What do you think of the 5 biggest mistakes when learning vocabulary?

[Iversen]

The five 'baddies':

1. Rote memorize words
2. Learn words that you don't need
3. Learn words out of context
4. Not apply words
5. Not jotting down words

I have probably more experience than most with committing these socalled errors, and therefore I also know that they shouldn't be accepted at face value.

Rote learning is bad because it means that you just learn by repetition without any attempt to put the words into a context or use more sophisticated memorization techniques. But the point is that the context doesn't have to be a specific sentence said or written by a native speaker - a context can also be the alphabetical order in which you find it in the dictionary or references to its word family or its etymology.

When I'm new to a language I get so many new words from the texts I study that I don't need to supplement them with words taken directly from a dictionary. And especially the small grey 'grammar words' can't be learnt from a dictionary (unless of course it contains a proper grammar section). Their morphology is often complicated, and they are used in many different ways which best are learnt from heavy text study/listening supplemented with grammar studies to clear up murky points and establish some modicum of order. But once those words are learnt the remainder are mostly regular and most have a clear meaning, and there is absolutely no point in waiting to learn them until you have met them out there. If you think a word might come in handy based on the meaning of its translation, then you are likely to find a way to use it if you learn it - in other words: go for it!

So my earliest wordlists in a new language are mostly textbased (taken from the right margin of my study sheets, where I jot down unknown and/or interesting words), but soon I feel I get more from making wordlists directly based on dictionaries because they are more efficient. Just think about all the time you waste on looking unknown words from texts up all over the pages of a dictionary - you don't have that problem if you simply choose a random page and memorize for instance a third of the words on that page. Besides you get the alphabetical order and to some extent whole word families as a help to memorize the words. And that shouldn't be seen as a way to cheat - ANY trick that helps you to recall a word on a word list is OK because you aren't doing a voculary test, but on the contrary extending your vocabulary.

Some learners may remember words better if they have a real sentence with it. I haven't incorporated that into my wordlist layout (three columns, groups of 5-7 words...) because I personally don't feel the need to do it with most words. I do however acknowledge some situations where it is logical to memorize words in a context:

Situation one: learning a substantive with an article or an adjective to remember its gender is absolutely a good idea. And learning more than one form of a verb at the same time is also a good idea, if that form can't be inferred. For instance I have learned Russian verbs in perfect/imperfect pairs, and I have memorized Greek verbs with the characteristic consonant of the aorist. But I also do see a point in memorizing lists of irregular Latin verbs with their four (or sometimes three) main forms in a systematic fashion - even if the method smacks of black school and rote memorizing. The criterion is that it works.

Situation two: idiomatic expressions are typically too long for my wordlist format, so I just write them down and look at the lists later. The basic rule where is that you never should learn an expression without also learning (or knowing) every word in it. In most cases they do have a meaning, but just one which you couldn't have guessed on your own. And when you have grasped the logic that lead to the expression being coined in the first place you also know what the native speakers of you target language really say, - and not just what speakers of your own language would have said in the same situation.

" 4. Not apply words" ... Well, this is the only of the five mistake I recognize as a true mistake, although with the limitation that writing also can be a way of applying words. The point is that I don't like to speak to people by phone, nor the idea of actively hunting down immigrants in my town who might be speaking one of my target languages - and even less the idea of paying people for speaking to me. So in practice I rarely speak any of my target languages unless I'm on a voyage to a suitable location - and that even includes English.

I can however write messages in several languages which I can't speak due to lack of practice. In principle it should be possible to promote these languages to spoken languages with just a minimum of effort, but since I also would have to keep a certain activity level to keep them as spoken languages I have in practice chosen not even to try to speak them. Instead I prefer to add new languages to the list of those I can deal with as written languages, which may be an unusual and politically incorrect choice, but in my eyes fully legitimate under the current circumstances.

[William Camden]

Like others, I have learned a lot of vocabulary with all five "mistakes". Rote learning may be suboptimal in some situations but with higher-frequency vocabulary in particular I don't just learn it, there have been times I practically gorge myself on it.

[Uncle Roger]

In my experience with Latin and Germanic languages, B1 to C1 level.

1 - Not using spaced repetition

2 - Not learning the article/gender and the most used preposition for that noun/verb/adjective, thus ending up guessing that the equivalent of your mother tongue will do

3 - Not using frequency lists i.e. learning words you don't need at that point of your studies, neglecting words you'd need at that point. As always: if you don't need to know it (for now), you need not to know it (for now). Efficiency is paramount.

4 - Not realising the number of words that the level of the language you are targeting actually requires, thus eternally underestimating how much you should focus on vocabulary (see #1)

5 - Not understanding the point at which you should start to phase out isolated word learning and phase in expressions learning instead. No point in learning "petard" if you are not learning "hoisted by his own petard". Kind of.

[白田龍]

The biggest mistake is failing to follow my beliefs and presuppositions about how one should learn vocabulary. Really a road to disaster.

[Cainntear]

All that worked well, but I noticed that to learn really well the words you have to relax and not become to anxious.

...and nothing is more guaranteed to make someone anxious than telling them they're doing it wrong.

I cannot believe people are saying they don't know who Luca is????

Now that you say "Luca", I know the name. But I don't know his face, and the original post, the video title and even the video itself didn't say who he was.

And why should I know who he is? He is not an active contributor to this forum or any Facebook groups I'm a member of. He is not a published researcher. He is not an experienced and respected teacher. He is one person, at best a single data point, at worst an anecdote.

It's great that he wants to help other people achieve what he does, but as far as I can see he hasn't put enough time into studying the actual process to really be any more help than any other YouTuber. If you look at sports, most gold-medal-winning athletes are coached by people who were never particularly successful as athletes themselves, because being good at something doesn't mean you know why you are good at it.

[BOLIO]

And why should I know who he is? He is not an active contributor to this forum or any Facebook groups I'm a member of. He is not a published researcher. He is not an experienced and respected teacher. He is one person, at best a single data point, at worst an anecdote.

You don’t know who he is fine. No harm meant in your direction.

Edited to let it go.

[garyb]

I'm not into the Youtube polyglot thing but I do have a huge respect for Luca, who I believe is a more accomplished language learner than practically anybody on here and has always given solid and well-thought-through advice. It's a bit of a shame to see him involved in this type of "5 mistakes" over-simplified clickbait. I agree that, like with most things, there's a middle ground between explicit study and learning only from context.

I have to agree about learning vocabulary you don't need, though. I fell into that trap myself at the start and I see it all the time on logs here: beginner or low-intermediate learners reading books or newspapers and thinking they need to study every single unknown word even though most of them will never be needed in a conversation. There was a discussion in eido's log on the difficulty of actually knowing whether you need a word and I don't want to repeat it all here, but the short version is that of course it's not an exact science and it's something you develop more of a sense for with experience. IMO you can avoid a lot of the problem by choosing appropriate materials in the first place, avoiding journalistic and literary language until you're at a more advanced level.

I don't think that learning unnecessary vocabulary will harm your ability (beyond perhaps using strange words in conversation, and that corrects over time), but it can become a big distraction from the language you actually need and from what I've seen (in real life as well as on here) it's quite common for learners to have an impressive vocabulary yet struggle with basic sentences and everyday usage. It can also feed perfectionism: feeling the need to know every word before being able to use the language.

[Uncle Roger]

I haven't checked Luca's videos in a while but at the time my thoughts were essentially:

1 - the guy is impossibly talented. He seems to have a relaxed, "lifestyle", "gain without pain" approach to learning languages but his approach won't work as well unless you are as talented, retentive and intuitive.

2 - the guy does a lot more work, heavy lifting and exercising than he wants others to know and sort of keeps it hidden, because admitting "yeah, it's a full time job, I work as hard as a professional sportsman" is not what the average guy in your potential audience wants to hear. Most people think that the hard work is kind of beneath their dignity, but normal distribution says otherwise.

Either way he is a very, very impressive polyglot, especially when it comes to pronunciation as somebody already said.

[cpnlsn88]

As it happens I disagree in principle with most of the 5 'mistakes'. I think the initial learning can be out of context and rote learning actually works.

The main issue for me is simply comfort. This will differ person to person and language to language depending on your aims and objectives.

In my time I have broken all these rules because it was more enjoyable that way. For some reason I wasn't able to enjoy reading German without understanding a lot of the words and 'guessing from context' was not helping so rarely allow words to go without finding out. That is linked to my own interest and enjoyment where I found it very uncomfortable to read whole swathes of text without finding out what a lot of the words meant.

For other languages, for some reason, I am not as interested in learning each individual word and can let a lot of words go provided I have the gist.

I would say to pace yourself so you are not learning thousands of words in the early days when you don't have a use or need for them.

Lists have their place in some cases. I think context is overplayed to be honest. A possible exception is related languages e.g. related romance languages where a lot of vocab is similar, in which case inferring from context can work well.

Main thing in language learning is enjoyment and commitment so if something is more enjoyable then you should probably do it that way.

My key messages would be:

1. Work out what you want from the language and tailor your vocab learning to that. If you are aiming for basic conversation that is different from wide reading in literature etc
2. The guiding principle should be your comfort and enjoyment.
3. In using SRS you should not commit to keeping learning the same words over and over. Be prepared to forget words, delete them or postpone way into the future. If they don't occur often it doesn't matter - if you encounter them again they will be remembered.
4. Learning words beyond your ability to use them may be counterproductive (I am including hearing and reading as forms of 'using' here).
5. Some forms of language lend themselves well to rote learning using SRS such as gender, plurals and irregular verb forms where you just need to 'stick' the relevant form in your mind. Similar for idiomatic expressions that diverge from your L1.

Committing vocab to memory is a short term endeavour to some extent because longer term one is always revising by reading and listening a lot.

[reineke]

Luca's opinion is sound but it shouldn't be taken as dogma. The fire and pitchfork crowd should chill.