Any way of turning passive vocabulary into active vocabulary?

[IronMike]

To answer the question the OP actually wanted to ask...

One big problem I always noticed with my linguists is the way they studied their flashcards: L2 to English. Almost exclusively. That was fine for the DLPT L & R. I would take their stack of cards away from them and flip them. Then quiz them English to L2.* Much harder, but once you can do a stack in that direction, the words stick.

This of course is not the only thing you should do. As others say above, you gotta use your productive skills if you want your L2's vocabulary to enter into your active vocab.

*Edit: Of course I mean, L1 to L2.

[Lisa]

My experience agrees with @IronMike: I need to do the english-to-L2 anki cards if I want to actually really know a word, otherwise I sort of know the shape (and what definitions exist in my deck) and I'm good at guessing. I tried studying just L2->english, but it wasn't effective.

For simple, obvious words, concrete nouns like animals and body parts and basic adjective like colors, I think learning both ways by Anki has made them active, not passive (for me, at least). But there's nothing like meeting a word in reading or listening to make it solidify in your head, and hard or abstract things need a lot of encounters.

@SamT, I wish I'd known how separate these skills are when I started on Spanish couple of years back, I learned to read, and thought speaking would magically come along for the ride; it was an unpleasant surprise...

[Kraut]

I have turned my MP3 Glossika material into an anki deck.

It shows the written English sentence and I am trying to recall the chinese sentence. The answer card has the chinese sentence and the audio (repeats the spoken sentence about eight times) and I try to repeat it. It was pretty difficult - I have done about 500 sentences


Would having the spoken English sentence instead of the written sentence as the prompt would be useful??

I think so, listening and speaking are engrained in our biological heritage, while reading and writing are an "invention" that derive from our capacity of face recognition, Dehaene and others have shown this. I do record my translations into German and practice my texts via consecutive (oral) back-translation.

[Flickserve]

I have turned my MP3 Glossika material into an anki deck.

It shows the written English sentence and I am trying to recall the chinese sentence. The answer card has the chinese sentence and the audio (repeats the spoken sentence about eight times) and I try to repeat it. It was pretty difficult - I have done about 500 sentences


Would having the spoken English sentence instead of the written sentence as the prompt would be useful??

I think so, listening and speaking are engrained in our biological heritage, while reading and writing are an "invention" that derive from our capacity of face recognition, Dehaene and others have shown this. I do record my translations into German and practice my texts via consecutive (oral) back-translation.

Thanks for the reply. I do get a bit bored of the daily reviews just reading the English and trying to translate.

I will add the English voice in. Perhaps having a mixture of voice and written prompts to translate into L2 will be more interesting.

[Brikelmer]

There are several variations, but the most important thing I found is a constant practice. If you don’t use the language apparatus, it will simply atrophy, so you need to work with it regularly. Go to various thematic and not so serious sites in the language of interest you have and read them, communicate with native speakers (very important) or at least with people that have a healthy knowledge of the language. Talk in person or chat online. All this translates the language from passive to active. I myself learn Chinese online, and I can say that practice was needed regularly for me. It is advisable to repeat the material you have covered or work with your teacher at the pace you enjoy.

[terricota]

This sounds like a good use of the clozemaster site where in effect, you're learning and reviewing vocabulary in sentences.

[Iversen]

Think while you listen to your target languages - simple thoughts at first and then more complex thoughts later on. Babble if you can't resist the temptation and won't be disturbing anybody else. And avoid multiple choice test and idiotic puzzles if you do use textbooks. The name of this thread is not converting passive vocabulary into passive vocabulary any longer, and that was the only thing you could expect from those two activities.

[golyplot]

Think while you listen to your target languages - simple thoughts at first and then more complex thoughts later on. Babble if you can't resist the temptation and won't be disturbing anybody else. And avoid multiple choice test and idiotic puzzles if you do use textbooks. The name of this thread is not converting passive vocabulary into passive vocabulary any longer, and that was the only thing you could expect from those two activities.

I assume you mean think in the TL?

I don't know about others, but I've always found that to be supremely unhelpful advice. I think having thoughts in the TL is a consequence of high language proficiency, not the reverse. You may as well tell people to just "get good".

[Iversen]

And I think having thoughts in the TL is an important, bordering on indispensable step in the direction of high language proficiency.

You may as well tell people to just "get good" - says Golyplot. And I agree - I do tell people to get good, but I also try to mention things that could help them to achieve that. Like for instance thinking in the target language.

But maybe I have to be a bit more specific. In some language learning systems people are expected to speak from day one, like for instance by being ordered to say "my name is .." plus their name in their exotic new language. Maybe you can speak before you have thought about what you are going to say, but I can't. So in these systems you need to think from day one, albeit in very simple and strictly regulated terms (which in my opinion is an abhorrent idea).

I'm somewhat more lenient: I accept a silent period in the beginning where you collect words and study grammar, but first and foremost try to absorb the language by listening and reading to comprehensible content without the obligation to produce utterances yourself. And to help you do that there are things like graded readers and bilingual printouts etc. etc.

However that phase shouldn't last forever. At some point you will probably want to activate all that passive knowledge, and then you have to cook up something to say (or write) - and that means that you have to think. It doesn't have to be a second Mahabharata - just a few words that hang together in the beginning ("this is a book"), and then you can make those fragments longer and longer and maybe make up fragments where there are any holes until you have become fluent in the language.

To put your brain in a state where it almost craves to get an opportunity to stitch words together there is a mental state I call 'the buzz' The buzz comes when you are so inundated with more or less comprehensible input that your brain starts spinning, and my experience is that it then also starts to produce content itself. But probably not if you are a total newbee - at least some of the input has to be understandable enough to stir your mental faculties, and you need to know some words and sentence patterns already. On the other hand it is not necesssary already to be an accomplished speaker - I would say that B1 or B2 in the usual framework would be more than enough to experience the buzz. And stitching a few words together can start even before that.

[einzelne]

The best advice can be found in Michael West's Teaching English in difficult circumstances – "read and tell" technique.

You read a chunk of text and then immediately try to reproduce it without looking into it, as if you're addressing someone. First, it will be a phrase, then a sentence, then a two, then a paragraph, then a page. First, you will reproduce the text word by word, then, once you get confident and the chunks get bigger, you will start to rephrase it in your own words (keeping new words and expressions, of course) — since it's hard to retell a paragraph, let alone a page by heart. If you also practice speaking with native speakers, you will see how some of new expressions will start to infiltrate your speech.

Caveat: don't try to learn the text by heart! It's dumb and ineffective. The key is to increase the difficulty slowly and gradually. Even if you passive skills are strong, I would recommend to start with dialogues and texts from textbooks and adapted books first.

Personally, I find it way more effective than shadowing. It's super versatile since you can choose the training texts for yourself: it can be a fiction book, a transcript of a TV series or a TED talk, or a radio broadcast or whatever. Under certain circumstances, it's even better than natives:) I imagine it would be quite hard to find a German native speaker who is eager to discuss with you the philosophy of hope by Ernst Bloch, especialy if you reside somewhere in Moscow or North Carolina. But you can always download a broadcast about about him and practice this technique.