best way to keep a vocabulary book

[reddragon]

At the moment I am recording new vocabulary by just keeping a list with spanish on one side and english on the other... in no particular order (apart from when they are presented in the material I am studying).. I can foresee I will just end up with one big list of vocabulary with no order etc.... I have attached a screenshot of what I am currently doing (colour coding is based on the origin of the words, e.g top 5000 word list, course book, memrise etc)

How do other people keep track of vocabulary ?

[reineke]

I prefer to hear the words and if I write things down I usually end up throwing it away.

A long time ago I had a small vocabulary booklet that was pocketable and easily consulted.
I got an A on my Latin exam. I cannot remember five words from that list. The words that I do remember are connected to a story: Terra est stella and Vulpes et uva. Wait, that's more than five words.

I also copied and recopied words, texts and sentences which worked a lot better.

I think that portability beats color coding and other considerations.

You may wish to read about Iversen's list method in the resources. section.

There's also the "Gold list method"

https://huliganov.tv/goldlist-eu/

How to Create a Language Journal – and Actually Learn a Language With It

"You might not want to write down every new word you encounter, but instead just words that stand out to you."

http://www.languagesurfer.com/2013/04/0 ... e-with-it/

Memorization and You

https://forum.language-learners.org/vie ... morization

Highlighting Is a Waste of Time: The Best and Worst Learning Techniques

http://ideas.time.com/2013/01/09/highli ... echniques/

[Iversen]

If you really really want to read about my three-column wordlist layout then you can find my guide in the resources section (as mentioned by Reineke), but it is also available as an ordinary thread, and the relevant part is found here.

But I actually don't think of wordlists as a vehicle for longtime storage - I tend to throw my wordlists out when I have been through them a couple of times - my longterm storage function is taken care of by my dictionary collection. If a wordlist is more than a few weeks old then I probably have forgotten the memory hooks I used to memorize its words in the first place, and then I can just as well start a new one. Actually I may also have forgotten some of the words, but I rely on reading and other activities to keep those words alive which deserve it.

[aaleks]

How do other people keep track of vocabulary ?

I don't keep it. I've never kept any vocabulary lists, at least for English. In school we were forced to keep such lists and it's one of the reasons why I dislike them, but I was learning German back then, not English. So I build my English vocabulary mostly by reading and looking words up. I've not jotted unknown words down, but just looked them up, tried to memorize and moved on. The bad side of my approach is I don't know the size of my English vocabulary but it's big enough to cover all native materials I read, watch or listen to.

[mcthulhu]

Your vocabulary notebook looks just like mine used to, though I usually used a 3 by 5 inch journal, and covered one column with a 3 x 5 card while I was reviewing. I used the notebooks for temporary storage, and a way to do review at odd moments while I was out and about. In parallel with the notebooks, I also used an Excel spreadsheet for permanent storage, searching, and sorting at that time (since then I've moved on to databases).

One benefit was that words near each other in the notebook usually came from the same context, which helped with association. (I had also experimented with dividing up the notebook into sections for each letter of the alphabet, so they were at least very roughly sorted and I could use the word list as a crude personal dictionary; but I gave up on that as not worth the trouble.) Another benefit is that paper journals have excellent battery life.

[Sayonaroo]

Personally the idea of a "language book" never appealed to me so I don't keep track of vocab like that. I think it's a waste of time, ineffective, and I have bad handwriting and I hate handwriting in general because it's so strenuous. I follow a different method. Currently I'm kinda doing the lingq method for Spanish where you read and listen a lot. I certainly learned way more Spanish than I ever learned during my 6 years of learning Spanish in middle school and high school. I got straight A's of course!

Maybe a language book could be beneficial at a different stage but for a beginner level I personally feel better off reading and listening.

[rdearman]

My Italian friend bought a small "telephone contact book". I don't rememeber the offical name of these, but basically they are a small book with small tabbed sections in alphabetical order for you to write in peoples phone numbers. Something like this:



This allowed her to write the words in the appropriate section, so that as she got more of them she could look them up. She filed them by her native language alphebetically.

[PeterMollenburg]

Mine is similar but with some variation on yours reddragon. I write French words, phrases, idioms, occassional tricky grammar points on the left, and provide an English translation or a French definition on the right (whichever I feel like at the time). I add words from various sources- a course, a book, something I hear etc.

I will review vocab for 10 minutes at the start of each hour of study. That 10 minutes is either spent referring to my written down words etc in the vocab. exercise book as mentioned above or by referring to a picture/illustrated/visual dictionary. I rotate those two sources taking it in turns for each successive 10 minutes at the beginning of each successive hour session of French studying/learning. Sometimes I miss it altogether. Some days I don't do it at all.

For the vocab book (in which I write the words in the 2 columns), when reviewing/revising words I've already entered previously, I work down (or up) a page and aim to translate the words from FR to EN or the other way round EN (or if I've written the FR definition instead) to FR, while covering up the column I'm aiming to answer with. Once I can successfully recall (and repeat out loud) correctly all words, phrases etc on one page in one direction, I then do it in the other direction. When I complete a page in both directions successfully (FR - EN, EN - FR), I move on to the next page.

I used to use SRS electronic techonlogy a lot. I just got tired of it- it felt too machine driven/dictated and I wanted to take a step back from technology.

If and when I fill the whole exercise book, i'm unsure what I'll do with it. I might throw it out. I might go back through it after completing another notebook or two first. I'm not that attached to it. Getting the words into my head is what matters, and even if they don't stay in there, I won't clutch to my notebook with desperate attachment hoping that if I carry it to my grave the words will activate in my next life.

Essentially what I mean is, I've learned to trust that the process is not infallible, but remains useful and enjoyable in itself, more so than SRS apps and computer programs at this point. Also I'm enjoying flicking through real pages of real dictionaries to find translations and definitions and then writing them down with a real pen and paper in an actual book- there's something nice and... human ... about it. Reviewing is nice and I also enjoy every other 10 min when I attempt to learn new vocab. from my current choice DK French English Bilingual Visual Dictionary.

[Elenia]

I don't keep a book, but rather have interesting vocabulary and sentences written down on bits of paper which I do keep together. If I use plain paper then things are often arranged a bit more randomly, which sometimes helps when I want to find a particular word usage. I don't make a note of every word or phrase I come across, only the interesting ones, or the ones which express a concept I have previously tried to express. I almost always write these words down in context. I then input this information into a excel document so that I can search for them, but I am not very good about keeping it up to date or using it.

[leosmith]

How do other people keep track of vocabulary ?

All the vocabulary that I make an effort to review comes from conversations I have, since that's the most valued skill for me. I copy/paste the items from the skype text to an excel spreadsheet. Then I write out the list in a notebook (middle of the page in the photo), because I find writing new items improves my retention. Next, I memorize the list, because I find it easier and retain it better than if I try this on anki. The following day I dump the excel list into anki, and let it take over reviews from that point on. So I only use the paper list for one day. In the same notebook, as you see, I do my writing practice. What I'm doing there is hand writing the answers to anki flashcards.