Vocabulary acquisition techniques

[SunLight]

I was wondering,
if any of you is learning a new language, which technique, if any, do you use to increase your vocabulary?
 
I know it's not a good idea to ask this in a gaming forum, since even in specialized forums I would get the usual answers like 'just find your way', 'just study and don't talk about studying instead' etc. etc.
 
And btw, another problem with those websites is, if someone speaks 10+ languages and uses a given method, then he/she is probably a genius and that method could not work for me. If they speak 0 languages or an easy (close to their native language) one, then you can't easily trust their methods.
 
Coming to the point, I was trying to find a way that works for someone who's superlazy, with mental exhaustion and who can focus for 10 minutes max like me ^^
 

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Looking at some statistics about word frequency from novels, subtitles, etc. (for Japanese, but it should be more or less the same for every language, since the distribution is similar ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zipf%27s_law ) I noticed that 15000 words cover 93% of the average text. I know roughly 2500, covering only 80% (and I can't understand anything, so it's obviously not enough) 93% might seem a lot, but it means there is still lots of unknown words, now how do I go from that tiny 2500 to 15000 words in a reasonable amount of time? Every method works, but you don't wanna spend ages doing something you could do faster.
 
Again from those stats I've got, in order to review 15000 unique words just by reading random stuff, you need to read 260000 words, i.e. you need to read like 2-3 novels, but that takes time for such a difficult language, let's say 1-2 months. That means I need memory traces strong enough to last 1-2 months at least, and to get there from 0-1 days intervals (i.e. short term memory, or no trace at all) SRS seems the most logical way to go http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spaced_repetition
But if I want to use, let's say, Anki (imho the best of those SRS tools, and also free) (http://ankisrs.net/) the problem is, what kind of cards should I put?
 

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As usual, in life everything has pros and cons, otherwise it would be easy to choose :s
 
- Just Words
pros: you can review very quickly
cons: boring, no context, you don't see the word in action. In this case word lists are probably a better option that SRS (imho)
 
- Whole Sentences
pros: you get context, and if you use sentences you actually found while reading, they are meaningful and interesting to you.
cons: slower reviews, and you could end up learning the sentence and not the word.

e.g. if I have a sentence like 'this morning I went to the library, and read a book', and you don't know the word 'library' maybe you remember the whole sentence, and your brain fools you into believing you know what 'library' means, but then in the sentence 'there is a library nearby' you won't get it.
 
- Sentences with 'cloze deletions' (like the MCD method suggested at this website, useful not only for Japanese http://www.alljapaneseallthetime.com/blog/10000-sentences-is-dead-long-live-mcds)
 
pros: here you cannot trick yourself, because you need to guess the word, e.g. 'this morning I went to the [...], and read a book', back of the card: library

And also you train your active vocabulary, because you have to produce a word, and not just recognize it.
cons: you can do this easily only if you can understand (almost) all the words in the sentence but one, possibly you need to put a hint, in which case you can just be lazy and look at the hint (as if it was a single word card), making the whole thing useless.

 

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In other words, all these methods seem to be flawed in some way

And another thing, I noticed that Anki and SRS in general is not only boring as hell (well, study is meant to be boring otherwise it's not study), but it really works when you need to keep in memory things you already know (i.e. you can remember them for at least a couple of days) and not to study unknown items.

 

I learned a bit of German without doing *any* SRS, word lists, etc. (just by reading/listening) but for 'the real thing', i.e. languages like Japanese, Chinese, etc. hard and not related at all with your own language, that doesn't seem to be possible in a reasonable amount of time. I need to get away from that 'I don't understand almost anything' advanced-beginner kind of level, and do it quickly. How? I feel like I wasted lots of time with wrong methods and I would like to move forward.

 

What do you think?

Edited December 30, 2014 by SunLight

[Platonic]

Well, it might be a bit off your question, but imo the best way by far to learn foreign languages, is by being forced to speak them/write them. Go and make some posts on English gaming forums, make a journey to France, pm with people in their native languages and so on. That's my method at least.

[SunLight]

Well, it might be a bit off your question, but imo the best way by far to learn foreign languages, is by being forced to speak them/write them. Go and make some posts on English gaming forums, make a journey to France, pm with people in their native languages and so on. That's my method at least.

Obviously when you need to use a word in your everyday life it will stick much faster, but we are talking about thousands of them...

 

Let's say I join a Japanese gaming forum, then what do I write? Active usage is much harder than passive understanding, and I don't have even that.

Probably I would have to google a lot of things, to check how you say this and that, in a way I would be forced to actively find information about some words, grammar rules, etc. and it would probably be easier to remember, after all that searching.

 

So I get your point, learning things you really need now, and not learning a big list of random words just because you'll need them in the future. But I would have to learn at least 10-20 words per day and *keep* them in memory. If you learn (and don't forget!) 10 words per day (every day, no Sundays, skipping days etc.), it takes you 4 years to get to 15000.

 

10 words might seem easy, but when a language is totally unrelated to yours, it's like learning 10 random numbers in the phone directory (does it still exist? ) every day, and remember the ones you did yesterday, last week, last month, etc.

 

Given that it took me 4+ years to get to 2500 (well, I didn't study almost at all, just lazily read stuff and watched anime) I guess the lazy approach doesn't work for Japanese, or it would take me 20(!) years to get there

 

I was talking about methods that allow you to consistently learn at least 10 (possibly more) words per day

Edited December 30, 2014 by SunLight

[SunLight]

an interesting tool I've never used is sub2srs (to be used along with Anki)

http://subs2srs.sourceforge.net/

 

as usual it's Windows only, what's more .net maybe with wine it could work...

 

It would be interesting to go through a movie or anime episode, and create a flashcard with the screenshot + the sentence with cloze deletion of the word you need to learn.

Human brain is very good with images usually, and that extra context might make it easier to remember the missing word, but I don't wanna learn rare words in this stage, rather than using sub2srs to do all the subs, I could just screenshot manually with vlc media player only the sentences I find suitable

 

A problem with these things is, you need to do a lot of work just to create these flashcards, but all the typing could count as study as well ^^

[VanDuyvesteijn]

I was wondering,

if any of you is learning a new language, which technique, if any, do you use to increase your vocabulary?

 

Do you know the website www.duolingo.com? There you can sign up and learn all kinds of languages right away. It is free and works with sentences, words and pronunciation at the same time. If you give some wrong answers the program combines them into new exercises! I learned a bit Spanish and tried to improve my English, much enjoyable!

Btw, since we're all gamers, progression also gives medals and xp in-game, very motivating haha

[Unknown]

Speaking that is creating the whole sentences by the words you know and you might need to use, i.e. You try to express yourself and you try to use as much words as you know. Speaking of course might not bring the expected results if you would speak all the time about the same weather I would also recommend watching movies with subtitles. 

P.S. Actually I've studied all that stuff connected with teaching/learning activities and if you have any questions, just go on here

[SunLight]

Do you know the website www.duolingo.com? There you can sign up and learn all kinds of languages right away. It is free and works with sentences, words and pronunciation at the same time.

nice, but I'm learning Japanese and that site doesn't support that language it seems. I might try it with German in the future.

 

Speaking that is creating the whole sentences by the words you know and you might need to use, i.e. You try to express yourself and you try to use as much words as you know. Speaking of course might not bring the expected results if you would speak all the time about the same weather I would also recommend watching movies with subtitles. 

P.S. Actually I've studied all that stuff connected with teaching/learning activities and if you have any questions, just go on here

At the moment I'd like to get a basic understanding rather than speaking (ofc speaking would be great, but I would be happy if I could read books or listen to audiobooks, or watch movies)

 

Unluckily I suffer from chronic depression among other things, so my mental stamina is very low, and I have a hard time focusing on anything. In my condition learning 20 words per day is probably too much, but given that some people do much more, I can't and won't lose to them! ^^

 

In my word list there are roughly 600 words I looked up recently, but I still don't know them, 600 is perfect for a small 1-month challenge now the problem is how to drill them into my lazy brain

 

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I found out already that Anki is useful only to remember things I already know (short term memory lasts only a few seconds, by the time you see another card you have forgotten the previous) that is, useful only to move items from medium-short term memory to long term, reviewing, but not learning.

 

I think I'll try a slightly modified version of the 'Iversen' wordlist method.

That is:

- learn in groups of 7 items (not too big, not too small for short term memory)

- hide the translation and go through the list, every time I fail I shuffle the list (impossible on paper but computers are useful here)

- when I can do all 7 words from Japanese to English (it would be cool if I could find a Japanese-Italian dictionary, but it's hard to find, so I have to study a foreign language using another foreign language...) then I do the same En->Jp

- if I pass a block multiple times, then I move to another block of 7, maybe I do something different for 5 minutes, to test if I can still remember them

 

of course you really know a word when you find it in a 'real' text and you understand it, but all this pre-memorization work is useful to get something in your brain, so you can make a link later when you read.

 

Another thing I noticed is, I remember perfectly (even after weeks) and without effort the fact that I looked up a word in the dictionary, and the meaning, and which text it was in, but I can't remember the word itself. orz

[SunLight]

Up to now I added 85 new words in 2 days, which is more than 40/day. Boring but effective, and it doesn't take *that* much. If only I could keep this pace it wouldn't be bad. Let's see if today I can add another 40.

 

I summarize here again what I do:

 

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I have 2 lists, let's call them list1 and list2.

 

Every day:

 

- I read the words I did the day before in list1, if I still remember them I move them to list2.

- I read all the words in list2, if I forgot some I move them back to list1.

 

At this point, in list1 I have only unknown words in blocks of 7 elements each. I do 1 block at a time.

 

I look at the words together with their translations, maybe I add some sample sentence, then without looking at the list I try to remember those 7 items.

I don't necessarily think about the translations, I just make sure I am perfectly aware of what I'm saying (for example, if a native English speaker says 'book' he/she doesn't think about the word in another language, it's all about knowing what you're talking about) sometimes it's hard to do, so I think about the translation, or I try to remember the sentence.

 

If I'm able to remember (without looking at anything) all 7 items, I hide the column with words, and I check whether I can go back from translation to word, and vice versa.

 

After doing a block I test myself on all the blocks I did in list1 (but not list2, I check that one only once a day) and I move to another block of seven.

 

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The more words I move to list2, the more time it will take me to review it daily. When I think it's too big (up to 150-200 words is ok, given taht you need 2-3 seconds to review a word in a list) I pick the ones I am more confident with, keeping that list always with no more than 200 words. These words going out need still to be reviewed, so I put them into Anki or another multilevel word list, but I won't review them every day of course.

 

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That's it... no pain no gain Obviously doing this I don't know the language, I am just putting those words aside in my memory so that whenever I meet them in a real sentence I can hopefully remember them, and reinforce the memory with a real sentence.

 

I hope this can be useful to someone (actually, during the time I used to write this I could have learned those 40 words for today, but we always tend to postpone boring things )

 

p.s.

a note about Japanese - since that is the language I am learning, skip it if you are not interested - I memorize words using our writing system, until I am confident I know them quite well. Why? Because I can write 900 kanji and I recognise an extra 500 of them, so Chinese characters are a hint, and I don't want hints, I want to be sure I understand a word when someone says it.

 

Let's take the word for 'this year' (今年, read 'kotoshi') if I just see the kanji 今年 I know that the first one means now, and the second means year, so I can sort of guess the meaning, but not necessarily the reading (今 and 年 can be read in many ways). If I write it as kotoshi (actually I write koTOSHI to remember the pitch accent) I know the word but not necessarily the meaning.

 

If I used furigana (word with reading on top) then I would have both a hint on the meaning *and* the reading, so I could wrongly believe I knew the word, while in reality I didn't.

[Springfield-]

First off.. you need to learn the verbs, pronouns etc, the vocabulary comes latter

once you've learned these things and get some vocabulary.. look for online tv channels in the language you're learning (it's good to improve your pronunciation and listening skills  by listening to native speakers).

Google translater is a very good tool for pronunciation practice as well

if there is support for it to read the text in the language you're interrested...

Edited May 14, 2015 by SPRINGFIELD22

[Aniky]

When i was learning Portuguese i started with the basics, such as numbers, days and basic words that are used in conversation, it helps that u are actively using the language in day to day basis as only that will maintain your brains to function and use the knowledge u already gained, without forgetting anything.

Also some sites like https://www.busuu.com/enc/ helps with it as well as the offer basic studies that u can learn from, at least at the beginners phase.

[SunLight]

First off.. you need to learn the verbs, pronouns etc, the vocabulary comes latter

once you've learned these things and get some vocabulary..

Get some vocabulary, but how? ('some' actually means 10000+ words here, because below that you can't read in a foreign language without using a dictionary all the time).

 

Let's say I am reading some text, and I don't know what a word means, I look it up in the dictionary. After 1 minute (if not less) I don't remember it anymore. Sometimes I remember I looked up a word meaning 'x', but I don't remember the word itself.

 

In the absolute beginner stage this is not a problem, because those words will probably appear almost every day, and you will be reading some textbook anyway, you can't really read 'real' stuff.

But after a while, you get to a point where you have to wait weeks (if not months) before meeting an unknown word again, and yet these 'rare' words cover like 10%-20% of the text, so you can't even ignore them. How do you keep them in your memory in between?

[Aniky]

Get some vocabulary, but how? ('some' actually means 10000+ words here, because below that you can't read in a foreign language without using a dictionary all the time).

 

Let's say I am reading some text, and I don't know what a word means, I look it up in the dictionary. After 1 minute (if not less) I don't remember it anymore. Sometimes I remember I looked up a word meaning 'x', but I don't remember the word itself.

 

In the absolute beginner stage this is not a problem, because those words will probably appear almost every day, and you will be reading some textbook anyway, you can't really read 'real' stuff.

But after a while, you get to a point where you have to wait weeks (if not months) before meeting an unknown word again, and yet these 'rare' words cover like 10%-20% of the text, so you can't even ignore them. How do you keep them in your memory in between?

 

 

A simple trick would be by writing those words down and repeat them on day to day basis, if u really are all in by learning these new words, then i assume the amount used by learning it wont cause a problem either. The thing is that when learning new language, brains (specially at older ppl, 20+) don't really function same way of learning as they do at younger age, therefor u will need to repeat the process of reading those words every day, or at least try to do read it every day so that your brains can actually start memorizing those words and later on remember it.

[SunLight]

At the moment the technique I'm trying is this (since I was too lazy to go on with the 'words only' method I mentioned before in this thread, which is boring as hell)

 

- I read stuff in the target language (ofc this can be done only when you get past the 'absolute beginner' stage, but you can still read dialogs from textbooks or easy material, if you can't read stuff written by natives for natives)

- If I understand a sentence I don't do anything (obviously ^^). Same for sentences I can't understand even if I look up stuff in dictionaries, or check grammar books. It means they are too much advanced for me (could be because of idioms, dialects or slang I don't understand, hard grammar, etc.)

- When I understand a sentence after I look up stuff in the dictionary (and only if I think I might need those words in the future) I copy it in a text file.

 

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For example in the JP Wikipedia page for Wolfenstein ET, talking about medics it says (in bold are the words I didn't understand, it doesn't matter here if you can read it or not, I'm just explaining what I do, and it can be done for every language. Probably the only thing you understood is HP ^^):

仲間の回復や蘇生を業務とする。HPが高く、また特別な動きをあまり必要なく死にづらいので初心者に人気がある。

 

Since I can't understand the first sentence only because I don't know those words (蘇生 = revive, 回復 = heal, 業務 = duty, task) I copy the sentence (and maybe leave the other one for context, even if I can understand it fully). In this case actually, 3 unknown words in such a small sentence are a bit 2 much maybe.

 

- So I end up with a text file where I put all these sentences with highlighted words. I study the words separately. With Japanese there is an extra difficulty, because not only I have to understand (for example) that 'sosei' means 'rebirth/resuscitation', but also that those 2 Chinese characters (蘇生) have that reading (sosei), which is not exactly obvious, at least for me.

 

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I read that text file every now and then, and if I manage to understand an old sentence (from 2 days before or so), I put it into an Anki (http://ankisrs.net/) deck for review. I don't add it to Anki straight away because I think Anki is good only when you don't want to forget something you know, but it's not so good when it comes to learning new stuff.

 

This way I will 'keep understanding' that sentence (or hopefully another sentence with those words) in the future as well. The problem is all these sentence reviews could snowball into a nightmare of hundreds of daily reviews, because I should put at least 10 every day.

[audrey]

The best way to learn a language for me is to watch show in that language with your subtitles. I knew English pretty good by the age of 8 because I watched Friends my whole childhood. When I was little I also watched multiple spanish and italian soap operas, and thats why I kinda understand those languages when I hear them too. I took classes of Italian for 2 years, French for 2 months and Russian in one semestery, for 2 months, and I still think best way are shows/films and not courses. Though you might have problems with grammar if you're learning it through tv shows

I plan to learn Italian by myself soon again, have some grammar books, have a few films, and will download some audio stuff too. I believe I have advantage because of those 2 years of Italian in highschool

[Scream]

The best way to learn a language for me is to watch show in that language with your subtitles. I knew English pretty good by the age of 8 because I watched Friends my whole childhood. When I was little I also watched multiple spanish and italian soap operas, and thats why I kinda understand those languages when I hear them too. I took classes of Italian for 2 years, French for 2 months and Russian in one semestery, for 2 months, and I still think best way are shows/films and not courses. Though you might have problems with grammar if you're learning it through tv shows

I plan to learn Italian by myself soon again, have some grammar books, have a few films, and will download some audio stuff too. I believe I have advantage because of those 2 years of Italian in highschool

This.

It's also good to just move to the country with the language you want to learn. That's how I learnt Spanish when lived in canary islands. Thanks to Spanish I found it easier to learn Italian, these are just two great languages to learn.