Iversen wrote:One final advice would be to get your vocabulary holes filled as fast as possible.
Voytek wrote:Have you ever used the frequency word list for any of your TL to fill these holes or you always look for words which are missing in your personal vocabulary?
Sorry for not responding before, but I didn't notice this question. The simple answer is that any new word which isn't totally obsolate or irrelevant (given your interests), will fill a hole so any bulk learning process will qualify. To find holes among the most common words you could in principle consult frequency lists, but with some reservations.
The first problem is that frequency lists mostly are monolingual, and monolingual lists with no explanations are worthless - if you don't know what a word in such a list means then it could just as well be spelled in Klingon using cuniform signs turned upwards down. Lists with words about some specific topic will be useful if you can understand the explanations or translations. A list of bird names with translations into your own language will obviously be more useful than a list with translations into a language where you don't know the names. But a list with the names of 27 berries shouldn't be learned in one session - you
will mix them up!
The second reservation is that you can't predict which words you will need, so some unspecific bulk learning will be necessary. But it will of course be logical to collect common words, grammar words (with their most common forms and uses) and the kind of expressions that glue conversations together. And then I would really like to state that you should collect the words you discover that you don't remember ... but I know from myself that it is easy to promise yourself to do it, but devilishly hard to do in practice.
So in order to get your thinking rolling it may be more productive just to learn to live with the fact that you don't know all words and expressions in your target languages. Or in other words: just think "bob-bop" if you simply can't recall a certain word. Or insert a word from another target language (better than from your native language). Or just find something else to think about. The important thing is to make the thoughts come gushing forth ... and remember: nobody else can hear your thoughts.