How can I learn 50 new vocabulary words a day?

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How can I learn 50 new vocabulary words a day?

Postby rdearman » Fri Jun 02, 2023 10:55 pm

As the title says. How could this be done? And I don't mean just stick them in anki and review, I mean learn the words and the meaning then review them daily.

I have my own ideas about how to do this, but I would like to throw open the question to a wider audience.
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Re: How can I learn 50 new vocabulary words a day?

Postby Gaoling97 » Fri Jun 02, 2023 11:59 pm

What words? 50 random words from the dictionary or 50 specific words?
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Re: How can I learn 50 new vocabulary words a day?

Postby leosmith » Sat Jun 03, 2023 2:30 am

rdearman wrote:I mean learn the words and the meaning then review them daily.
For how many days? The problem soon becomes the reviews. I don't think it's possible to do this for a year, for example. But I remember reading that 35 words a day are possible. This was pre-anki time, and I think the way they came up with that number was to take students who started from scratch and determine their known words after a longish period of time.

I did 50/day for about 2 months per the word brain technique. Word lists are reviewed per Leitner, but terminated after 1 month. I did this for Thai, most of the words came from articles that I read, and it was not fun. After this, I slacked off on my Thai and didn't use the words much, so they didn't stick well. If you learn a bunch of vocabulary very quickly, or over a short period of time, and you don't use it regularly, you are going to lose it. And ime, doing anki flashcards alone is not enough to prevent that from happening.
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Re: How can I learn 50 new vocabulary words a day?

Postby rdearman » Sat Jun 03, 2023 7:13 am

Gaoling97 wrote:What words? 50 random words from the dictionary or 50 specific words?

Any words. Could be random, could be from a book. Doesn't matter.
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Re: How can I learn 50 new vocabulary words a day?

Postby Saim » Sat Jun 03, 2023 8:42 am

In my experience to cram higher amounts of vocabulary you need to just do that, cram. Which means either using some kind of wordlist or Memrise deck that you go over several times over the course of a single day (or a couple of days) while practicing production (native > target), or fiddle with the Anki settings until it lets you cram rather than doing SRS. It's less "efficient" in that you're spending more time per word in terms of hours, but then you can learn more words faster in terms of days and weeks.

SRS across days/weeks doesn't work for this; doing "daily revision" of everything is impossible at this point. SRS is about doing the minimal amount of revision to not forget. If you want to cram lots of vocab you need to do far, far above the minimum amount and then stop revising after a certain point. They're two entirely different approaches that both have their pros and cons.
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Re: How can I learn 50 new vocabulary words a day?

Postby Iversen » Sat Jun 03, 2023 10:17 am

Those members who have been here long can predict my answer: triple column wordlists with one or max. two repetitions - if you haven't learnt a word by then give up leave it for later. So I do review my words daily, but only for one or max. two days (if I go by the book).

I fold my A4 sheets, and on each halfpage I can then have three triple columns, each with around thirty words. And I would hardly ever do less (except in my silly 30 language project, which includes languages I don't actually study - there I just do one triple column per language, but then for instance all the Germanic or all the Romance or all the Slavic languages in one go).

If I hadn't used those wordlists I would have had a hard time learning enough words to keep a dozen languages plus the loose afloat. However to make those words active it takes something more, like for instance using them in mini essays for your personal log thread in LLORG :lol: . Or simply forcing yourself to think in your languages. :idea: Or speaking, if you can find some patient co-humans to speak to :roll: . But without my wordlists I would have been down to just a few active languages, namely those I am confronted with regularly AND have learnt many years ago. I wouldn't be satisfied with that...

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Re: How can I learn 50 new vocabulary words a day?

Postby einzelne » Sat Jun 03, 2023 3:27 pm

You learn 50 words on Monday but then the rest of the week reviewing them (without adding another 50 every single day).

Seriously, I doubt you can sustain such a pace over long stretches of time.

Personally, I cannot learn words in isolation. I need to have a story, a narrative etc. I usually do the following in the beginning: I take a book, underline unknown words, write translation on the margin. I review by repeating out loud the whole sentence/phrase with the new word without looking into the text. Then I also usually have an audiobook, which I cut into small chunks (1-2 minutes) which I listen to repeatedly. I once added Iversen's wordlist to this routine and it certainly helped. I imagie, if you add reverse translation once you can passively recognize the new words/expression easily, it would be even more effctive.

The problem is I'm too lazy and cannot stick to this routine for a longer periods of time. But seeing words in context and reading books I'm genuinely interested in (as opposed to textbooks with dumb grocery store dialogues) certainly helps.
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Re: How can I learn 50 new vocabulary words a day?

Postby inu » Sat Jun 03, 2023 4:42 pm

A daily input of 50 new words with daily reviewing every word you added, hm… :shock:

Let’s do some math. If your reading speed is 100 wpm (English 1. grader) you can read 6000 words in an hour. If your reading speed is 300 wpm (English adult) you can read 18000 words in an hour. If you read a new word and a one-word-translation for providing meaning you can read 3000/9000 word-pairs in one hour. After up to 4 hours of reading, you would have read 12000/36000 word-pairs. Given you would read up to 4 hours a day, by adding 50 new words each day to your review-queue you would hit that count of words (12000/36000) on day [edit:] 240/720 (reading time for 100 wpm = 1.day: 1min; 2.day: 2 min; 3.day: 3 min,...,240.day: 4 h). On the last day you would have seen the first 50 words 240/720 times and the last 50 words just once.

I don’t know the source anymore but I believe I it was Paul Nation who mentioned that you have to meet a word round about 7 times in different situations to make it “stick” and that you have to know round about 98% words in a text to be able to guess the meaning of an unknown word from context. So, to be able to guess 50 unknown words from context you need a text with at least 2500 words (2450 known/50 unknown). At a reading speed of 100 wpm you’d have to read for 25 minutes and at a reading speed of 300 wpm you’d have to read round about 8 minutes to finish a text of 2500 words.

Here’s my idea:
I don’t know if ChatGPT is able to do what I’ve got in mind but maybe you could ask for a story (in or below your current level to make sure the words are “known”) of the length of 2500 words including your 50 unknown words of choice or reduce the number of words to 10 (whatever number of words works for ChatGPT) and have 5 Stories in the length of 500 words each (you get the idea). The next day you add 50 new words to your list and ask for a new story/new stories including these words (mix the list up to have variety). If you deem every word “new” until you have seen it 7 times you'll end up with stories with 17500 words as a total number of words after seven days (day 1: 2500, day 2: 5000, day 3: 7500 and so on). At a reading speed of 100 wpm you’d have to read for round about 3 hours or for 58 minutes at a reading speed of 300 wpm per day. On day 8 you either clear your list of the first 50 words and add a new bunch of 50 words and ask for stories with your 300 older words and 50 new (350) and have stories with 17500 words in total (17150 known/350 unknown) and repeat the process until you run out of words – reading for 3 or 1 hour a day (depending on your reading speed) OR you keep the old words in the list but don’t change the total number of words for your stories (17150/350). So, you would be reviewing all of your words daily but the words you have seen more than 7 times would be deemed as “known” (98%). If you keep expanding your word list that you provide to include in ChatGPTs stories but keep the total number of words for your stories at 17500 you’ll theoretically end up with a story/stories only consisting of words from your wordlist on day 350 and you’d have “learned” 17500 words with only reading 1 to 3 hours per day in one year. Hypothetically.
I don’t know if this actually works, if I miscalculated, what ever. Just an idea.

edit: corrected miscalculation & clarification
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Re: How can I learn 50 new vocabulary words a day?

Postby leosmith » Sat Jun 03, 2023 5:02 pm

Iversen wrote:
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You call that a Д? :P
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Re: How can I learn 50 new vocabulary words a day?

Postby Le Baron » Sat Jun 03, 2023 5:02 pm

No-one learns 50 words a day properly, in any setting. It's just another fictional idea. People say they do this, but everyone has more reason to be sceptical than believe it. I consider a word 'learned' if I can actually use it or recognise it immediately when it turns up. If not then I don't know it and that is that. I seriously doubt anyone can learn 50 words a day to that use/recognition level. Actually more than that, they just can't. What einzelne wrote about learning (or rather trying to learn) 50 on Monday then spending the week reviewing, and never mind adding another 50 per day!, is the cold reality. And in fact that of those 50 many will simply escape your memory and possibly for months. And also that adding more just compounds this. So it's really a shotgun method, with fewer hits relative to the amount of shot.

If we dispense with Sunday we are talking here about learning 300 words a week, 1200 a month. It's not even a serious proposition. However, because I too would love to learn masses of words in a short time span, I would like to see verified examples of ordinary learners using some method to achieve it so that I can 'eat my words' (all 300 a week of them).
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