Best approach to learning more words

[polyglotponderings]

I am at the point in learning of Russian where I understand the grammatical concepts and can use them, but now I realize that I just need to learn more words to be able to express myself fully. I've been using Learning with Texts to read a novel called Маруся (marusya.etnogenez.ru). Any words that I don’t know, I mark and export to Anki. In Anki, I’ve been creating four cards for each word: 1) English->Russian Lemma, 2) Russian Lemma->English, 3) Russian Inflection ->Russian Lemma, and 4) Russian Lemma->Russian Inflection. The full sentence is used on the cards.

Here’s my issue. There are 12,583 distinct words (inflected) in the book. (over 6600 lemmas or base words). I haven’t been using LWT for too long, but I have marked 2,973 (inflected) words as known. This means that there are 9,610 more words for me to learn from this book. I’m sure I know more words that I haven’t had an opportunity to mark in LWT, and some of those words are names and such. If I’m generous, I could round down to 9,000 more words I need to learn.

If I make cards for these based on my current process, I would have approx. 27,000 new cards to learn. (I used an average number of 3 cards per word. Typically there would be 4, but some are already in base form, so I would only have two for those.) At a rate of 30 new cards per day, it would take me 2.5 years (900 days) to finish. I’m tempted to just have one card (English->Russian Inflection) for each word. If I did that, it would still take me almost a year (300 days) to finish.

Since this is the only language that I’ve reached this level at, I’m wondering what other’s approaches are/were for dealing with the large amount of words that need to be learned. Is there a more efficient approach than what I am doing? I know many of the well-known polyglots on YouTube talk about being able to learn a language in a year or less. Based on my analysis, it takes at least a year to learn all the words in a single novel. Maybe I’m thinking about something incorrectly. Has anyone else thought through an analysis similar to mine? I’d like to hear any thoughts or advice anyone has on this topic. Thanks in advance.

[rdearman]

It seems to me you're doing a calculation based on a single novel which is fair enough, however you also seem to think that you need to know every single word in the novel. So let me ask you a question, do you need to know every single word in a Harry Potter book to speak English? No, probably some aren't used anywhere else, some are so rare as to be useless.

You may want to get another book to use for extensive reading. Here you just read for pleasure and try to get the point of the novel without looking up every word.

Also you might want to look into word frequency lists to learn. Learning the first 5000 most frequent words is probably worth more than learning the first 5000 words in a single novel.

[mcthulhu]

I can definitely sympathize with the desire to know ALL the words. I once spent a summer during college doing pretty much the same thing, in my case using a Solzhenitsyn book and piles of index cards. It might be better to prioritize, though.

I saw a rule of thumb once that when you find you've looked up the same word for the third time, it might be time to learn it. It was suggested that you could make a pencil mark in the dictionary next to words you look up, to keep track of this. It doesn't need to be three, and maybe it could be five, but some cutoff along these lines could help you to adjust for frequency so you're not trying to memorize rare words.

Or if you want to be more systematic, some Russian word frequency lists per rdearman's suggestion are at http://www.artint.ru/projects/frqlist/frqlist-en.php. You could verify relative frequency that way before making cards. Some stats from that page:

1000 most frequent lemmas cover 64.0708% of word forms in texts.
2000 most frequent lemmas cover 71.9521% of word forms in texts.
3000 most frequent lemmas cover 76.6824% of word forms in texts.
5000 most frequent lemmas cover 82.0604% of word forms in texts.

Since you asked about efficiency, I would also suggest that using separate cards for separate inflected forms seems like overkill to me, and maybe particularly inefficient for Russian; I've only ever used lemmas. There are only so many grammatical patterns; you'd end up with a lot of repetition among your cards. At some point the relationship between an inflected form and its lemma will become obvious to you anyway, just from exposure.

[Descarte72]

Use Lingq.com and just read what you like to read, but read a lot, and relax.

[smallwhite]

There are 12,583 distinct words (inflected) in the book. (over 6600 lemmas or base words).
... 9,000 more words I need to learn.
... 30 new cards per day, it would take me 2.5 years (900 days) to finish.
... one card... for each word... it would still take me almost a year (300 days) to finish.

30 Russian words a day, 9000 Russian words in 10 months, and you're not happy? 9000 words is C1 level if you pick your words reasonably carefully, eg. from frequency lists and/or picking words most relevant to you, and learning lemmas instead of inflected word forms.

A link for you: Super-fast vocabulary learning techniques

[Arnaud]

9000 words is C1 level if you pick your words reasonably carefully...

10000 words are required for the TRK2 (B2) level in russian (at least in the official texts, perhaps they are more relaxed in reality).

All people learning russian know that to reach a confortable level, you have to amass an extraordinary quantity of vocab: it's due to several factors: precision of the language and lack of "universal" verbs/auxiliaries (to have, to be, to get smth done, to do, to make, etc: all these verbs exist but are not used to form handy structures like in english or french/italian/spanish/you name it...), high dependancy of the context, multi-layers roots of vocab: slavonic, slavic, russian (not counting the borrowings of dutch, german, french in the 18/19th centuries) that often give several words for one thing (with the nuances of literary/popular vocab), several verbs for one action (with subtle variations based on the choice of prefixes) chaotic history that made the language evolve more rapidly than in europe, richness of the colloquial/slang/"mat" language, etc...
Honestly, there are no magic tricks to learn the russian vocab: you have to learn it, in a way or another, and it's a long path.
My method was to learn the most frequent words (as proposed by rdearman) through graded-readers: they bring you progressively to the desired level, but there is still a big gap to close between graded-readers and real books.

[blaurebell]

I'm learning Russian vocabulary with Learning with Texts now. Just looking words up and typing in the dictionary definition is usually enough to learn the words eventually. It's slow going with Russian because it has so much vocabulary, but LWT is still a better option than Anki. I found that the amount of vocabulary I needed to learn up front with Anki to understand even simple texts was so excessive that it made me give up Russian for a while. Also, it's hard to find good frequency lists, because they are usually based on stuff I don't read - newspapers for example. Best just focus on the exact vocabulary you need and don't practice that vocabulary explicitly either, because there simply is too much of it. Just let your memory deal with the most common words naturally. When they are repeated they will eventually just start to stick anyway. Learning with Texts also has colour coding so you can use it as a more refined prompt than known / unknown. LWT is basically SRS with context, only relevant vocabulary and nuances between known and unknown. You will only remember words that are frequently repeated and this way you don't waste your time on words you might never see again.

[smallwhite]

9000 words is C1 level if you pick your words reasonably carefully...

10000 words are required for the TRK2 (B2) level in russian (at least in the official texts, perhaps they are more relaxed in reality).

Do they give you a vocabulary list to study?

[Arnaud]

9000 words is C1 level if you pick your words reasonably carefully...

10000 words are required for the TRK2 (B2) level in russian (at least in the official texts, perhaps they are more relaxed in reality).

Do they give you a vocabulary list to study?

I don't know, but I know they are books like this one who give the minimum to know: https://www.ozon.ru/context/detail/id/27644461/
Vocab, colloquial expressions to know, synonyms/antonyms list: here, it is 5100 "units". It's closer to what you said.
Perhaps I'm wrong, I remember having read 10000 (I'll try to retrieve the document when I have time).

Edit: http://russian-test.com/assets/docs/Tre ... 2_sert.pdf
Requirements for the TRKI 2: page 21: 10000 units of passive vocab and 6000 units of active vocab.

[Xmmm]

Putting 10000 words into Anki might let you game the system and pass a TRK2 exam (somehow I doubt it but for the sake of argument) ...

but personally I would feel foolish being the owner of a TRK2 certificate if I couldn't make heads or tails out of a typical Russian TV drama. Kind of like a black belt in karate getting beat up by someone who weighs fifty pounds less than him and has no formal training.

тачка, урод, мент, ты издеваешься

Those are all brand new words to me, despite the fact that I've read 1.5 million words and know more than 16000 as per LingQ. It seems like they are all colloquial or outright slang, but Dostoyevsky certainly didn't use them, nor do they appear on Russian political talk shows. I also doubt they are on any formal test.

And yet they are endlessly repeated on a show watched by millions ... which is why a lot of people on this thread are telling you to drop Anki and read broadly (and watch a lot of TV).