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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 |  | |
| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5222 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes  Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 305 of 350 27 May 2015 at 1:33pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
I'm going to have to agree totally here with this post. I think that my own post wasn't clear enough. I was writing with the idea of learning to actively speak German in mind and not only learning to read Harry Potter. But this actually raises an interesting question. Is there a significant difference in the skills necessary for reading and writing a language? I believe there is, as illustrated in the general discussion here. Passive knowledge, as the term suggest, does not require the ability to do anything other than recognize the significant forms and derive some understanding. The key words are the nouns and verbs. Things like grammatical gender, case endings, conjugation, colocations and idioms are not really that essential for some understanding. In fact, one could skip over certain words and enjoy the text quite well. I would argue that there are degrees of understanding but that might confuse the debate. Active knowledge, on the other hand, as the post above has pointed out, requires mastery of how to use the language. With this idea in mind I certainly do suggest that wordlists can be extremely helpful. Although I think that trying to learn 10000 word forms or word families from an unstructured list is very inefficient, I believe that a short structured list can be used as a guide or a sort of road map for approaching the target language strategically. The is the essence of my language kernel idea that so many people like to pooh pooh. I won't go into any detail and thereby fan the flames here but the idea is not that new or complicated. In essence it takes the frequency list idea and injects a heavy dose of grammar and structures the words into functional groups. For example, we know that of the 12000 or more verbs in French, less than 100 account for around 70 - 80% of all verbs in the spoken language. Those are the verb families that one must drill to death. Now, within those verb families, certain verb forms are much more important than others. This is where frequency lists of word forms are useful. We know that in French half of those tenses or tables are hardly used, especially in the spoken language, and within the tables, certain persons are much more frequent than others. So we concentrate on those. We know that certain grammatical words such as pronouns, prepositions and conjunctions are extremely important. We identify the key ones and drill those to death as well. There is probably a small number of key adverbs to study as well. If grammatical gender is important, we look at the word forms frequencies to establish our priorities. So we drill those inflections to death. We know that nouns are a vast open-ended category. One approach is to group nouns by theme such as parts of the body, the house, the family, transportation, food, etc. And one musk keep in mind that nouns may have many different meanings. Using this approach one can create a structured list of 300 or 1000 or 1500 words that are in fact a guide to what you have to know inside out in order to speak the language. Edited by s_allard on 27 May 2015 at 2:51pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Ezy Ryder Diglot Senior Member Poland youtube.com/user/Kat Joined 4141 days ago 284 posts - 387 votes Speaks: Polish*, English Studies: Mandarin, Japanese | Message 306 of 350 27 May 2015 at 1:54pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Why do you insist on putting the words into thematic groups? It causes confusion in the long
term... And what exactly is inefficient about bigger lists? Edited by Ezy Ryder on 27 May 2015 at 1:55pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5222 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 307 of 350 27 May 2015 at 2:25pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
I agree with the observation here that you understand the word after seeing it in context. You might see something like je te tuerai. Does this mean 'I kill you' or 'I will kill you'? The context will tell you. The issue is why put this form in a list and translate it as "kills" when you could use the infinitive tuer as the lemma. As a matter of fact, in the same list there is the infinitive gâcher. What is the purpose of a list like this? Should the learner of French memorize these words before attempting to read native materials in French? If, instead, while reading one is making up a list of words to be reviewed at a later point, then this is something else. I might put tuerai or, preferably, je tuerai, on such a list because I want to be reminded of the future tense form. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5222 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 308 of 350 27 May 2015 at 2:48pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
I'm not sure if the question is about words in functional groups or nouns in thematic groups. Let's start with the first question. The idea of separating words into functional groups is to highlight the common structural features of the group and facilitate the learning. We put the verbs together because they conjugate and are the central element of subject - action pair in the sentence. We put adverbs together because we want to focus on how verbs and adjectives can be modified. We put the prepositions together because we want to isolate the words that are used as a kind of connector between words. Now, the categories are certainly dependent on the nature of the language. I've been talking here about English. These categories probably differ considerably from one language to the other. As for putting nouns into thematic categories such as the body, food, house, family, etc., the idea is pretty simple. It's the idea used in visual dictionaries or many vocabulary books. You put together things that are related or connected in some way. How this is confusing in the long run I don't know. Bigger lists aren't inherently inefficient. The position I take is that systematic preliminary memorization of large unstructured lists, e.g. 10000 words, is an inefficient manner of learning to understand and use the vocabulary of a language. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Ezy Ryder Diglot Senior Member Poland youtube.com/user/Kat Joined 4141 days ago 284 posts - 387 votes Speaks: Polish*, English Studies: Mandarin, Japanese | Message 309 of 350 27 May 2015 at 2:59pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/14640746608400047 Read the penultimate sentence of the abstract
Inefficient compared to what? And how? Edited by Ezy Ryder on 27 May 2015 at 3:00pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| rdearman Senior Member United Kingdom rdearman.orgRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5028 days ago 881 posts - 1812 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Italian, French, Mandarin | Message 310 of 350 27 May 2015 at 3:35pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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A general observation from the papers I linked to earlier was in order to get the same amount of benefit from a word-list or SRS program you should put contextual clues into them. Additionally as s_allard is suggesting the use of grouping these words into thematic categories will also facilitate retention.
So the experts all seem to agree it is efficient to learn words from flashcards, but to improve retention and gather a deeper meaning you should group them and add context such as visual, audio, or textual context. I think s_allard is right and I believe Ezy Ryder is also correct. The ideal "frequency list" to use for the intentional study of vocabulary would have the following elements. - Grouped into thematic categories as well as frequency, so you can produce multiple lists to study (e.g. 100 most common animal words used) - Associated with a sight and/or sound wherever possible and usage of the word in a sentence. With a frequency list like that you'd very quickly pick up enough words to read most novels. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5222 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 311 of 350 27 May 2015 at 4:30pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
Although I really don't want to spend more time on this topic that by now is going in circles, I was curious to see what this article cited here was about. (BTW, I really am irritated when people cite some authority in an argument but give no information about what was being discussed. This is a case in point.) Here are the last two lines of the abstract: Unlike STM, LTM proved to be impaired by semantic similarity but not by acoustic similarity. It is concluded that STM and LTM employ different coding systems. STM = Short Term Memory, LTM = Long Term Memory. This is a very old paper (1966), and a lot of work on memory has been done since. But that's a minor point. What is more important is the definition of semantic similarity. Since I didn't feel like paying for the complete article, I had to do some rummaging around the Net to find out how cognitive psychologists use the term semantic similarity. Basically semantic similarity is how words are associated with each other; words that share elements of meaning are considered to be similar. "Light" and "candle" go together. So do "stove" and "heat". I don't see any connection between this idea and that of putting vocabulary items into thematic groups. The words are not grouped by semantic similarity. They are grouped by physical proximity. For example, a visual dictionary will show the picture of a face and have little arrows and labels naming parts of the face. So we have words like le nez, l'oreille, la bouche, l'oeil, le menton, la dent, etc. The theme, i.e. the face, is being used as a mnemonic device to bind all the other elements. I can see people forgetting words in the long run but not really mixing up le nez and la dent. This article is another attempt to inject a red herring into the debate. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| chaotic_thought Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 3334 days ago 129 posts - 274 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Dutch, French | Message 312 of 350 27 May 2015 at 5:03pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
Differences between things like 'I kill you' vs 'I will kill you' are grammatical differences. The grammatical effect of adding ''ll' or 'will' to the subject of an actor produces a specific grammatical effect in English. This effect might be expressed completely differently in another language. By the way, the English sentence 'I kill you' doesn't make much sense to me unless we're clarifying which one of us will be doing the killing, as in. "No, no. I kill you." Anyway, it's better to learn with real examples and not contrived ones like this. Also important is to learn what sorts of idiomatic things people are likely to say in your target language, like for example when we say "I could kill him!", we're usually expressing a certain kind of emotion targetted at someone and not declaring an intention to murder someone.
You can put whatever you want on your list. I would put whatever helps you to remember the word. If making fine details about grammatical distinction like 'kill' vs 'kills' vs 'will kill' vs 'a possibility to kill at some point in the not-too-distant future' helps you remember the word, then you could do that. But more likely you know the word 'tuer' already as it belongs to the basic vocabulary of the language. So I would just write 'tuer' as for me it is the identification of the conjugation pattern that actually presents a problem to me, not the word itself: tuerai -> tuer jouerai -> jouer conduirai -> conduire This sort of 'reverse conjugation table' approach is more helpful to me because I can just focus on the conjugated forms that I see most frequently. But some other people like studying conjugation tables in the other way direction (infinitive -> conjugated form 1, conjugated form 2, ...). To give such a list a 'context', imagine the listing contains words that help you to read a particular book or article. Whenever you do a review reading of that book/article/audio recording/etc., you can optionally use the list to remind how to interpret something. With time you will need to consult this list fewer and fewer times. Edited by chaotic_thought on 27 May 2015 at 5:15pm 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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