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

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StringerBell
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Re: Maintaining active vocabulary at an advanced level, without...

Postby StringerBell » Sun Jan 23, 2022 2:18 pm

TSS42 wrote:The other day I was horrified to realise that I had forgotten the German of "manual transmission" and "to approve". I really don't want to go back to Anki and I don't want to have pointless conversations with strangers.


I don't have advice to give, I just wanted to say that this kind of thing happening is normal and possibly even unavoidable, even for native speakers.

My husband is a native Italian speaker. He has an extremely high level of Italian (he was a voracious reader of classics for most of his life and went through a long phase of believing that having the highest level of his native language possible was better than studying other languages before eventually changing his mind and believing the opposite). He learned English seriously as an adult and moved to the US in his late 20s, where he's been living for 10+ years. I'd say 95% of his life has been English for the past decade. Since moving here, the only time he uses Italian is to talk to his family/friends still in Italy who don't speak English, but that's no more than 1-4 times/week on average.

He has recently started talking about how horrified he was to realize that he's starting to have problems recalling some Italian words while speaking and at times when speaking Italian he automatically thinks of certain words in English first and has to really make an effort to avoid using them and reach for an Italian equivalent. He tends to always talk about the same kinds of topics with his parents or with his cousin or best friend so he never really has occasion to use certain words. When he wants to say something he hasn't said in a long time he might struggle to retrieve it. However, once he hears it again, obviously he knows what it means and then he could use it in the future, if he had need for it again.

So if the same thing is happening to even a native speaker then probably it's a natural process. There are definitely things you can do to reduce how much it happens (like the advice others gave) but at some level it's probably not avoidable or worth stressing about. In your case, even if you were doing LE all along, the terms "manual transmission" or "approve" might still not have come up unless you had made a huge effort to talk about a vast array of topics.
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s_allard
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Re: Maintaining active vocabulary at an advanced level, without...

Postby s_allard » Sun Jan 23, 2022 3:06 pm

TSS42 wrote:...conversation or SRS
I consider myself C1-C2 in German reading and a high B2 in listening comprehension. Nowadays I just read a lot of books and watch Sturm der Liebe for hours. A while ago I stopped using my Anki deck with thousands of MCD cards, but 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". I really don't want to go back to Anki and I don't want to have pointless conversations with strangers.

So that leaves me with four options:
1. Scriptorium: Low-stress activity, but would it really help preserve my active vocabulary?
2. Translate random paragraphs and texts from English to German.
3. Freeform writing in German on any random topic.
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.

All ideas welcome.


It seems to me that there is a fifth option here : engage on a regular basis with native tutors or what Mary Hobson calls language buddies. This doesn’t have to be expensive.

The reason we forget words is simply we don’t use them. The highest or most intense level of usage is with a live interlocutor. This does not have to be pointless conversation. Far from it, you can usually always find something to talk about. If conversation is not happening, change tutor.

I have found that there is nothing like a good conversational exchange to get the juices going. When everything goes well, time flies by and the session is over before we know it.
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iguanamon
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Re: Maintaining active vocabulary at an advanced level, without...

Postby iguanamon » Sun Jan 23, 2022 3:34 pm

Most of us live our lives and work outside of our second languages. Most of us don't have a partner or family who speak our L2's. There are words that aren't going to come up because we aren't in those daily life situations. For years, I got my haircuts in Spanish, I learned the associated vocabulary. I don't feel the need to know all the haircut vocabulary in Portuguese, Haitian Creole or any of my other languages. If I ever have a barber who speaks one of my other languages, then ok.

My point is that expecting to have the same vocabulary and speaking abilities that we have in our native language in an L2 is not realistic without either living in an L2 country; neighborhood; or with an L2 native-speaker... and that's ok. If I need words, I'll ask for them and I am not ashamed or too proud to use circumlocution or define what I need. If I have enough advance warning, I'll search for the vocabulary I may need to know.
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Re: Maintaining active vocabulary at an advanced level, without...

Postby Kraut » Sun Jan 23, 2022 4:59 pm

You could repeat/prepare/maintain vocabulary/situations with "Thematischer Wortschatz in Situationen .." or similar.
I maintain my Spanish simply by learning mini-texts by heart, of which I have a little collection. They are very "deep learned" and I have to devote 15 minutes in the morning to refresh 3 of them for the day: I can recite them loudly, withdraw grammar, verbs whatever ..
Here is an example:
https://www.tripadvisor.es/ShowUserRevi ... Rioja.html
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