What's your method of learning a list of new words?

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klin21698
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What's your method of learning a list of new words?

Postby klin21698 » Wed Aug 03, 2022 3:02 am

Background: I took Russian for a few years in university which mainly focused on grammar. Now I'm independently brushing that up, and I'm focusing on expanding my vocabulary.

I'm quite curious as to how other forum members go about learning more vocabulary?

This might be an oversimplification of vocabulary acquisition, but I'd describe it in two steps:
1. Finding a list of new words to learn
2. Learning this list of new words

I'm more curious about #2 above - learning a list of new words. I've read about SRS, different types of flashcards (cloze, word/translation), and various other pencil/paper methods. Obviously, different methods work for different people, but I'm curious what has worked for you?
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Re: What's your method of learning a list of new words?

Postby luke » Wed Aug 03, 2022 5:03 am

Anki.

In general, I think cards you make yourself are better, but that goes back to where your list comes from. If you make your own list, you make your own cards.
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Re: What's your method of learning a list of new words?

Postby daegga » Wed Aug 03, 2022 6:16 am

Reading the vocabulary in a narrative (books usually) in different contexts (with dictionary lookups if necessary - popup dictionaries and reading tools facilitate this, so do graded readers with footnotes or Ilya Frank style parallel translations).
Not always easy to find the right material though, especially if you have a specific list of vocabulary items in mind.
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Re: What's your method of learning a list of new words?

Postby Kraut » Wed Aug 03, 2022 10:39 am

I don't make word lists. I translate colloquial texts, back-translate and then memorize the complete mini-texts. The following is from a talk on RTVE's "La aventura del saber" about "Gone with the wind".
Thus I have the new words in powerful overlapping contexts. It's not a flashcard "trayectoria= Lebensweg, Weg ..." but accompanied by "desde el principio hasta el final" and "como va evolucionando" and further down "como se va formando", "como se va transformando" ... the latter also being some nice examples of a perifrasis verbal (ir plus gerundio)

"Lo que el viento se llevó". Oye, ¿cómo era Escarlata? Cuéntanos.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------

Bueno, Escarlata es desde luego, la protagonista de esta maravillosa obra y tiene una personalidad muy interesante.
Se ve toda su trayectoria desde el principio hasta el final, cómo va evolucionando esta chica adolescente, muy centrada en sí misma, histriónica, le gusta ser una persona... Llamar la atención. Ser el centro, ¿no? Ser el centro de atención. Utiliza su belleza, es estratega, juguetona y no se toma nada en serio.

A medida que va pasando por esta película, vamos viendo cómo se va formando por la circunstancia externa, lo que es la guerra, cómo se va transformando en una mujer pues mucho más dura, una mujer de negocios.
Sobre todo en una época en que eso no estaba permitido.
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Re: What's your method of learning a list of new words?

Postby s_allard » Wed Aug 03, 2022 2:16 pm

In my opinion thinking in terms of lists of words is a bad approach. What you have to think of is how are the words used and how can you learn to use these words similarly. This inevitably leads one to think in sentences or even mini-paragraphs.

I do something very similar to what Kraut has outlined. Now the next step is to actually learn to use the forms that you have gleaned from good sources. Here there is a lot to talk about but one thing I do is put some key phrases on a sheet of paper that I put next to my computer screen. When I meet with my online tutor I glance at the sheet and deliberately try to work some of those phrases into the conversation. I can of course make annotations and corrections on the sheet. Then I make a new sheet of more phrases. I end up with a set of pages that I can rotate periodically. For me it works really well.
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Re: What's your method of learning a list of new words?

Postby Le Baron » Wed Aug 03, 2022 2:25 pm

Similar to much of the above I also work with small lists and work more on building then into various phrases. So for example if I come across some invariable verb, then I look it up and find it can be slotted into a phrase for I, you, him, we etc. I'll build a lot of phrases with it, also using words from lists I'm currently learning. To get the double (or more) benefit of learning grammar forms, new words in context and useful phrases to boot.
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Re: What's your method of learning a list of new words?

Postby SalzSäule » Wed Aug 03, 2022 2:37 pm

It's been a while since I just 'found a random list and learnt from it'. I think it can be of some use to beginners, particularly for grinding basic vocabulary, but beyond that no. All of the ways I have learnt words:

* Flashcards (nowadays always cloze into L2, but in the past sometimes incl. pictures too) on ppt. or Anki or paper, I suppose Duolingo fits almost here too.

* Scriptorium (writing out a sentence multiple times, ensuring you understand the nature of each word).

* Through context-based reading and ' viewing ' (e.g. subtitles, some YT videos, even memes lol).

* By taking a word and finding example usage in multiple sentences.

* Learning songs in my TL and their corresponding EN translation (via lyricstranslate).

* Brute memorisation through back translation or verb drills.

* Memory palaces constructed via images (e.g. an image of a scene with a mountain in the bground, next to a lake with boats, with some houses on an island, a pavement, flowers, a balcony, a door, and a lantern is how I learnt munte, lac, barcă, casa, trotuar, floare, balcon, ușa and felinar in Romanian). I can also do the traditional way by imagining a place I know well, but this I find less vivid.
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Re: What's your method of learning a list of new words?

Postby Yunus39 » Mon Aug 08, 2022 6:47 am

klin21698 wrote:Background: I took Russian for a few years in university which mainly focused on grammar. Now I'm independently brushing that up, and I'm focusing on expanding my vocabulary.

I'm quite curious as to how other forum members go about learning more vocabulary?

This might be an oversimplification of vocabulary acquisition, but I'd describe it in two steps:
1. Finding a list of new words to learn
2. Learning this list of new words

I'm more curious about #2 above - learning a list of new words. I've read about SRS, different types of flashcards (cloze, word/translation), and various other pencil/paper methods. Obviously, different methods work for different people, but I'm curious what has worked for you?


Learning vocab in context is big, as well as, "discovering" the meaning vs. looking it up. If a new word comes up in convo, I try to have them explain what it means in the target language without looking anything up.

When I was working at lower levels, I would write all these words in a notebook and then have my language partner make an audio recording of each word with three sentences using the word.

I still use this process in intentional language partner time, but also supplement with Anki decks made from frequency word scrapes. I have some books relating to work that I know I want complete vocab coverage for. So I use this tool to make word frequency lists and then import them into Anki: https://www.browserling.com/tools/word-frequency?msclkid=76b82660bdc011ec80183771b1349981. I end up suspending a lot of cards, but that's no problem. I have a friend who works at the Newspaper, and he made a word frequency scrape of their archives.
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Re: What's your method of learning a list of new words?

Postby Sae » Mon Aug 08, 2022 11:14 am

I struggle to learn 'lists' of new words. My brain just isn't wired that way. I easily forget vocabulary that way.

So what I find works for me (which is how my tutor helps me with it):

Learning the words in context and in related groups. An example of this is when I think about 'time' in Vietnamese, there's 4 key words.
'lần' = time, eg: "I have seen that band 3 times"
'thời gian' = time, eg: "I had a great time!"
'giờ' = hour, eg: "I went to bed at 10:30pm"
'tiếng' = hour, eg: "That was 3 hours ago"


So I make it a part of my language practice to use those words and build an association with them and try to use them whenever I practice the language as it gives me context and by grouping them, if I do get stuck I might go, "I know 'giờ' is hour, but I want the other word, ah yeah, it was 'tiếng'!"
But I could end up writing something like the below to help me memorise how each word works.

"Tôi sẽ xem Batman lúc mười giờ tối. Tôi đã xem Batman năm lần và tôi đã có thời gian vui. Phim dài hai tiếng."
Which means:
"I am going to watch Batman at 10pm. I have watched Batman 5 times and I had a good time. The film is 2 hours long."


What I also find that works is learning words progressively. What I mean is, let's say, using the example words above, I learn, "giờ'", so now I have a means of giving the time and I practice it and get used to using it. Then I learn 'lúc ' because I can then give the time in a sentence (as 'lúc' mean 'at' in the context of time)
Then I learn "lần" so maybe I do a few sentences with "lần" in it in and then I work it into a sentence with "giờ" so I am referring back to what I've already learned to strengthen my memory of that word. Then I might learn "tiếng", so now I can use it alongside "giờ" and "lần". This is a method I've seen some language learning apps use, which I've liked.

This is also why I hate language learning tools that don't teach grammar or give access to grammar resources early on because I like to be able to experiment from early on so I can learn and practice new words...even if those sentences don't make sense, like super early on I'd use stuff like "I am bread" or "I am a fish".
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Re: What's your method of learning a list of new words?

Postby Iversen » Mon Aug 08, 2022 2:39 pm

I do make wordlists - lots of them, and I have my own format for them which so far served me rather well.

I may learn some topic related vocabulary by reading articles in magazines or on the internet, but if I don't see the words in print, write them down and do at least one repetition a day or so later I forget them. However with the help of my dear wordlists I have amassed enough vocabulary to keep a conversation going or read articles in Wikipedia in at least a dozen languages, and my sample based wordcounts show that I know at least 10.000 headwords in half a dozen more - enough to satisfy my immediate needs. I could never have done that just from letting input flow passively into my head.

And yes, I also study grammar, but that has not much to do with the acquisition of new words. Most new words don't push you into exploring new topics in grammar - they just fall in the wellknown old categories (at least for intermediate and advanced learners - newbees should definitely learn grammar and the basic grammar words from the beginning, as advised by Sae). As for idiomatic expressions they are best learnt when you know the literal meanings of the words they contain. I may find space for very short expressions into wordlists, but not for long ones.

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