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Super-fast vocabulary learning techniques

 Language Learning Forum : Learning Techniques, Methods & Strategies Post Reply
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tommus
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 Message 185 of 255
25 December 2008 at 11:58am | IP Logged 
tigernerve wrote:

In dutch for example you would write, "Top nederlands woorden" That's how they say "Dutch" in Dutch.   


Unfortunately, that search in Google returns only one hit which doesn't seem to be useful.

I think it is best to build frequently used word lists from the material you normally read. It is fairly simple in Java and other computer languages to parse words by frequency. I think there are websites that do that but I don't have a URL. I use a homemade Java program that parses Dutch words plus the English translation. However, the result is still a list to be memorized. And I get bored with that very quickly.

I find the best technique seems to be phrases (not single words and not long sentences) in Anki, so you see the words in simple context.


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tommus
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 Message 186 of 255
25 December 2008 at 1:10pm | IP Logged 
I see that "1000 Nederlandse woorden" produces a lot of good hits. 2000, etc. also work.

One "top" list seems to have an unexpected order. http://ordbok.lagom.nl/stats/stats-nl-01.nl.html

Number one is ik (I). Number 4 is het (the least common form of the) and the most common form of the (de) is only number 14. Sweeds and Sweden are 35 and 45. So it doesn't seem like a true top 1000 Dutch words. Still useful.

Another 1000 Dutch words list: http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Appendix:1000_basic_Dutch_word s


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William Camden
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 Message 187 of 255
15 February 2009 at 3:39pm | IP Logged 
I tend to use colour a lot when writing down vocabulary or highlighting words (I picked the idea up in this forum somewhere). The L2 word is typically in red, often a little larger than the translation, if I write the translation at all rather than simply relying on memory, and the translation will be in another colour, like blue, green or black. Visual stimulation is important in study, I find.
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Iversen
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 Message 188 of 255
15 February 2009 at 5:08pm | IP Logged 
When I described my word list method in the first part of this exceeding long and complicated thread I did write that each language should be written in its own colour (though only on a particular sheet of paper, - I don't have green, red or blue languages). The reason is that you then much easier can ignore one of the languages and focus on the other.

In other threads I have written about my grammar sheets on thick green paper, where endings and affixes all have different colors. I recently commented on the verbal system of Tagalog in my language learning log, and for the sheet I produced there I needed no less than four colours in order to show the mechanics of that language.

Edited by Iversen on 16 February 2009 at 9:29am

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Tyr
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 Message 189 of 255
16 February 2009 at 5:56am | IP Logged 
I find my best way of learning words is to learn their source and where possible also to equate them to similar English words- this is only in Germanic and occasionally romance languages of course.
If only such information was included in ways of learning words...

I tried 'albis' recently and it is rather good but its words seems very useless. I don't really need to talk about planets and high tides....

P.S. Would anyone know of a good Swedish word list? All I can find so far is the wiktionary ones which aren't great.

Edited by Tyr on 16 February 2009 at 6:04am

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William Camden
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 Message 190 of 255
16 February 2009 at 7:16am | IP Logged 
Iversen wrote:
WHen I described my word lists in the first part of this exceeding long and complicated thread I did write that each language should be written in its own colour (though only on a particular sheet of paper, - I don't have green, red or blue languages). The reason is that you then much easier can ignore one of the languages and focus on the other.

In other threads I have written about my grammar sheets on thick green paper, where endings and affixes all have different colors. I recently commented on the verbal system of Tagalog in my language learning log, and the sheet I produced there I needed no less than four colours in order to show the mechanics of that language.


It was almost certainly one of your posts I got the idea from. I also notice an increasing trend to have headwords in dictionaries in a different colour from the black text (using blue, red, orange and other colours) and it probably reflects trends in educational psychology. Collins may have started the trend.
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Iversen
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 Message 191 of 255
17 February 2009 at 3:37am | IP Logged 
To Tommus: I don't quite understand why you want to find those "1000 word"-lists. Those that I have seen had all less information on each word than a normal dictionary. The only argument could be that you want to learn the most frequent words first. But consider this: the most frequent words are often function words like pronouns, prepositions and things like that, and because they are so frequent they are involved in a lot of idiomatic expressions, and if they are inflected they often are irregular. You can't learn anything about that from a simple list of words.

My advice for learning the basic word stock would be to learn the words in context from real texts or from text books, - if a word is common enough you are bound to meet it again and again in even the most simple texts. But unlike the most ardent proponents of 'learning from context' I would supplement this with more formal methods like word lists or flash cards or whatever (or even '1000 words'-list, but only to spot the holes when you already know most of the words)

Some word lists are written on the basis not of frequency, but of themes: birds, family members and so on. Those are in my opinion only valuable if they describe in detail what each word means, - but that is normally done much better in a book about that theme, maybe combined with a good dictionary. For instance if you want to learn the vocabulary of cooking then read a book about cooking. Again, such word lists should only be used to check the holes in your vocabulary, not to learn the whole list from.

Word lists are for me a very important tool, but only as a memorization aid, and in general they function best for that purpose when you compile them yourself. I have written a lot about how to optimize them for that purpose, so I'm not going to repeat that here.


Edited by Iversen on 17 February 2009 at 3:46am

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William Camden
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 Message 192 of 255
27 August 2009 at 12:45pm | IP Logged 
Nothing new to add, but I will give this thread a bump. Rather than asking the same questions again and again, people should learn from the wisdom of the ancients (well, 2007...) :)


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