studying vocab or reading a lot?

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Re: studying vocab or reading a lot?

Postby rdearman » Sun Nov 03, 2019 9:59 am

guiguixx1 wrote:The issue is that the words I've put there are not frequently-used words, since I'm reading B2-C1 level materials. I feel like learning these words is useless since I don't often need to understand them.


Learning any word is useless until you need that specific word. I think you have a good system. Extensive reading gets all the common stuff and SRS get the rest. I find it frustrating to need a word but not have it and have to resort to trying to describe something. Not hard if it is a physical thing. Lot more difficult if it is a feeling or other non physical concept.

If you want to cut down the srs, maybe put in only things you cannot describe with your current vocabulary.
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Re: studying vocab or reading a lot?

Postby coldrainwater » Sun Nov 03, 2019 6:06 pm

From following and reading your prior logs, it may be that you have a thirst that isn't properly quenched using your existing study habits. It might help as an exercise to shift your priorities and your mindset away from learning the TL and specifically toward learning vocabulary for a period of time. I suggest about three months from personal experience. With your language milieu, you can start at a very advanced level with Italian. The same pattern is likely to repeat for future languages as well and you may be unsatisfied with the vocabulary portion until you make an intentional paradigm shift. Here is roughly how I would implement it:

Allocate plenty of upfront time for administration and reflection when choosing reading resources. Don't dive in until you are satisfied that your goals will be met. No autopiloting of resources. Choose some books that cater heavily toward logophiles. I haven't done the legwork in Italian, but I know plenty of English examples. Scour blogs that cater heavily to advanced usage of vocabulary. With blogs and forums, you get 2 for 1 with great examples of native writing combined with tough vocabulary that is already vetted (choose blogs with some native followers). Word-a-day type blogs are decent, but they may be best for diagonal reading and skimming for content since I often come across 1001 ''advanced'' words that are little more than well-known cognates vs English/French. Try your hand at etymology sites. You can sometimes find decent word-density on those. You will have to sort the sound from the noise no matter what since you have one massive starting romance vocabulary being a French native with adv. EN, but you can use admin time to help with that. Rather than trying one or two dictionaries, I would try ''virtually all'' types of dictionaries and find efficient ways to pull words that are of personal interest to you. Those can be the words that you directly add to your active daily word use. Keep your interests in mind and be greedy. That is good ammo in the sense that you mould your active voice into exactly what you want it to be. It will have your own personal diction, ideally bumped up against actual use cases for the audience you intend to engage.

Speaking of actual use cases, there is also a sweet spot for audiobooks. Audiobooks in general and advanced translated audiobooks specifically can be great for picking out and imprinting lower to mid (advanced) vocabulary (and for reinforcing even easier content below that). I find in ES that 19th century and early 20th century classics work well for this (as a simple field-tested example). They bring rich diction and once your ear gets to a point where it can parse it, you do actually have time to ''learn'' vocab from it. That is partly since the speaker speaks slowly often with professional clarity and partly since you may already be familiar with the diction used. In this stage, I look for aha moments as I am listening. The more of those I find, the better the rating I give it. I then springboard from that audiobook to others like it ensuring the next one is equally rewarding. When I notice those aha moments, I don't care if I miss the next sentence. What matter is that I latch onto an awesome use case. Sometimes you can get a rhythm going and strike gold with resources like that, pulling your entire vocabulary set up a notch. Podcasts like that can be tougher to find but can fit the same bill. In ES, I found a very rich source of such podcasts from Argentina.

There are also plenty of esoteric options available now to handle dictionary study. I am not necessarily recommending it, but you can purchase/download almost any dictionary, convert it to text using Calibre, and parse out what you need if you don't want to read/skim/study the originals. That allows you to quickly do things like highlight or eliminate classes of substantives based on preference.

It may be that your passions in life are not as strong for vocab (I actually think yours are very strong, jmo), however, I like to remember that ability begets interest. The mountain I will need to overcome personally is grammar rather than vocabulary, but I know I will get there remembering the relation between interest and ability. Perhaps my favourite trick for learning vocabulary and what underlies most of my motivation is a basic search for novelty. I tend to avoid repetition and seek novel reading experiences. I also look for great prose. From a web browsing standpoint, you can expand novelty to the limits of what you can absorb by letting yourself go off on browser-based vocabulary tangents. Also, don't forget to use extensions such as Transover to add new vocab on the fly as well. You can pick up vocab in multiple languages like that. As a side note, in many/most of these scenarios, you will likely get plenty of monolingual reading experience as you are picking up new words. You can also blend these ideas with ''normal'' reading. I have little Italian experience, but I know one of the first authors I would go for is Umberto Eco (Name of the Rose) since I love the way he handles vocabulary and what content he uses. Reading one author can actually move your language vocab way forward. In Spanish, I would offer Miguel Delibes as a 20th-century example and Emilia Pardo Bazán as a 19th-century example. One author, big vocabulary boost. Part of the trick is the admin time required to find such authors (with a nod to Goodreads).

So in sum, more than just choosing vocab or reading a lot, I think it is a shift in priority.
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Re: studying vocab or reading a lot?

Postby mentecuerpo » Mon Nov 04, 2019 11:38 pm

Iversen wrote:Maybe my age and my sceptic attitude are part of the explanation for the relative lack of impact speech has on me, but the main factor is that I can't linger when I meet new words in speech - I hear them and barely have time to notice that there was something I didn't understand. With writing I can take that extra second to solve the mystery, and if I'm in the process of doing some serious studying then I'll definitely note new words down.


I am curious: when you read an article, for example, do you write down all the words you don’t know or only the interesting ones?

Once you have made a list of words from your reading,
how often do you review your list?

How do you categorize your list? You add the new words to a general list, or you keep a new record for a new project, or you probably do both.
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Re: studying vocab or reading a lot?

Postby mentecuerpo » Mon Nov 04, 2019 11:52 pm

As far as TV, I watch passively. I like YouTube videos that I can watch multiple times. I save the links on a playlist, then I can go back to the video and watch it again.

I have added a couple of German videos to "My German" YouTube playlist. I only understand a few words, but I keep watching them a few times a month as a baseline to see my progress.

I don't mind listening to a new language I am learning, and I don't understand. Little by little, I will decode the language as I learn more words and practice my listening skills. Learning new words is a slow incremental process.
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Re: studying vocab or reading a lot?

Postby Iversen » Tue Nov 05, 2019 2:54 am

Iversen wrote: (...) if I'm in the process of doing some serious studying then I'll definitely note new words down.

mentecuerpo wrote:I am curious: when you read an article, for example, do you write down all the words you don’t know or only the interesting ones?
Once you have made a list of words from your reading,
how often do you review your list?
How do you categorize your list? You add the new words to a general list, or you keep a new record for a new project, or you probably do both.


I divide my activities into extensive and intensive ones. During extensive ones I hardly ever write anything down, whereas during intensive ones I do take notes. And since just reading an article is categorized as an extensive activity where I don't want to interrupt the activity I normally don't take notes. OK, if I hear or see some reference to a topic that interests me I may jot a reference down for later use, but that will typically not be words just for the sake of being words - more likely the name of an interesting dinosaur or the name of a rarely heard composer.

On the other hand, when I work intensively with a text (more often than not using a bilingual printout) I try to squeeze as much information as possible out of it, and then I often use a format where I copy the text to the left on a folded sheet (which serves to slow me down so that I notice all details), and then I make a right column of some 3 to 4 cm for new words. If the liste of new words grow faster than the text copy beside it then I know that the text is difficult, and then it may be worth making a second copy or write out a translation - maybe even do a retranslation. The list of new words will be used for a triple-column wordlist, and once I have done that I throw the original piece of paper out or put it on a pile of paper that will go into the dustbin at some later point. I have no veneration for text copies, but normally I keep the original printout for later use, for instance as goodnight reading.

Your question about categorization can be answered quite simply with "no, I don't categorize". Actually it might be relevant for instance to have a collection of words from for instance an old craft or some special kind of food or place names, but if I really wanted something like that I would just print out an article from for instance Wikipedia and then study it intensively - and keep the original text for later. I wouldn't make a special wordlist for for instance species of insects or berries. I would see it as a task related to learning the names of for instance kings involved in the 100 years war rather than a word acquisition project.
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Re: studying vocab or reading a lot?

Postby mentecuerpo » Tue Nov 05, 2019 3:32 am

Iversen wrote:
Iversen wrote: (...) if I'm in the process of doing some serious studying then I'll definitely note new words down.

mentecuerpo wrote:I am curious: when you read an article, for example, do you write down all the words you don’t know or only the interesting ones?
Once you have made a list of words from your reading,
how often do you review your list?
How do you categorize your list? You add the new words to a general list, or you keep a new record for a new project, or you probably do both.


I divide my activities into extensive and intensive ones. During extensive ones I hardly ever write anything down, whereas during intensive ones I do take notes. And since just reading an article is categorized as an extensive activity where I don't want to interrupt the activity I normally don't take notes. OK, if I hear or see some reference to a topic that interests me I may jot a reference down for later use, but that will typically not be words just for the sake of being words - more likely the name of an interesting dinosaur or the name of a rarely heard composer.

On the other hand, when I work intensively with a text (more often than not using a bilingual printout) I try to squeeze as much information as possible out of it, and then I often use a format where I copy the text to the left on a folded sheet (which serves to slow me down so that I notice all details), and then I make a right column of some 3 to 4 cm for new words. If the liste of new words grow faster than the text copy beside it then I know that the text is difficult, and then it may be worth making a second copy or write out a translation - maybe even do a retranslation. The list of new words will be used for a triple-column wordlist, and once I have done that I throw the original piece of paper out or put it on a pile of paper that will go into the dustbin at some later point. I have no veneration for text copies, but normally I keep the original printout for later use, for instance as goodnight reading.


Thank you for taking the time to explain in detail the way you of your intensive reading. I am sure that many who read your blog will benefit. I am a big fan of yours.

Two follow up questions:
1. Your intensive reading is it mainly to learn the new words, or you do an intense study of the content of the text itself?

2. When you have reached a conversational level in a language, and you are very comfortable with the language, for example, you can understand 95 % of what you hear on a movie or the streets, and above 90 % of what you read on a regular text: Do you keep doing intensive reading on that language?

Thanks.
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Re: studying vocab or reading a lot?

Postby Iversen » Tue Nov 05, 2019 4:02 am

1) in this context intensive reading (which includes copying and trying to understand everything in a text) is mainly a language learning thing, but I prefer using non-fiction texts about topics which also are interesting in their own right. If I just want to learn more about a topic I'll usually do it by reading extensively about it or watching TV programs.

2) In my case I would almost certainly pass 95% understanding of for instance Wikipedia articles long before I can understand even half of what I hear on a TV program, let alone what I would understand from speech heard in the streets in a suitable location. So I'll have to answer in another way. I use bilingual texts when I study texts in weak languages - and that will typically be languages in which I can't conversate fluently yet, but also some where I just don't get enough input (like for instance Romanian or icelandic).

I would in principle be able to use monolingual original texts before I could have participate in a normal conversation between native speakers. But the keyword here is 'normal'. I have used monolingual texts for study purposes in for instance Greek, where it takes me some 3-4 days of total immersion in Greek surroundings before I switch to speaking predominantly in Greek - and that's why I don't count Greek as a language I speak. I have also used Slovak and Polish texts from monolingual magazines as study objects, but I definitely would't claim that I can have conversations in either language. So by the time where I can eavesdrop in a language I'll almost certainly have stopped doing those intensive text studies long ago and switched to 100 % extensive input - but I keep making wordlists and reading about grammar. Those activities never become irrelevant.
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Re: studying vocab or reading a lot?

Postby mentecuerpo » Tue Nov 05, 2019 3:43 pm

Iversen wrote:I would in principle be able to use monolingual original texts before I could have participate in a normal conversation between native speakers.


Thank you for explaining in detail the process you use to learn a new language.
I have bookmark this post for future references in other blogs on this site.

You use reading from the beginning.
At what point in your process do you incorporate audio material?
Do you work on your pronunciation?

Thank you for your input.
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Re: studying vocab or reading a lot?

Postby Iversen » Tue Nov 05, 2019 5:45 pm

And thank you for being interested in my way of learning languages.

When I first started to learn Italian and Spanish by homestudy way back in the 60s I only had the pronunciation indications in my textbooks to go by - no tapes, no CDs and definitely no internet. And we were taught English and later German in school, but French only came later. The result must have sounded slightly weird, but I got the pronunciation more or less fixed during my travels to the relevant countries, and today I can speak both languages in a way that doesn't seem to cause problems for native listeners.

In spite of this I find it important to listen at least so much to a new language at an early stage that you can hear it inside your head with a pronunciation that isn't too far from the real mcCoy. And knowing something about phonology is also a great help. But this can be done long before you actually start to speak a language, and in the meantime it means that you can read texts and be reasonably sure that your inner voice isn't too far off the mark. I recently got a confirmation that this system can work by getting my Bulgarian pronunciation checked by a native speaker, and she not only said that it was surprising good for a person who claimed he couldn't speak the language, but when we discussed specific words and phrases I could also hear that her pronunciation of those things was close to mine. The biggest problem was actually guessing where the stress should be since it isn't marked in the Bulgarian writing system.

So my feeling after this is that you don't have to worry too much about pronunciation in the beginning, contrary to what most people claim, provided that you are willing to change your pronunciation habits later when you actually get into contact with native speakers - and provided also that you are able to listen to the way these speakers actually speak and not just automatically convert this into the way you expect them to speak. We have discussed this in another thread not long ago.

It also helps that I don't care whether I have an accent in my foreign languages as long is it isn't so bad that native speakers can't bear listening to me.

My situation is for the moment complicated by the fact that I'm working on perfecting the music collection I'll listen to until I die - I'm almost entirely devoted to classical instrumental music so all the music I want to hear has already been written long ago, which is a great help. The only problem is that much of it was recorded in the ugly old vinyl days or recorded in concert halls with coughing and sneezing attendance. Once I'm through the process of replacing the bad items I can return to the normal pattern where I try to listen to my Polish, Croatian, Serbian etc. TV channels and to clips and podcasts on the internet etc., and I'll also reboot my transcription exercises - but only for languages I already more or less have mastered in their written form.

Listening for meaning (and fun!) is in my world something that first is relevant when I already can read a language. The only things I can understand before that are too basic to be worth spending my precious time on - like the utterly boring and much too slow audio that follows with textbooks or the five minut lightning courses on Youtube. All listening I do before that will be of the type where I listen for recognisable words and patterns and intonations in purely native speak that would allow me to do a transcript.

And - returning to the main issue posed in this thread - I don't expect to learn any new words from these activities.
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Re: studying vocab or reading a lot?

Postby Olekander » Sun Nov 10, 2019 12:32 pm

The idea of postponing speaking and listening till much later would make me extremely scared to be Frank. I think I'd be experiencing a feeling that I knew so much but didnt actually know the language at all. I think my own language akin to that is latin which I learnt in school.

The only way I learn languages is by applying what I know at all stages of the learning process with native speakers. Supporting that with learning via texts is critical but again there ends up being a huge dichotomy between my spoken language and my written understanding. I guess a plus of reading an absolute monstrous amount of text and understanding the language before actually using it would be that you may ultimately end up speaking with a higher register and be more able to have academic discussions if you're able to transition from reading to speaking in a fairly short amount of time. I doubt many could do this. A prime example of this is an uncle of mine who read French at cambridge in the days when they did 0 speaking practise. He was unable to order a coffee in a french restaurant.


It's very interesting to know that such methods are working so well for other people though. The key take away from this is that it's really important to work out what works for you and yo can only do this through trial and error.
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