How can I learn 50 new vocabulary words a day?

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

Postby jimmy » Sun Jun 04, 2023 8:07 pm

I know that this was NOT the expected thing for Chinese, maybe even it is impossible or at least NOT an ordinary/usual thing. . . :)
as normal case or analysis , one is expected to learn & use correctly just 6 characters a day..

actually ,I believe I could do the more by myself as a personal observation if I deal the entire of day. but I do not know why ,this is a general overview or expectation to learn & use 6 characters a day only.

anyway, I think that such programs should be personalised not generalised.

normally everyone better knows himself/herself.
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Re: How can I learn 50 new vocabulary words a day?

Postby Steve » Sun Jun 04, 2023 9:30 pm

Stepping back and looking at cumulative numbers, that's about 1500 words/month or about 18K/year or 180K/decade. Assuming root words and not every individual form, this is approaching a native vocabulary level in a year or so in some languages.

Speaking for myself, and thinking in terms of passive vocabulary, I'd binge listen to songs and binge repetitive extensive reading. I'd build up to a rate of N new pages per day and repeating maybe the previous 6N pages. In other words, start a new "chapter" every day and repeat the last week's worth of chapters. I'd want audio, L1 text, and L2 text versions to mix listening and reading. I'd also add a new song every day or so depending on its length and content. I'd also do passive listening of songs in the background while I'm doing other things.

Doing sampling counts of unfamiliar, somewhat familiar, and familiar words in songs and pages periodically would give me a sense of how many new words I'd be encountering per day as well as how many are sticking to some degree. I could then adjust the number of songs and pages to get closer to 50 unfamiliar words per day. Probably some degree of duplication for words that did not come close to sticking with first exposure, but I frankly wouldn't care if I was hitting exactly 50 per day as long I was in the ball park.

The main thing is that I would treat this as a process. Once it starts to stabilize at various levels of vocabulary (perhaps at 1 month, 3 months, and 6 months or whatever), I'd adjust the ratio of new to old material to cover more unfamiliar words as needed.

Sounds great in theory.... My best guess is that for a given amount of time per day some rate of new word coverage would emerge that would probably slowly shift over time. In practice, I'd see what amount of time my brain would stay fresh per day and settle at that rate of words as what I'm capable of. I'd also adjust the material I was using to make sure I enjoyed it.
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Re: How can I learn 50 new vocabulary words a day?

Postby rdearman » Sun Jun 04, 2023 9:44 pm

Just to give a little more context to the reasons behind the question. I mentioned in my log that I'm doing the same stuff regularly, but don't seem to be progressing. I said that I needed to have a think about what I'm doing, and how to break the deadlock I find myself in.
rdearman wrote:I continue to do the same thing, and I don't think I am progressing, so this would indicate that what I am doing is wrong. But I'm not really sure what else to do. I'm going to need to think about this a little.

The best things I did with French and Italian were the super challenges, both the reading and the listening. But, I can't read in Korean! I don't have enough vocabulary.

I figured if I jump-started the reading process by learning most of the words in the book, before I start reading the books, then I'm ahead of the game. This is the reason I'm not all that worried about reviews, I'll see the words in the books anyway.
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Re: How can I learn 50 new vocabulary words a day?

Postby einzelne » Sun Jun 04, 2023 10:42 pm

rdearman wrote:I figured if I jump-started the reading process by learning most of the words in the book, before I start reading the books, then I'm ahead of the game. This is the reason I'm not all that worried about reviews, I'll see the words in the books anyway.


If I remember correctly, you're a software developer. From the statistical point of view, it doesn't make any sense. An average novel would have around 5-8k unique words, half of which, if not more, would occur in the text just a couple of times. Learning several thousand words before you actually tackle a novel sounds like a horrible idea. You can pick up a random novel in English and run the statistical analysis for yourself (Just an example: Spinoza's Ethics has only 2200 unique words, but yet 1400 of them occur in the text 5 and less times - simply not enough to get organic space repetition.)

Do you read adapted books in Korean comfortably? If so, I would pick up an easy book translated into Korean (scientific non-fiction works best) and read it next to the original. I do it on my Kindle iPad so I can always check how many times a work occurs in the text — that can give you some indication which words are worth reviewing first.. And I use a pop-up dictionary to check the meaning if the translator allows themselves too much freedom.

But since Korean is a Category IV language I don't know about its hidden challenges. One thing I'm sure of is that I wouldn't expect quick results.

UPD. iPad has a build-in Korean-English dictionary. You can use iBooks for reading.
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Re: How can I learn 50 new vocabulary words a day?

Postby luke » Sun Jun 04, 2023 11:12 pm

rdearman wrote:Just to give a little more context to the reasons behind the question.
rdearman wrote:I continue to do the same thing, and I don't think I am progressing, so this would indicate that what I am doing is wrong. But I'm not really sure what else to do.

The best things I did with French and Italian were the super challenges, both the reading and the listening. But, I can't read in Korean! I don't have enough vocabulary.

You did a Listen-Reading experiment a while back and made a video about your experience. As I recall, a big challenge was that you could read English way faster than the TL you were listening to. My suggestion is to speed up the recording so your reading doesn't outpace your listening.

Other important components of Listen-Reading are the bilingual text and that it is a book that you know and love and therefore are somehow enchanted by experiencing it again.

Based on my earlier thread post quoting Paul Nation's work, I'd think if you were able to stay engaged with the test for about an hour or so per day, 7 days per week, you might approach your target vocabulary growth. (Time per day reduced because you'll be reading faster than 150 words per minute, as long you're looking at the English. I'd assume your pace would slow down if you can get to the point of Korean-Korean Listen-Reading that same enchanting book).
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Re: How can I learn 50 new vocabulary words a day?

Postby rdearman » Sun Jun 04, 2023 11:47 pm

einzelne wrote:If I remember correctly, you're a software developer. From the statistical point of view, it doesn't make any sense. An average novel would have around 5-8k unique words, half of which, if not more, would occur in the text just a couple of times. Learning several thousand words before you actually tackle a novel sounds like a horrible idea. You can pick up a random novel in English and run the statistical analysis for yourself (Just an example: Spinoza's Ethics has only 2200 unique words, but yet 1400 of them occur in the text 5 and less times - simply not enough to get organic space repetition.)

I have done the statistical analysis of one Agatha Christie book, using AntConv. There are 7785 unique tokens (words) and a total of 21,286 words.

Rank | Type | Freq
1 | 말했다 | 312
2 | 있었다 | 172
3 | 수 | 165
4 | 그는 | 160
5 | 그 | 144
6 | 나는 | 119
7 | 한 | 105
8 | 그리고 | 102
9 | 그러나 | 101
10 | 있는 | 100
11 | 이 | 90
12 | 그녀는 | 71
12 | 에밀리 | 71
14 | 게 | 67
14 | 베러는 | 67
14 | 판사는 | 67
17 | 거요 | 66
18 | 암스트롱 | 66
19 | 있소 | 64
20 | 알고 | 63

The first 20 words in Frequency order cover 10% of the book. So, if I just memorised these 20 words, I could freely read 20% of this book. If I memorised the first 900 in frequency order then I would have 59% coverage of the words in this book. At this point, the words only show up 4 times or less in the book. So, in theory at this point I could simply look up the rare words which only occur 4< times in the book.
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Re: How can I learn 50 new vocabulary words a day?

Postby iguanamon » Sun Jun 04, 2023 11:49 pm

You can start reading now with some help... like... using parallel texts with human-made translations. In this way, you can take one text a few pages at a time and learn from it.

Without my own homemade parallel texts, I would not have advanced as rapidly as I did in minority languages with few resources available. You can choose sources to use and work with. You're also a skilled programmer and can make your own texts easier than I can. I have used the Old Testament of the Bible, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, Robinson Crusoe and much simpler texts- like a 14 page pamphlet about the water cycle for 4th graders.

Remember Sprachprofi learning Japanese with subs2srs. She outlines how she studied with subs2srs very well. Emk used subs2srs for (admittedly easier) Spanish. Couldn't you try something similar for Korean? You'll probably get the feeling of advancing and doing something else.

Well, several people have done things like memorize the 3,000 most common words and then plowed through to reading with that foundation. It is possible and has been done. It's just not my thing.
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Re: How can I learn 50 new vocabulary words a day?

Postby Iversen » Mon Jun 05, 2023 12:00 am

I am puzzled by the negative experiences of einzelne. According to the post above his initial retention rate in French was OK, but one year later almost all the new words had mysteriously disappeared. I haven't kept my old Serbian wordlists so I can't check my retention at the word level, but globally a drastic loss would be visible in my wordcounts. And yes, I have seen a fall, but not at an alarming rate - at least not when we speak passive vocabulary.

The question is whether something in our daily routines is different enough to give such a difference in outcome in the long run. I have actually experienced in my study history that might be seen as a parallel, namely the losses that occurred happened during the 25 years I didn't study languages at all (I had got my exam in French and literature, judged theacademic job market... and switched to economics and informatics). I could speak Romanian fluently when I left the university, but lost it all within a couple of years. My Latin was also practically gone, and my Italian had become rusty. Only my English, German, French and to some extent Spanish survived because I used them for reading and tourism. So lack of activity can definitely be a language killer. But einzelne has not been as passive as I was during those 25 years.

I have at least spent a minimum of 2-3 hours daily on language learning in general since I rekindled that hobby in 2006, and especially during the last years I had spent much of that time on other Slavic languages - but not with Serbian as a major time gobbler. So maybe the activities in other Slavic languages have spilled over to my Serbian? But I haven't done anything magical - just wordlists, a bit of grammar, intensive studies of short text passages using bilingual printouts - and a lot of extensive surfing on the internet (mostly written sources, including a solid dose of Wikipedia) ... I don't know whether einzelne does something totally different, but doubt that it would suffice to explain his loss of vocabulary. My first reaction now will be to do a new wordcount with the dictionary I used in 2014, but I wouldn't expect it to differ much from my results from 2021 - time will tell.
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Re: How can I learn 50 new vocabulary words a day?

Postby einzelne » Mon Jun 05, 2023 12:17 am

rdearman wrote:I have done the statistical analysis of one Agatha Christie book, using AntConv. There are 7785 unique tokens (words) and a total of 21,286 words.


In reality, the number of unique words is way less. The results need to be lemmatized. Now, it counts 'to be", "are", "was", "is" as 4 tokes whereas it just one word.

rdearman wrote:The first 20 words in Frequency order cover 10% of the book. So, if I just memorised these 20 words, I could freely read 20% of this book.


The reality is more complex than that. Imagine a sentence in your target language: "Abracadabra was abracarabra". Technically you 'know' 33% of words. Still it doesn't translate into understanding 33% of text. The same with: "I have been abracadabra": you know 75% of words but it doesn't help much. The sad reality is that meaning quite often lurks in low frequency words.

Still, frequency dictionaries are a great tool. Routledge has one for Korean, so if I were you, I would definitely use it as an additional tool.
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Re: How can I learn 50 new vocabulary words a day?

Postby einzelne » Mon Jun 05, 2023 12:27 am

Iversen wrote:I am puzzled by the negative experiences of einzelne. According to the post above his initial retention rate in French was OK, but one year later almost all the new words had mysteriously disappeared.


What's so puzzling? Almost all of them occurred only once during your 2 years of extensive reading in French. You haven't seen these words in more than a year. You didn't read fiction in French during this year, only non-fiction + podcasts. How do you expect your memory to retain them? I distinctly remember some words and expressions from the book in Russian (a draft, for instance, because the book was about a writer) but I couldn't recollect their French equivalents.

Hell, last June I went through a Spanish textbook, read several graded readers and then read two short unadapted books on my Kindle in one month relatively comfortably. Now, I don't remember even some basic stuff.

It has to be a sustained exposure over years to stick in your brain. I don't have this problem with English, for instance.
Now, since you deliberately train your memory this way, it's only natural that your retention rate is better. But I believe my experience is closer to that of the average 'wannabe polyglot' Joe.
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