana and 50 Katakana. You can learn them by heart in no more than one week. After having memorized them, one might expect that I should have been able to read a text written using kana just as easily as I could have read the romaji-written version. Unfotunately, it didn't work this way for me. It still took quite a lot of "training" in reading texts before I could read a text written using kana script as easily as I could read the same text written with romaji script. I suspect it works similarly for words as it does for countable characters. Knowing 100 characters by heart is not sufficient for reading text written in the Japanese syllabary because these symbols are not simply random objects that you must identify when reading. These symbols belong to a system, and knowing the objects themselves is only one part of what you are doing when reading You also have to be able to interpret the objects as part of a larger system (i.e. the language itself). So, for those who want to learn 100, 1000, or 10000 words "up front", you can certainly do that. But I suspect you will still need to do significant training before these words actually become part of your "language interpretation system". For example, this is the part of your brain that you need to be able to hear words that are not distinctly pronounced, spoken too quickly, or to interpret words which are written unclearly or perhaps that you skimmed over too quickly for your eye to actually capture them. Unconsciously I think we skip over quite a bit of input processing when we're actually listening to someone or actually reading a text. You don't usually hang on to every character or every word. Edited by chaotic_thought on 26 May 2015 at 1:00pm 5 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5243 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 290 of 350 26 May 2015 at 1:27pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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I have to say that I'm enjoying this dabbling with German so much that I just might actually take up the language
and start a log here at HTLAL after my DELE Spanish exams. While poking around the Net I found this fabulous resource on Youtube, Easy German, with many interviews and dialogs with native speakers. All with transcripts and translation into English. I also found a German pdf of the Harry Potter book I keep referring to. What more could one ask for? Mr. and Mrs. Dursley, of number four, Privet Drive, were proud to say that they were perfectly normal, thank you very much. They were the last people you’d expect to be involved in anything strange or mysterious, because they just didn’t hold with such nonsense. Mr. und Mrs. Dursley im Ligusterweg Nummer 4 waren stolz darauf, ganz und gar normal zu sein, sehr stolz sogar. Niemand wäre auf die Idee gekommen, sie könnten sich in eine merkwürdige und geheimnisvolle Geschichte verstricken, denn mit solchem Unsinn wollten sie nichts zu tun haben. After spending about two hours on this whole thing, it's clear in my mind that the initial goal must be to get the basic grammar up to speed. The big challenges are going to be grammatical gender, case declension, verb conjugation and word order. Unsurprisingly, the first words on the frequency list are the many functional or grammar words that are used all the time. And just a quick glance at the resources we've seen so far tells us that some key verbs include haben, sein, wollen, machen, müssen, dürfen, kommen. These will have to be drilled to death. Frankly, the more I look at this the more I believe that trying to memorize a hodge-podge of 10000 word forms or word families systematically is very inefficient and excruciatingly boring. At least for me. If some people find that it works for them, then be my guest. Edited by s_allard on 26 May 2015 at 2:13pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Ezy Ryder Diglot Senior Member Poland youtube.com/user/Kat Joined 4162 days ago 284 posts - 387 votes Speaks: Polish*, English Studies: Mandarin, Japanese | Message 291 of 350 26 May 2015 at 2:16pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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If you really prefer to plough through several books, constantly referring to a dictionary,
then just do so. I'm not saying everyone has to learn the way I do. Your approach is good for those who need to see results immediately. If you can't stand the thought of studying something you don't need at the very moment, I presume any other way would get you bored and burning out. The approach I use is good for those who don't like studying, and want to get it over with as quickly as possible. I tried going through a book in Chinese, looking words up with a pop-up dictionary, adding them to Anki as I went. I don't think I got past the first chapter, it was so painfully slow, I needed to stop at least once per line. But now, having spent ~139 hours on my vocab deck, and 108 hours on my character deck (I wrote out a third, up to a half of the reviews though, which makes it slower than it needs to be), I can follow a fantasy book, or a Wikipedia article, with greatly reduced need for dictionary look-ups. I have to admit though, I am starting to feel tempted to go through the list of word families I extracted from the first year or so of writing in my log here, memorizing the Cantonese equivalents. Just to see how hard it would be to get to a point where I can start having conversations and all... 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| rdearman Senior Member United Kingdom rdearman.orgRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5049 days ago 881 posts - 1812 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Italian, French, Mandarin | Message 292 of 350 26 May 2015 at 5:13pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
As has been pointed out on numerous occasions in this thread, people are not memorising a "hodge-podge" of words. They are memorising words which they believe will be useful to them. Some people get their words by scraping dictionaries, others by parsing books, still others by collecting sentences from websites.
You continue to argue but you still have not provided any factual evidence to the contrary. Where you get the words is irrelevant, from frequency lists, a "hodge-podge" of words from a book, or from a magic time-travelling fairy. The point is you'll spend less time learning new words if you memorise them from lists. It doesn't matter if the lists are electronic or paper, doesn't matter if they have context sentences, or dictionary definitions, or multiple dictionary definitions. Do you s_allard have any evidence to the contrary to support your claim that learning from books is more efficient? Remember we are using the definition of efficient as: A system (or machine) achieving maximum productivity with minimum wasted effort or expense. If you could please provide factual evidence or links to research that would be greatly appreciated. For example:
Also quoted from the above paper:
Referring to learning via flashcards or vocabulary lists: 1) There is a very large number of studies showing the effectiveness of such learning in terms of amount and speed of learning. See Nation (1982), Paivio and Desrochers (1981) and Pressley et al . (1982) for a review of these studies 2) For fast vocabulary expansion, however, it is not sufficient by itself. There is no research that shows that learning from context provides better results than learning from word cards (Nation, 1982). 3) Direct learning of vocabulary from cards is a kind of form-focused instruction which can have the same benefits, perhaps even more markedly so, than form-focused grammar instruction. (Nation, forthcoming) To your point about the dog-walker neighbour, you will need specific vocabulary after the first few thousand common words.
This paper also makes another point I agree with:
I have said before that memorisation of vocabulary words isn't the be all and end all of learning a language, you still need to know grammar, usage, idioms, etc. But the efficient use of vocabulary learning will give you more time for these important tasks. The paper TESL CANADA JOURNAL/REVUE TESL DU CANADA VOL.7,NO.2,MARCH1990 lists four types of techniques which are: de-contextualizing, semi-contextualizing, fully contextualizing, adaptable. Word-lists, flashcards, and dictionary word-lists are all examples of de-contextualizing. Which is a poor method for vocabulary retention, unless it is coupled with the insertion of context. I'll give you this point, reading is better for retention of the vocabulary when you can guess it from context, but as noted previously you cannot determine context until you've gotten a sufficient coverage of the most common words. In this paper Paul Nation states:
He summarises by saying that vocabulary learning with lists is useful for large amounts of vocabulary to be learned quickly either as a beginner, or when reading in a new field. Learning from context assumes a knowledge of most of the words which make up the context. BTW Learning from context is known as "incidental learning".
And the The Turkish Online Journal of Educational Technology which states:
Although you have publicly denounced the use of frequency lists, the experts believe otherwise. You can read a portion of Paul Nations paper for free here. http://www.corpus4u.org/forum/upload/forum/2005110612351651. pdf
Some other papers you might wish to look at are: https://books.google.co.uk/books?hl=en&lr=&id=j2LXAwAAQBAJ&o i=fnd&pg=PA62&dq=is+it+more+efficient+to+learn+vocabulary+fr om+a+list+or+a+book&ots=ijBTT2NkmY&sig=A6jF60SoYRhH7hBLbpFx2 pci2Fs#v=onepage&q&f=false http://www.researchgate.net/profile/Kate_Cain/publication/22 8753998_Individual_differences_in_the_inference_of_word_mean ings_from_context_the_influence_of_reading_comprehension_voc abulary_knowledge_and_memory_capacity/links/09e4150a2c93b1cd b3000000.pdf http://extranet.das.pac.dodea.edu/principal/Professional%20A rticles/Differentiation/Teach%20Meaning%20Vocabulary.pdf http://www-o.ntust.edu.tw/~syying.lee/publications/RELCSy_yi ngLee.pdf http://extranet.das.pac.dodea.edu/principal/Professional%20A rticles/Differentiation/Teach%20Meaning%20Vocabulary.pdf Admittedly some of these papers make to points you have raised. But I'm not going to quote them, you'll have to find them yourself. :D 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Jeffers Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4722 days ago 2151 posts - 3960 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Hindi, Ancient Greek, French, Sanskrit, German | Message 293 of 350 26 May 2015 at 9:11pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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Thanks for finding these references, rdearman. It will take some time to have a look through all of them. The first paper, Vocabulary: Description, Acquisition and Pedagogy, University of Cambridge makes a point that I've tried to say a few times in this thread. On page 11 of the article (page 10 on the pdf) they argue for learning the 3000 most frequent words by whatever means necessary, and then using other strategies to learn from that point. They call this a "start up vocabulary". I don't think you disagree with that point do you? (So much of the back and forth in this thread has been because people aren't really understanding each other, so please do clarify if you do disagree).
I don't think s_allard has argued against this notion either. What I think s_allard has argued against is the idea of learning 8000+ vocabulary items without context. I don't think this is your position, rdearman, but it's not a straw man either, since we have been given examples of people who have done just this: e.g. the man who learned 8k or so Norwegian (?) words in a few months. Elsewhere on HTLAL there was the case of a French girl who had learned over 20,000 words of English, but complained she couldn't understand sitcoms. Everyone's advice was to practice listening, but her decision was to learn more words! I hope I haven't said anything controversial that anyone would disagree with in the previous two paragraphs. Now I'm going to share my own opinion, which of course you can take or leave... My takeaway point from page 11 of the Nation & Waring article is that it is very efficient to learn the 3000 most common words in a language, even without context since those words are frequent enough that they should keep coming up. However, if learning high-frequency words is efficient, then it follows that as the words become less frequent it is less efficient to learn them out of context (e.g. from a list). The exception is if you create a list based on specific topics. For example, Barron's Mastering French Vocabulary has word lists around given topics such as medicine, education, history, politics, etc. If you want to read a given topic then learning the top 3k words plus a good dose from a book such as this would also be useful. Nation & Waring also mention the University Word List, which I suppose could be combined with the most frequent words of a language to pad out the list. After getting a solid core my own preference would be to learn words based on learning from reading (including putting words into SRS of some kind). Like many others, I have been frustrated by the circles this thread has been going in, so this morning I wrote a detailed post about "my method" on my log. I won't repeat it here, but the reason I wrote it was to get my ideas together in one place so I could think about them. If anyone wants to ask questions or give constructive feedback there, please feel free to comment. Edited by Jeffers on 26 May 2015 at 9:12pm 4 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5243 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 294 of 350 26 May 2015 at 9:53pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Thanks @Jeffers for preventing me from writing a nasty post and getting into trouble with the moderator. It is with some satisfaction that I see the phrase "After getting a solid core..." being used. It may not be in the same sense that I use those words but in essence the idea is that with a good foundation in the language you expand in whatever direction you want to go. I don't need to be lectured on the work of Paul Nation et al. I have referred to his works abundantly here and I agree with most of it. Nowhere have I seen him recommending learning 10000 words from a list. And as someone who has peeved off a lot of people with the idea of a 300-word speaking threshold and the concept of the C2 speaking threshold, I certainly don't have to be convinced that a kernel of 1500 - 3000 word families is a good base for speaking (1500) and reading (3000). Nowhere does Nation suggest that learning a language consists of just learning 3000 words. What he says is that, using whatever tools necessary - including wordlists and flashcards - , the learner should be guided to that sweet spot of around the 3000 high-frequency words. What is also very clear in Nation's thinking is that deliberate vocabulary learning must be associated with four activities or stands: 1 Meaning-focused input (learning through listening and reading) 2 Meaning-focused output (learning through speaking and writing) 3 Language-focused learning (deliberate study) 4 Fluency development (in listening, speaking, reading and writing) Teaching Vocabulary But that's not the current focus of the thread. What Jeffers has so rightly pointed out is that the current discussion is about the systematic memorization of very large quantities of decontextualized words, e.e. 10000 words. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6410 days ago 9753 posts - 15779 votes 4 sounds Speaks: Russian*, English, FinnishC1, Latin, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Danish, Romanian, Polish, Belarusian, Ukrainian, Croatian, Slovenian, Catalan, Czech, Galician, Dutch, Swedish | Message 295 of 350 26 May 2015 at 10:14pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
I often disagree with Jeffers but I'm joining the manifesto, slow learning is deep learning.
I don't do that (and one book would be enough to get the basics). In children's books, pictures can help, and the plot is generally not too complex. One more thing here is that words and syntax can "make sense", even if you don't truly understand them. I get that a lot with Swedish. many elements are familiar, even if I can only get the gist and not understand all individual words. Of course this may lead to illusions, but I don't worry about that. I get my reality checks when I come across something I really want to understand in detail. (Music can make the language feel familiar like that, although in my case it's just due to my experience with Germanic languages) Also, instead of a startup vocabulary, I tend to do narrow input, ie content with a familiar topic (or reading something I've read before, or parallel texts). This whole convo reminded me on this post by frenkeld ages ago, in a thread where Steve Kaufmann tried to prove the superiority of LingQ: If you look at grammar and vocabulary as two pillars of language study, you can define 4 types of learners, based on how they like to approach each of the two: 1) Vocabulary - hard core (word lists, flashcards); Grammar - hard core (grammar study &/or drills). 2) Vocabulary - hard core; Grammar - "natural" acquisition (from input & practice). 3) Vocabulary - natural acquisition (bilingual sources; context; look up the words in a dictionary without recording); Grammar - hard core. 4) Vocabulary - natural acquisition; Grammar - natural acquisition. I am starting to think that you will find learners in each of these categories. You happen to be in category number 2. (I've previously attributed the categories to Chung) Back then LingQ was unusual for being focused on type 2, nowadays this is more common. Type 1 of learners is becoming less common, I think. Of course most do different kinds of activities; the question is how you do the bulk of your learning. And this wasn't made explicit but I think this was mostly about how you reach B2 or maybe low C1. Everyone comes to a point where you mostly improve through practice, although you might work on a specific grammar topic or vocabulary area occasionally. The question is how you get to that point. 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| rdearman Senior Member United Kingdom rdearman.orgRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5049 days ago 881 posts - 1812 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Italian, French, Mandarin | Message 296 of 350 26 May 2015 at 11:37pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
No I agree with this completely.
I don't believe it is necessary to limit your learning to the first 3000 words. And in a number of those papers the experts have pointed out that when you need to know specific vocabulary for a given topic (I'm thinking of s_allards dog-lover example here, or physics professors at the cheese shop) you can learn them out of context. So in these two examples you could learn them either with or without context. I'm just pointing out that for the sake of efficiently word lists are faster. However I thought I'd pointed out in my post that a number of the references I quoted agreed with s_allard and other posters that incidental learning (e.g. via context, or extensive reading) can give a deeper meaning, but I would argue you'd get that deeper meaning eventually anyway.
Errr... no that doesn't really follow. I think you have faulty logic here. The rate of learning from lists is faster than incidental learning regardless of word frequency. In fact it would actually work out the other way around. You'll encounter lower frequency words from say 3000-8000 range more often if you SRS them, than if you depend on a chance encounter in a book. If you're purposefully finding and studying these low frequency words, you'll efficiently learn them faster via a list because you'll encounter them more often. I personally wouldn't consider words in the 3000-5000 frequency range "rare", while they don't show up on every page of a book, they show up often enough. I took some samples from the 3000-5000 range in French. tuerai | kill écouté | listen bourse | scholarship réaliser | achieve jungle | jungle aimable | friendly guide | guide rats | rats prenne | takes gâcher | spoil I think you'd agree these aren't "rare" or obscure words. They might not come up all the time, but they are frequent enough they are worth knowing.
I think here they are talking about really infrequent words, something in the 8000+ range. Here I agree you'd want to either encounter them in a book, or study them because you have some interest in this topic. Also buy this time if you have a good coverage of the first 8000 most common words then it will be much easier for you to pick out the word via context.
Some people have mentioned the use of pop-up dictionaries as a way of learning via context, that isn't actually the case. If you're using a dictionary you're not learning from context you are learning the dictionary definition. Learning from context or incidental learning is when you infer the meaning from the surrounding words and topic clues. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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