Did you also experience that you forget some words in new (foreign) language when you do not use it or do not study?

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alaart
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Re: Did you also experience that you forget some words in new (foreign) language when you do not use it or do not study?

Postby alaart » Sat Nov 27, 2021 6:51 pm

jimmy wrote:
alaart wrote:It's normal, just learn them again, and again, eventually they will stick.

At beginner and intermediate level, what I'm doing to combat this with flash cards is that each time I look up a word that is already in my database, I'll add a sample from a sentence (mostly the ones I just encountered, but also from dictionaries or google search), I also reactivate all previous sentences containing this word.

At an advanced level where you don't necessarily do flash cards, you could try to read material about the same topic as your target word that you keep forgetting. Eventually, inside this topic it gets repeated much more often, and so it will eventually stick too.


hi,
as I believe I am self taught ,
these days I am generally not willing to attend any education program ( except (education) programs that are compulsory or some programs that I aim something other than educating myself (e.g. to get social interaction with someone)) although I am not opposing to this activity.
so, beside expressing that it might be interesting information , I obviously heard at one (mandatory/compulsory) education video that listing words was not useful. Also, I am not sure on this detail but the lecturer was presumably saying that listing words was causing to forget them


Listing words without any context doesn't work for me. Like A=B. That would be the worst case, or maybe if it works, only with a certain kind of word - words that are very specific like government or soccer.
For more dynamic words I try to create as much context as possible around the word, audio, pictures, examples and translations from other languages that come the closest. I add notes later as I encounter them.

This works for me, but everybody is different, try around, and you will find what works for you.
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Re: Did you also experience that you forget some words in new (foreign) language when you do not use it or do not study?

Postby jimmy » Sat Nov 27, 2021 7:19 pm

alaart wrote:
jimmy wrote:
alaart wrote:It's normal, just learn them again, and again, eventually they will stick.

At beginner and intermediate level, what I'm doing to combat this with flash cards is that each time I look up a word that is already in my database, I'll add a sample from a sentence (mostly the ones I just encountered, but also from dictionaries or google search), I also reactivate all previous sentences containing this word.

At an advanced level where you don't necessarily do flash cards, you could try to read material about the same topic as your target word that you keep forgetting. Eventually, inside this topic it gets repeated much more often, and so it will eventually stick too.


hi,
as I believe I am self taught ,
these days I am generally not willing to attend any education program ( except (education) programs that are compulsory or some programs that I aim something other than educating myself (e.g. to get social interaction with someone)) although I am not opposing to this activity.
so, beside expressing that it might be interesting information , I obviously heard at one (mandatory/compulsory) education video that listing words was not useful. Also, I am not sure on this detail but the lecturer was presumably saying that listing words was causing to forget them


Listing words without any context doesn't work for me. Like A=B. That would be the worst case, or maybe if it works, only with a certain kind of word - words that are very specific like government or soccer.
For more dynamic words I try to create as much context as possible around the word, audio, pictures, examples and translations from other languages that come the closest. I add notes later as I encounter them.

This works for me, but everybody is different, try around, and you will find what works for you.


thank you very much for this highly nice comment.
in fact, now you have provided more cogent/valid methods ,at least for me.
I only expressed that only "listing words" would not work well in general.
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Re: Did you also experience that you forget some words in new (foreign) language when you do not use it or do not study?

Postby Leurre » Sun Nov 28, 2021 1:31 am

jimmy wrote:
Leurre wrote:So, we forget things, is that the topic?
-.

and,..., what is the problem with that?


Oh no, I answered and spoke to the topic, didn't you see? I forget things too. Especially when I don't study them or use them, that's very much related to my not remembering things. It's funny how that works.
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jimmy
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Re: Did you also experience that you forget some words in new (foreign) language when you do not use it or do not study?

Postby jimmy » Sun Nov 28, 2021 8:41 am

Leurre wrote:
jimmy wrote:
Leurre wrote:So, we forget things, is that the topic?
-.

and,..., what is the problem with that?


Oh no, I answered and spoke to the topic, didn't you see? I forget things too. Especially when I don't study them or use them, that's very much related to my not remembering things. It's funny how that works.

ah , okay.
this tendency of misunderstanding is presumably caused by some speech of native culture. In Turkish, when you start with such a comment we generally consider that the responder believes somethings go wrong.
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Re: Did you also experience that you forget some words in new (foreign) language when you do not use it or do not study?

Postby Jean-Luc » Sun Nov 28, 2021 10:36 am

The meaning of my former post was to say that words well-learned (long term memory) are never forgotten. The trick is how to get them registered in your long term memory...
Besides learning words with tools like Funeasylearning (for Croatian and Chinese at the moment) with many "games" to get memorized, I am using (as already said in this topic) "context" such as :

Sentences option of the flashcards app
Small stories at the right level (audiobooks)
Videos on Youtube made for
Viki's option (if available) when watching a film. You can stop and pin a character in the transcription when watching the film.
Watching numerous MV of songs with transcription and translation
Reading books
...

Many apps can help you memorize in a fun or interesting way words in context. Bored when learning makes it hard to memorize (in my case)
About learning with songs, my article (in French, but you can use an app for auto translate)
https://labdeslangues.blog/2020/04/12/l ... apprendre/
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Re: Did you also experience that you forget some words in new (foreign) language when you do not use it or do not study?

Postby Iversen » Mon Nov 29, 2021 12:11 am

alaart wrote:Listing words without any context doesn't work for me. Like A=B. That would be the worst case, or maybe if it works, only with a certain kind of word - words that are very specific like government or soccer.


It does for me - at least learning most kinds of words with a translations using my own three-column layout works for me, and I can prove it.

In 2014 I did an experiment with a Serbian-English dictionary that presumably has around 12.000 headwords. My main goal was to learn vocabulary AND to test my wordlist system, so when I had run through roughly half the book I did some wordcounts - 12½ page before and 12½ page after the borderline (the mysterious ½s are due to pages where only one column was used out of two). It turned out that after the stop point I knew 33% - but before it I knew two thirds of the words (67%), so when I had finished the whole dictionary I had presumably learned an estimated 4.000 words in just a few months. And those weren't transparent loanwords, but the kind of words that would have eluded me before the wordlist campaign. Since then I have never doubted that you can learn word directly from a dictionary.

OBS: under 'known' I accepted words which I could have guessed even if I hadn't seen them before - like "стyдент" for student. I can't say whether I actually had learned that word beforehand, but there was no doubt whatsoever what it meant so I count it as 'known'. I had another category for 'guessable' (or la la words) - to this day I haven't found a suitable name, but it's words whose approximate meaning I either knew or could guess, especially if I had some context (like "стаза" or "стадо"). And then I had a third category for definitely not known or guessable words.


But there is more to say about this: I have used the same dictionary again in 2018, 2019 and 2021. I have not been terribly active with Serbian in the meantime, and it seems that I have forgotten some of the 67% I knew in 2014. Since then my percentages have sunk through 64% and 55% to just 54% - so yes, you can forget words. It should however be said that the last estimates are based on other pages, and the total page estimates for those tests were higher, and that means that even the 54% would correspond to 6264 words. But I have also tried another dictionary with twice as many words in 2021, and even though my percentage here was a dismal 48% that would correspond to an estimated passive vocabulary of 11.337 words so I'm not too depressed. But the crux of the matter is that laziness can cost words - and the loss could occur among the precious words that aren't reinforced by parallels in other languages.
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