Maintaining active vocabulary at an advanced level, without...

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Re: Maintaining active vocabulary at an advance level, without...

Postby DaveAgain » Thu Jan 20, 2022 12:38 pm

Could you perhaps talk to the TV when you watch Sturm der Liebe? I often feel the characters appreciate my advice when I'm watching TV. :-)
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Re: Maintaining active vocabulary at an advance level, without...

Postby einzelne » Thu Jan 20, 2022 1:32 pm

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Re: Maintaining active vocabulary at an advance level, without...

Postby zenmonkey » Thu Jan 20, 2022 4:16 pm

Input helps retention - so either reading a lot or watching things like Charite will help out with the retention issues.
However, 'losing vocabulary' may be an issue with production - If you are really experiencing 'I know the word but I forgot it when I wanted to use it.' then that is an active vocabulary problem, and speaking is really the solution.

Don't like speaking with random people? Then find a tutor, or develop a specific friendship to regularly practice. Or plan the next vacation in-country.

Personally, I find 'talking to myself' not to be very effective over time. And boring. But I know others use that.
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Re: Maintaining active vocabulary at an advance level, without...

Postby Iversen » Thu Jan 20, 2022 5:08 pm

TSS42 wrote:(...) now I'm suspecting that my active vocabulary is dropping off. The other day I was horrified to realise that I had forgotten the German of "manual transmission" and "to approve". (...)


Find an article about a relevant topic (like car components including "manual transmission") and translate it into German - this is much more efficient than relying on random phrases. You will be mercilessly confronted with your lexical weaknesses, you will be learning by looking things up and you will have the final result in writing for later repetition. And hurray, you don't have to show it to anybody, so it doesn't have to perfect - the purpose is to remind you about things you ought to know and maybe once knew.

'Grammar' words and general communication terms (like "approve") are harder to address directly through a specific topic, but are supposed to be both common and omnipresent - if they aren't then it is less important if you forget them. My personal solution would be to do wordlists based on dictionaries - there you also see those once-known words, and you have a reason to be poring over a dictionary.

And one thing more: you should probably focus on the words that aren't international. The others are guessable.
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Re: Maintaining active vocabulary at an advance level, without...

Postby Iversen » Thu Jan 20, 2022 6:06 pm

I have described my wordlist layout here
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Re: Maintaining active vocabulary at an advance level, without...

Postby Le Baron » Thu Jan 20, 2022 8:12 pm

At an advanced level the vocabulary shouldn't really need to be supported by anything like Anki. As zenmonkey says active vocabulary is maintained by usage (including listening/reading) and speaking creates a reflex action like a muscle memory which is connected to the vocabulary as employed.

On the other hand I don't even worry about temporarily forgetting words I haven't used for a while or even if I can't recall a word/collocation; because I do that in my native language. So why should it be considered as any kind of different process at work just because it is an L2?

I have an unpopular minority opinion stating that unless a speaker lives (or has lived for a decent period) surrounded by the language, or has some early background that has driven it deep into auto-pilot, they probably aren't C1 or C2. Probably. That's not something I'd be devastated about. Thousands of immigrants are 'high functioning' users of a language whilst wavering between B1+/B2+/C1, back and forth between the last two.

If this seems not to be addressing the question, the answer I'm giving is that losing/gaining/regaining words is normal and at an advanced level of a language that is being currently used, the expanded core vocabulary should be there all the time.
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Re: Maintaining active vocabulary at an advance level, without...

Postby lichtrausch » Thu Jan 20, 2022 8:16 pm

TSS42 wrote:4. Speaking to myself in German. I have tried this a number of times in the past and found it to be the most exhausting experience.

Why is this exhausting? If you have advanced vocabulary and speaking skills, this should be a casual way of maintaining them.

Aside from speaking to yourself or a pet, I think it's helpful to listen (and to a lesser extent read) more actively. Repeat useful or interesting words and phrases. Think about how you might incorporate them into your own speech.
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Re: Maintaining active vocabulary at an advance level, without...

Postby daegga » Thu Jan 20, 2022 10:27 pm

I tend to start thinking in a language after I engaged in something interesting using this language and then ponder upon it. Especially after consuming audio books. This takes away the question of what to think/talk about - it comes naturally.
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Re: Maintaining active vocabulary at an advance level, without...

Postby einzelne » Fri Jan 21, 2022 1:11 am

TSS42 wrote:It's not the German part, but having to think what to think next that drains me out.


I can certainly relate to this. That’s why I like “read and retell” technique — you don’t have this problem.
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Re: Maintaining active vocabulary at an advance level, without...

Postby DaveAgain » Fri Jan 21, 2022 5:48 am

einzelne wrote:
TSS42 wrote:It's not the German part, but having to think what to think next that drains me out.


I can certainly relate to this. That’s why I like “read and retell” technique — you don’t have this problem.
One of Mary Hobson's tips was to try keep up a continuous monologue of your own actions.

https://forum.language-learners.org/vie ... 29#p104229
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