Efficient Vocabulary Exercises (Types, passive vs active etc)

[rowanexer]

I've seen a variety of exercises for learning vocabulary but I'm not really sure which are more effective.

A lot of apps use quite passive methods that don't seem very useful to me. E.g. Duolingo including very obviously wrong red herring words, or ListLang having 4 words to pick the correct answer but only one being a verb to fit into a verb space. Will these exercises ever translate into a passive or active knowledge?

Other exercises I'm not sure whether they work or not. E.g. finding an L2 word in a wordsearch from the L1 translation, or matching 7 L2 words with their L2 definition. These can be harder to do if you don't already have a good memory or grasp of the words.

What exercises do people find useful to learn vocabulary? Does anyone know of research which compares the effectiveness of different exercises?

I've listed some of the exercises I know below.

Exercises
* Flashcards
** L1 -> L2
** L2 -> L1
* Wordsearch
* Cloze deletion exercises
** Type L2
** Select L2 word from several options
* Matching from small list
** Match L2 & L1
** Match L2 & L2 definition
* Rearrange a sentence
** Only sentence words included
** Some red herring words included (aka Duolingo)
* Create a sentence for vocabulary
* Triple column wordlists

[Iversen]

Triple column wordlists (and yes, this is not the first time I have mentioned this exercise, but I like it, and it works for me)

[leosmith]

I've seen a variety of exercises for learning vocabulary but I'm not really sure which are more effective.

I don't think I can answer your detailed questions, but instead, would recommend finding a "system" of learning vocabulary that integrates well with your learning plan. Super-fast vocabulary learning techniques may help.

[Odair]

No exercise can beat reading.

[leosmith]

No exercise can beat reading.

How about 90% reading + 10% memorizing/reviewing new vocab you encounter? How about reading with a reading tool that provides mouse-over definitions? Etc.

[Iversen]

There is a test-your-vocabulary page out there somewhere which has a log page where you can see in graphic form that the people with the largest vocabularies were those that read the most - preferably literature, though I would make a case for popular science articles too (oh! wishful me..). But before you can read comfortably you already have to know a lot of words, and that's where the systematized tools come in - including, but not restricted to Anki and my own wordlists.

Bilingual sources can function as a shortcut to reading too difficult stuff, but I would have a hard time reading a Basque or Hungarian text even with a translation to help me. And with other writing systems like those used in the far East I would be even more utterly lost until I had studied them. In short, you need to build some basic skills even before proceeding to read stuff.

Børnebogcafe.JPG

But even after you have amassed a sizeable passive vocabulary from god-knows-where you still have to make it active. And here the best thing you can do is to avoid everything that smacks of multiple choice as the plague!! Multiple choice only tests your recognition skills, and your time would be better spent on repetition. Instead 'directed' recall should be used - and I use 'directed' here because totally free recall would allow you to eschew all your weak points. The recall should be something that produces either the intended word or at least a synonyme. And the obvious tool here is some kind of translation exercise, but when I do wordlists from a dictionary the alphabetical order of neighbouring words is also part of the game. Or memories about where you saw a word or associations in the form of images .. actually everything that can tickle your recall mechanism in the brain enough to make it do its job.

But even recall isn't enough, To really activate something you also have to use it in a context, and I don't really have a system that could force me to use all the words I have recalled even during the last hour. The thing comes nearest would be thinking about a relevant topic. Writing is too slow, and waiting for a suitable conversation partner to pop up out of the nothingness would be too optimistic. So thinking about a certain topic which you just have read about would be the feasible solution - although it would not force you to use all the small grey words you ought to have learnt. Translation exercises could be used - especially the bidirectional version which Luca Lampariello has advocated. However he expects a sizeable delay before the retranslation, and I think it should be done while you still vaguely remember the original text from which the first translation was done. Else it would just be like doing a translation from scratch - which of course also a good exercise, but only when you more or less already have learnt the language. And then you could just as well write essays out of your own head.

[Cainntear]

No exercise can beat reading.

No, but while no exercise can beat swimming if you want to swim in the Olympics, that doesn't mean there aren't exercises that are useful before you are capable of swimming non-stop for several hours; or even that there aren't exercises that are useful in between sessions of swimming several hours.

Plus, of course, swimming for several hours at a time might not be a good practice if you're aiming for a sprint gold (or even record) in Paris next summer.

Personally, I think a balance can be acheived. I don't personally think the being able to do vocabulary exercises as fast as a click of the fingers is good, because you're atuning yourself to the exercise itself, and not to the words more generally. When I was using flashcards mostly intensively, it didn't really teach me much; but when I was using flashcards most effectively, I think I was dropping the cards before I previously did, and just trusting the words to come up frequently enough in the stuff I was reading in order to remember them. And if they didn't, they probably weren't worth wasting much time on anyway.

In effect, I was using flashcards to enhance other activities, and not as a specific, siloed goal. But I can't really describe what I was doing in a detailed way. If I tried to, I'd just be inventing stuff to make myself sound clever.

[smallwhite]

Semi-relevant to your request for research:
Two articles by Quizlet's data scientist

[rowanexer]

But even after you have amassed a sizeable passive vocabulary from god-knows-where you still have to make it active. And here the best thing you can do is to avoid everything that smacks of multiple choice as the plague!! Multiple choice only tests your recognition skills, and your time would be better spent on repetition.

Instead 'directed' recall should be used - and I use 'directed' here because totally free recall would allow you to eschew all your weak points. The recall should be something that produces either the intended word or at least a synonyme. And the obvious tool here is some kind of translation exercise

Yeah this is what I suspected. There's a lot of hype in the language community for things like Clozemaster, and stuff like ListLang will give you a percentage like "you know understand 10% of speech!", which is very encouraging but I can't really see the effects in real life.
I've been putting new words from a textbook into Anki as well but I'm also feeling like I'm just getting good at doing Anki, and not actually at remembering and using these words in real life.

I've seen methods where you write things out using the new words, but I haven't tried just thinking about the topic like you said. I suppose this is similar to what I've heard people do where they try to narrate things in their target language, either in their head or out loud, and talk about what they're doing/going to do. Currently I don't have any opportunity to use Portuguese actively in my life, so I am struggling to get to any active recall stage. I don't want to just be uselessly learning how to recall stuff in Anki.

[DaveAgain]

But even after you have amassed a sizeable passive vocabulary from god-knows-where you still have to make it active. And here the best thing you can do is to avoid everything that smacks of multiple choice as the plague!! Multiple choice only tests your recognition skills, and your time would be better spent on repetition.

Instead 'directed' recall should be used - and I use 'directed' here because totally free recall would allow you to eschew all your weak points. The recall should be something that produces either the intended word or at least a synonyme. And the obvious tool here is some kind of translation exercise

I've seen methods where you write things out using the new words, but I haven't tried just thinking about the topic like you said. I suppose this is similar to what I've heard people do where they try to narrate things in their target language, either in their head or out loud, and talk about what they're doing/going to do. Currently I don't have any opportunity to use Portuguese actively in my life, so I am struggling to get to any active recall stage. I don't want to just be uselessly learning how to recall stuff in Anki.

I watched a language learning video about listening the other day. One exercise suggested there was summarising; watching/listening to something, and then self-talking about it, either a recap or arguing points raised etc.