How can I learn 50 new vocabulary words a day?

[einzelne]

Also, others in this thread are thinking about reviews, I'm not worried about reviews, that is a separate problem. So I could learn the words, and then when I am confident that I have learned the words, I could put them into Anki for review and make that a sane review schedule, not a "drink from the fire hose" 50 words per day.

I'm sorry, I don't get it. How do you expect to learn anything without reviews (i.e. repetition)?

[tastyonions]

I don’t see how reviews are “a separate problem” anyway. If you want to retain your words for any significant time, you’ll need reviews. And if you keep up a 50 per day pace, the number of reviews will eventually be brutal.

[leosmith]

Also, others in this thread are thinking about reviews, I'm not worried about reviews, that is a separate problem. So I could learn the words, and then when I am confident that I have learned the words, I could put them into Anki for review and make that a sane review schedule, not a "drink from the fire hose" 50 words per day.

I'm sorry, I don't get it. How do you expect to learn anything without reviews (i.e. repetition)?

I believe he is making a distinction between 1) initial memorization, which requires multiple repetitions in a very short period of time, and 2) daily (or longer) reviews which often employ a single repetition.

If you dump 50 unknown words into anki, and you only do one or two reps that first day, you are probably going see to most of those words every day for a long time before you know them well enough for the intervals to increase to something reasonable. But if you already "know" the words, you'll probably mark most of them "correct" the first time, and the review schedule will be much easier.

I just started German. I memorize all the unique words and sentences that I get after a Pimsleur lesson (for example, there were 20 today), and the next day I import them to anki and start my reviews. So I am both somewhat familiar with the words, and I have memorized them once, which makes anki reviews doable.

[einzelne]

I just started German. I memorize all the unique words and sentences that I get after a Pimsleur lesson.

I apologize if it's off topic but I could never understand people who use Anki for reviewing basic, high frequency words. It's Pimpsleur, you will get your reviews anyways. Or do you practice reverse translation?

[leosmith]

Pimpsleur

Is that how native Russan speakers spell it? Anyway, as I mentioned in a different thread, I like to use it for many things:

I’ll review both directions, so it’s a reading primer too. I’ll write out 5-10 lines of L2 answers by hand in a notebook, so it’s a writing primer. Of course, I’ll read the answers out loud, so it a speaking primer. Pronunciation, vocabulary, grammar...the only thing that’s missing at this point is conversation.

Also, if I just do it per the instructions, it may take several days for me to "pass" a lesson. With anki involved, I can finish one every day.

[Iversen]

The other thing the OP doesn't mention is "how well". Good enough to recognize when reading? Good enough to use in writing? Good enough to recognize subtle differences in style and register? Or, like I did with 300 in a month, just to know the basic "standard" translation?

My wordlists don't leave space for long rants about any word - sometimes I write two lines because a word has two totally distinct meanings, but my philosophy is that you first learn a core meaning, and then the rest will be easy to add later - expressions that include the word in question will also have to be added later. The point is that wordlists (and resumably ANKI too) should give you a massive passive vocabulary, but they only serve a purpose if you then read something (for reinforcement of the passive side) AND use the language, which only will activate a fraction of the passive words you have learnt. And for me easiest way to use a language actively is to try to think in it. English is normally the only language where I regularly notice that I have switched to it without even noticing or taking a decision, though during travels in countries where I know the local language well this may also happen with other ones. But once I reach a level where I can write in it with a dictionary I also start thinking - with lots of holes and guesses of course because I can't look things up at the spot, but correctness is not important, it's the action itself that counts.

As for percentages

Will all due respect to Iversen, I doubt the retention rate is great if you decide to do 50 words per day without subsequent reviewing after a 2-day session of doing wordlists.

I actually did a fairly thorough (though not scientifically tenable) analysis of this some years ago, when I decided to learn Serbian at a point where my only other experience with Slavic languages was some very shaky Russian. The idea behind the experiment was that I went through a Cyrillic Serbian-English dictionary (for the first couple of letters also a Serbian-Italian one), and I did two repetition rounds and up to letter И also one check round two weeks later, I counted the percentages of words I didn't remember. I have still the spreadsheet data, and out of 1724 headwords I had lost 349 at the first repetition one day later, 217 at the second one two days later (not necessarily the same ones) and 247 at the check round two weeks later. So I think this shows that the words didn't disappear as rapidly as you might think. HOWEVER it should be said that I was my own judge as to how precisely I had to remember a word - and I accepted near synonyms and Danish equivalents for the translation in the dictionary. So don't trust my figures blindly please..

On top of that I did wordcounts before and after the point I had reached in the dictionary with my wordlists. With a wordcount I check all words on random pages, not only those I have used in my wordlists, and the results were as follows: before the wordlist phase I checked 812 words and estimated that I knew a third, 267 words (including some that looked the same in Danish ansd Serbian, but not necessarily in English), and after the exercise I judged two thirds (499 out of 750) to be known - and then there was a middle category I called 'guessable' where the words rang a bell, but not so loudly and clear that I would claim to understand them. That also went up, of course. And again: these estimates are only valid at the passive level, NOT the active one. So basically I had added a third of the words in the first half of the dictionary to my Serbian vocabulary in a few weeks, - and presumably also two thirds of those in the second half although I didn't do wordcounts on that part. With around 12.000 headwords in that particular dictionary (Сазвежћа) this would amount to around 4000 headwords in less than two months. Try to beat that with other methods.

However Serbian hasn't been a top priority for me later on, and on the two wordcounts I did in 2021 my percentages of definitely known words had shrunk to a mere 54% and 48% respectively (plus 13% resp. 8% *la-la* or guessable ones on top of that). Not as much as in 2014, but enough to read stuff in Serbian (and with some difficulty also its relatives, such as Croat).

[Beli Tsar]

I should probably clarify what I said about Anki. The vast majority of people stick words in to Anki, and then learn them during the reviews. What I was saying was learning the words before the SRS. Interestingly, it is recommended (outside of language learners) that before you put something into SRS, you should already know the information. The SRS is simply to keep you from forgetting, not to teach you. If you were using SRS as a medical student, the recommendation is to learn the information, understand it, make your own cards, and then review the information.

Agreed - sort of. Certainly Anki out of the box is rubbish for learning words. It just isn't designed for it.

It was using Memrise for word lists that convinced me this is not due to any inherent problem with the technique, so much as a combination of setup problems and a lack of effort to support initial learning by the Anki developers. That's their legitimate choice, of course - they do provide it free, after all.
Memrise uses easier questions to start off - multiple choice, multi-directional learning steps - and creams then into a short period. It works well. You could try putting the same word list into a custom Memrise course, doing the first day there, and then moving to Anki. It might work quite well.

For simplicity I just bodge Anki by imitating the initial learning steps in Memrise. It works, if not as well. I hope someday someone writes an Anki mod that is designed for initial learning, so that you begin with multiple choice and move onto harder things.

But interested to see other ideas coming up here.

[inu]

[...]It would be interesting if ChatGPT or another AI could bring the number of hours down.[...]
[...]The AI might even generate what it considers the proper "frequency list", perhaps based upon the student's interests.

Thanks for pointing out Paul Nation’s text @Luke. I'm still a bit reluctant when it comes to ChatGPT (I don’t think it’s reliable enough), but I see the enormous potential.
In my opinion, the biggest problems when learning from native content, i.e. by reading or listening, are (1) the amount one has to consume in order to even have the chance to meet a word often enough to learn it (see Nations calculations) and (2) the difficulty of the content, i.e. the famous 98%, so that you can read/listen fluently at all. Often, you’re wasting too much time on too difficult content. Maybe AI actually offers a solution in this respect or at least provides assistance. It would be a game changer to get a series of optimized texts tailored to your individual needs until you can easily transition to native content. I’d say it’s definitely worth investigating what AI can do in this regard.

[...]I have nothing against Anki, I use it all the time. But I personally think it is rubbish for learning vocabulary. So I'm looking for alternatives, and hence this question.

Also, others in this thread are thinking about reviews, I'm not worried about reviews, that is a separate problem. So I could learn the words, and then when I am confident that I have learned the words, I could put them into Anki for review and make that a sane review schedule, not a "drink from the fire hose" 50 words per day.

For me Anki works pretty well as a vocabulary learning tool. I think it's a question of preference. I had to change the settings to avoid "review-hell", though. If you are looking for alternatives and don't care for reviews, I'd say:
Any method that helps you find as many anchor points in your mind as you can for a new piece of information (word), engage as much and as deeply as possible with it, and reinforce the heck out of it will do the trick.

[...]The point is that wordlists (and resumably ANKI too) should give you a massive passive vocabulary, but they only serve a purpose if you then read something (for reinforcement of the passive side) AND use the language[...]
[...]With around 12.000 headwords in that particular dictionary (Сазвежћа) this would amount to around 4000 headwords in less than two months. Try to beat that with other methods.

Iversen’s method seems to fit in that category pretty well.

In my experience mnemonics, especially key-word-method and method of loci, are very powerful tools for memorization. After 5 months I was able to write 2200 Kanji (15 per day) with the help of James Heisig’s Remembering the kanji (combination of mnemonics & writing) and after a break from Japanese study for a year and a half my retention rate for recognition was still surprisingly high (90%). I tested method of loci for Russian grammar but my spatial memory (the key to loci method) is a joke so it didn’t work as well.

Imo in the end, learning lots of information/words is all about how efficiently you organize your repeated engagement with an information (word) that’s necessary to trick your brain into thinking “this is vital, dude, let’s keep it”.

[tungemål]

This website says that:
- adult English speakers have a vocabulary of 20.000-35.000 words
- natives learn on average one word a day from ages 16 to 50
- they claim non-natives living in English-speaking countries for many years learn 2.5 words a day

You can check your vocabulary there.

Maybe some people can learn 50 words a day. I estimated that I managed to learn about 2000 words in a year when I studied fairly consistently, so about 6 words a day. With 50 words a day you'd only need 400 days to reach 20.000. (native-level vocabulary).

How to learn? I think these are good ideas:
1 - learn the word in many ways: reading it, writing it (by hand), saying it out load, and hearing it.
2 - visualize the word while saying it (easiest with words referring to physical things)
3 - context: get example sentences, several, for the word from for instance context.reverso
4 - etymology might help, since the brain works by association
5 - be sure to cram the word by prompting with native language and twist your brain to come up with the word in the target language - you'll remember it better.
6 - maybe walking will make you learn faster?

[einzelne]

The point is that wordlists (and resumably ANKI too) should give you a massive passive vocabulary, but they only serve a purpose if you then read something (for reinforcement of the passive side) AND use the language, which only will activate a fraction of the passive words you have learnt.

Thanks for sharing you experience. I didn't claim that the words evaporate almost immediately and, as I said, I used it successfully in my learning routine. And, while I was doing it together with other reviewing activities (relistening the chapters of the book I was working with), the initial retention rate was quite good.

And I agree that you need to read a lot in order to see these words in context and reinforce them in you memory, and this is where my retention rate for lower frequency words drops dramatically. It's funny that I still remember that I did your lists with a French novel a couple of years ago and used Quizlet flashcards after that for a month and when these cards a year ago almost everything was forgotten. (For context, by low frequency words I mean words which tend to pop up in your books sporadically but which are by no means low-frequency for native speakers, like décerner, gambader, la cohue, l'égout.) So, depending on your goals, you either let it go, or have to run review session regularly (unless you can read/listen to in your target language 2-3 hours every single day in each of your languages which I certainly cannot afford). This at least has been my experience.