Why so many words?

[lusan]

..... because at the moment I'm trying to cram 1500 words per day using a spreadsheet (and anki).

What do you mean? 1500 new words? How is that possible? At the most, I do 20 days per day using Anki. How?

Its like you stopped reading the thread after his post... then didnt even go back to finish the page

Actually, you are correct. I tried to delete the post after reading the whole thing, but it is not possible. I got your answer down the line. Thanks.

[rapidlearner]

well, I've searched and asked a lot about the standard number of words, you should memorize per day. actually i found it quite challenging that there is no standard 4 that.
many websites are siting that 6-12 is quite efficient. however I'll let you know that a friend of mine (an obvious genius), once was memorizing about 40-60 a day and could get 117 in the TOEFL score! those that have passed the TOEFL know what this means..

[Uncle Roger]

How can there be a standard?

Wouldn't it be just a matter of how many words you want/need to learn in a given time period?

[principiante]

I am trying to do 1500 per day. Basically I have a spreadsheet with about 20k words and three columns, "Correct Answer", "Prompt", and "My Answer". I hide the column with the answer and write down my answer based on the prompt. Like close deletion in anki, but much quicker to do. I skip the ones I don't know and answer as many of the first 1500 I can. I filter out the ones I knew and unhide the answers and go down them again to remind myself. Then I repeat this trying to get down to zero unknowns of the 1500. This isn't SRS because I'm ignoring the card after I get it right, and I don't revisit, I'm just moving on to the next 1500 cards the next day.

So my actual retention is less than 1500 but forcing myself to write the answer, actually type the answer, does seem to aid in my memorisation. Also these are the same cards which are in an anki deck, so I'm going to see them all again anyway which is why I'm not all that bothered about repeating the same 1500.

When I complete this spreadsheet (about 2 weeks) then I'll paste in another batch and start again. This is the plan.

In another post, you have probably described how you load your substantial list into a spreadsheet and Anki. If that is so, could you point me to that post or briefly describe your method?

Thanks

[rdearman]

In this example I wasn't using anki, but importing into anki from a spreadsheet is easy. Just needs to be tab separated.

Here is a post on anki support forum.
https://www.google.co.uk/url?q=https:// ... zhHA89AxMK

[Cavesa]

1.As was said, learning is not just SRSing. SRS is a powerful tool but not the only one. I improved my vocabulary enormously without it, with extensive input. But SRS adds efficiency to it, especially at the more advanced levels, where new vocabulary is not naturally encountered that often. I don't mean it in the sense "there are few words you don't know", I mean "a new advanced word is used once per 1000 pages, while a basic one is used once per 10 pages". SRS helps with that. The problem is the idea of some learners that SRS should be the only or main thing to do. It shouldn't. Wordlist memorisation on its own is no way to learn a language for many reasons. Yet, some people still make this mistake and are disappointed with the results.

2.There is a huuuuge difference between the very beginning and the later phases of learning. Both in the sense of the overall level in the language, and in the sense of starting with SRS. The first few units of a coursebook are usually easy, as you practice the same stuff over and over, and you will meet those words anywhere you look. Then it gets harder, as you practice more and more new stuff along with the old stuff. With SRS: you can add 50 words during the first few days, but you are highly unlikely to keep that pace for longer, due to the reviews. Hundreds of reviews per day can be a hell. But it is definitely possible to keep a much more reasonable pace and add more words whenever you feel like having too little to do.

3.I agree with Rdearman, that the officially suggested amount of new vocabulary per day is extremely low. Fortunately, we learn through various ways, so we can do better than that in reality. But the ceiling varies a lot. I wouldn't argue about just a few words per day being recommended for a learner of an exotic language, I have no experience in this area and would never underestimate the challenge there. But a few dozen per day, that is possible in a related language.

It depends on the amount of free time for reviews, the individual memorisation ability, and boredom tolerance above all.

[Whodathunkitz]

To support rdearman...

When I was using Memrise for cebuano i was doing hundreds of new words every day. Except they weren't necessarily NEW words.

I did every cebuano course on Memrise, I'd burn through them. I'd build up thousands of reviews to do. At some point I'd stop learning new ones and knock off 1-2000 reviews, maybe more in a day. Many of the courses had the same basic words, so it was more frequent or near repetition of same/similar words. Less spaced and more repetition? I probably have around 5000 cebuano words and PHRASES according to Memrise but with significant duplication. Perhaps 2000 different words in 3 months at a guess. And this was my first language.

The spreadsheet of rdearman intrigues me but vocab isn't my problematic aspect. I'm good at the reading part. Extensive reading seems to allow the brain to do automatic conversions from Latin based English words to Spanish ones using generalisations.

Pronounciation/listening/production/verb conjugation are problematic for me and covered on other threads.

It seems to me that language learning is unique for everyone but hearing about others' ideas and techniques can be inspiring.

I also would be interested in a link to more detail of the spreadsheet technique. It kind of sounds like Memrise in bulk using techniques I use at work to sort data, but in a completely different way. But I do like my phone apps...

[rdearman]

I have never felt so supported! I thought I should expand on my answer a little. The method I was using with the spreadsheet was something which I stole from small white. Basically I found a bunch of words which were subject specific and then I put them into a spreadsheet. I used to have this available for download but can't find the link. If I find it then I'll edit this post. But actually it is easy to make your own. You put TL word or phrase in column A, then NL translation in column B. Then put conditional formatting on column C, such that if A ≠ B the format background colour to red. Then just hide column A, and type your answer in C. If you're not right it goes red.

You can do some excel wizardry to improve on this method, but it quickly shows you want you don't know, and you aren't limited to a number of reps per day.

I was doing this after finding a lot of subject specific words. I did a playlist on YouTube showing most of this. https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLIdb ... O1mbKIpLxL

I'm on a tablet at the moment, so if that link doesn't work then I'll edit that later too.

So, I should point out that this cramming of 1500 words a day didn't last long. I think I only managed to do it for about 2 weeks consistently. However, I did load all those words into anki and I have been doing about 40-60 new cards per day, but when the reviews pile up to much I scale it back to only 5 new words per day until the reviews drop to a reasonable level.

My strategy at the moment is I have three decks with subject specific vocabulary. Food and D&D words and numbers up to 100. The numbers test audio first the other two are just basic word cards. I then have two decks which are phrases both with audio. These are my language learning decks, although I also have a couple of others for personal information, some math stuff, some inspirational quotes.

For me the maximum new word count with anki tends to be in the 40-60 range. More than that and I get too many reviews and it takes too long. Less than that and I whiz through too fast. A quick look at my stats shows I've studied 90% of 2017 (331 days out of 365) and I average 247 reviews per day which takes about thirty minutes per day. Mind you these stats include the non-language stuff, but the bulk of it is vocabulary.

I would also point out that this was running parallel with my reading of 75 books, so that re-enforced the are.

I hope that helps. Feel free to ask if you need more information,

[spanglish]

In my experience, everything depends on the mind of each person, some learn only by phrases that are used more in real life and others by memorization of words with frequent use.

[Cavesa]

In my experience, everything depends on the mind of each person, some learn only by phrases that are used more in real life and others by memorization of words with frequent use.

It depends. I personally find memorisation of phrases very tricky, as many people prefer this to learning properly (with grammar), and are surprised by their inability to form their own sentences. I find some of the modern teaching methods too focused on the "useful" phrases too (supposedly useful to tourists, that is the usual criteria).

However, there are good ways to tackle this. AJATTs 10000 phrases are likely to work, I totally believe that. The sheer amount of examples weighs some other aspects out. But the usual "courses" like the official ones on Memrise have absolutely no chance to achieve that, and neither has memorisation of the few examples in a coursebook.

But that still doesn't change the point of this discussion: many or few? I would be interested in success stories featuring systematic approach to phrases. Do the people memorise many similar phrases with small changes? Or fewer and more varied, making each of them harder?