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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 |  | |
| Po-ru Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5260 days ago 173 posts - 235 votes  Speaks: English*, Japanese Studies: Korean, Spanish, Norwegian, Mandarin, French | Message 1 of 350 19 April 2015 at 7:30pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||||||||
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Apologies if this has been answered elsewhere but I was looking at my study charts and came
across something I wanted to bring up. I spend about 5-10 minutes per day studying vocabulary for the main languages I am studying (usually 2-3 Japanese, Norwegian, or Spanish). This may not seem like very much but in my totals column, I see that I have studied around 40 hours of Japanese vocabulary over the past year. This is some what of a loaded question but I think it would be smart to ask it anyway. How much time do you believe should be spent studying vocabulary actively? How much do you spend studying vocabulary actively? By actively I mean using things like word lists or flashcards. I for one like these methods as I feel that slowly but surely my vocabulary expands. I aim to incorporate about 3-5 new words a day into each of my master vocab lists. I am just wondering what other's vocabulary study plan looks like. I also recognize that this depends a lot on different factors like previous exposure to the language, native language, former language study, etc., and I think it would be good for people to bring up these differences as well. For example, naturally since I have studied Japanese longer, my Japanese vocabulary study now focuses on more advanced words I have come across from reading newspapers or watching Japanese television shows while my Norwegian vocabulary study still focuses on acquiring common and high frequency words. I guess my questions are then directed a bit more generally and would just like to hear what everyone else does. Thanks 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
| daegga Tetraglot Senior Member Austria lang-8.com/553301 Joined 4301 days ago 1076 posts - 1792 votes Speaks: German*, EnglishC2, Swedish, Norwegian Studies: Danish, French, Finnish, Icelandic | Message 2 of 350 19 April 2015 at 8:03pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||||||||
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I try to keep it minimal per language nowadays, 2-3 minutes. All languages together about
100-200 cards per day in Anki. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Ezy Ryder Diglot Senior Member Poland youtube.com/user/Kat Joined 4129 days ago 284 posts - 387 votes Speaks: Polish*, English Studies: Mandarin, Japanese | Message 3 of 350 19 April 2015 at 8:36pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||||||||
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I don't think counting minutes or reviews is the optimal way of controlling progress with
such methods. One day I might have more reviews, or do them quicker (which also depends on how you review). So I just count the number of words I learn. I also doubt in the value of barely "comprehensible" input (other than motivation), so I focus almost only on vocabulary before compelling input becomes comprehensible (treating intensive reading as a part of it, at times). The most new words I was learning consistently, was 100 a day in Chinese. But that number tends to change from time to time. So, for example, now it's only 20 a day (and I sometimes skip days). 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
| smallwhite Pentaglot Senior Member Australia Joined 5088 days ago 537 posts - 1045 votes Speaks: Cantonese*, English, Mandarin, French, Spanish | Message 4 of 350 19 April 2015 at 9:17pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||||||||
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I think it depends a lot on the language. My target languages (French, Spanish, Italian, German) are very similar to English and to each other, such that very little time is needed for learning grammar or reading. I needed a lot of time to practise Spanish listening, but not the others. So, what's left to learn? Vocabulary. Most of my study time is spent on vocabulary.
My study phases go roughly like this: * About 1 month of overview using a variety of resources. * About 1 month of courses like Teach Yourself. * About 1 month of grammar study and grammar drills. * [By this stage, I can read and understand almost anything - if I had a dictionary]. * Many months of reading easy native materials such as news, listening practice usually with transcripted news, SRSing words from those stuff, SRSing standard learners' vocabulary such as frequency lists and words taken from courses Teach Yourself. * Many months of reading novels, and SRSing the words. During February's 6-Week-Challenge, my Spanish and my Italian were at the last 2 stages described above, and vocabulary-study made up 67.63% of my study time, averaging 2.7 hours per day. See my stats here. It includes time spent copying words and looking up dictionaries, not just the time answering cards. *** Sometimes I look at it another way. I aim at learning 10,000 words. I aim at learning a not-too-difficult language in 500 days. So I have to learn 10,000/500 words per day, which is 20 words per day. But some days I work on listening or grammar instead, so I have to learn 40 words per day instead. *** Yet another way to look at this: Memrising a word takes around 6 seconds x 15 times per year, after which you're likely to know the word pretty well already. So 90 seconds per word. 10,000 words is 900,000 seconds. 900,000 seconds over 500 days is 1,800 seconds, or 30 minutes. But you don't need to SRS all 10,000 words. I tend to SRS about 8,000 words, which would then take 24 minutes per day. I used to use my own SRS which takes just 2 seconds per word instead of Memrise's 6 seconds. So it actually just takes 24 mins / 6 sec x 2 sec = 8 minutes per day. 4 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
| luke Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 6985 days ago 3133 posts - 4351 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Esperanto, French | Message 5 of 350 19 April 2015 at 11:27pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||||||||
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I'm a reluctant SRS user. With multiple languages, I'm even more skeptical, as I occasionally find the wrong language getting mixed into a sentence. It could be a coincidence.
Statistics wise, Anki says over the last year: 41 hours studied, 10.4 minutes average per day. Studied 66% of the days. If I studied every day, that would be 6.9 minutes per day. Average answer time: 6.1 seconds. I think most of my word learning comes outside of SRS. (I use a frequency deck). 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
| robarb Nonaglot Senior Member United States languagenpluson Joined 4839 days ago 361 posts - 921 votes Speaks: Portuguese, English*, German, Italian, Spanish, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, French Studies: Mandarin, Danish, Russian, Norwegian, Cantonese, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Greek, Latin, Nepali, Modern Hebrew | Message 6 of 350 20 April 2015 at 12:15am | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||||||||
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Interesting perspective from smallwhite. That approach to language learning is so fundamentally different from
my own, though I don't doubt it works. I have tried vocabulary study, and it's effective at what it does, but currently I'm not doing it regularly in any of my languages. The activities that add the most words to my vocabulary are: -reading and looking up the unknown words in a dictionary, and -reading extensively and inferring the meaning of whatever words I can. I don't think either of these techniques allow me to learn as many word-definition mappings per hour than dedicated vocabulary study does, but there are other benefits. Reading gives you more exposure to grammar, usage, and culture, plus it's more interesting for most people and you get to learn the content. Let's suppose I want to meet smallwhite's goal of 40 words per day. While I don't necessarily acquire 40 new words each day from reading, in practice for related languages I get a lot of cognates or semi-cognates that I don't learn on any particular day but gradually get better at dealing with as I gain more experience. When I learn a word of Latin, Germanic, Greek or Chinese origin it is often worth 3-15 words because similar words are used internationally. It's hard to measure but I would guess that my total passive vocabulary increases at 40 words per day. (Especially hard to measure because it doesn't increase that much in any one language over a sustained time period.) I think we should be careful about extrapolating rates of word learning during vocabulary study. If you could actually learn an SRS word for each 30 seconds of activity, then during smallwhite's 6-week challenge (s)he would've learned 2.7*60*2 = 324 words a day! Of course this is an overestimate because it takes some time to identify which words to SRS and create the materials and begin and end a session. I also doubt that most people can go through a card every 2 seconds, and it's hard to concentrate for that long. smallwhite, how much time would you guess you've put into vocabulary study in a language by the time you've actually SRSed 8,000 words? Also (there must be research on this), does anyone know the shape of the function between time spent memorizing and items successfully memorized? If there's some kind of fatigue/interference effect, you may not be able to learn twice as many words by spending twice as much time. In that case, the best solution for most people might be to spend 2-10 minutes daily after all. Edited by robarb on 20 April 2015 at 12:18am 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Po-ru Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5260 days ago 173 posts - 235 votes Speaks: English*, Japanese Studies: Korean, Spanish, Norwegian, Mandarin, French | Message 7 of 350 20 April 2015 at 12:58am | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||||||||
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Thanks everyone for the replies. I definitely feel like there are a lot of interesting and intriguing
differences in opinion. Come to think of it now I think SRS may actually be a bit better than what I am doing now. I am sort of doing that manually but I think using SRS to supplement my current approach may be very helpful. I started playing around with Anki to see hot it works. I have been using Quizlet to do this manually and one thing I do like about Quizlet is that it has the sound. So I can get vocabulary training from hearing a word as well as reading it. I am not so concerned with how many words I acquire a day. I mainly use these list more for reference purposes or as my own dictionary but I also use them as vocab list. I study the new words I've added in the past week to the list and generally go from the newer to the oldest. My concern is that I may have been dedicated a bit too much to vocab training but I think that might not be the case. For me keeping these master lists of vocabulary help me to make sure I have some documentation of the words I come across. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
| smallwhite Pentaglot Senior Member Australia Joined 5088 days ago 537 posts - 1045 votes Speaks: Cantonese*, English, Mandarin, French, Spanish | Message 8 of 350 20 April 2015 at 1:45am | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||||||||
I thought I stated clearly that 2.7 hours per day "includes time spent copying words and looking up dictionaries, not just the time answering cards". The 2-second 6-second calculations are card-answering only. Copying words and looking up dictionaries takes 2 minutes per word on average, btw.
Why are you so pessimistic? Everything I wrote in my post turns out impossible or unachievable in your post. Answering a card in 2 seconds average was a fact; I timed myself. If you type 50% slower than I do, then you'd average 3 seconds.
Hard to concentrate for 8 minutes per day? Well, it wasn't hard for me, but if you really need to, you can split that into 4 sessions of 2 minutes each.
I'll let you do the estimation ;p I learned and SRS'd 7972 words within the first 4 months of learning German, studying grammar and other things at the same time. I've learned Spanish for 372 days, have SRS'd about 8500 words, studying grammar and other things at the same time and now I'm pretty sure I can pass DELE C1.
Or maybe it's 2-10 minutes per session, with multiple sessions per day possible. I do multiple sessions per day. People learn enough to graduate from University in 3 years and become managers in 5 years. I don't think a person learning new words maxes out at 2-10 minutes daily.
You're talking as if vocabulary-learning TAKES TIME AWAY from reading. For me, vocabulary-learning LETS ME READ SOONER. I cram 10000 words in, say, 6 months, so that I can read comfortably from the 7th month onwards. As opposed to dragging out the process and knowing (vaguely) just 5000 words after 3 years of study, and still just "enjoying" Harry Potter and bilingual texts.
(I meant I aim at learning 40-per-day ACTIVE vocabulary because I do production cards). I read, too, so I get those cognate etc discounts just like you do. And I SRS on top of that. Bascially, what you do each day, I do half, and the remaining half I SRS. So, with the half same as yours, maybe I will learn 20 words, maybe I won't. With the other half, the SRS half, I know for sure I will learn 20 words. In fact, when I learned my first L2, French, I did not SRS. I felt that I knew many words. It was later that I tried SRS and fell in love, because it was so much more efficient. Now I know words solidly, I know their exact meanings, and I can spell them. I realised that previously with French, I didn't actually know the words; I only had a vague idea. Edited by smallwhite on 20 April 2015 at 2:18am 3 persons have voted this message useful |
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