How to learn vocabulary?

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LinguaPony
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Re: How to learn vocabulary?

Postby LinguaPony » Mon Oct 30, 2017 9:37 am

Bilingual reading is a huge booster.
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Tillumadoguenirurm
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Re: How to learn vocabulary?

Postby Tillumadoguenirurm » Mon Oct 30, 2017 11:15 am

A question to those of you who never use any srsprogram, what do you do to remember or recognise words? Do you look them up in the dictionary every time, write them down, memorise or what?
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Re: How to learn vocabulary?

Postby aaleks » Mon Oct 30, 2017 12:09 pm

Tillumadoguenirurm wrote:A question to those of you who never use any srsprogram, what do you do to remember or recognise words? Do you look them up in the dictionary every time, write them down, memorise or what?

Look up in a dictionary, read everything written about the word (there can be several translations/meanings), choose the one that suits more, try to memorise it. It's not always so long and tedious, sometimes it's just look-up and move-on. Once I tried to write unknown words down while reading but for me to write something down = forgot it. So instead of memorizing a word on the spot, I would have to spend additional time to memorize the word later.
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Re: How to learn vocabulary?

Postby tarvos » Mon Oct 30, 2017 12:37 pm

Tillumadoguenirurm wrote:A question to those of you who never use any srsprogram, what do you do to remember or recognise words? Do you look them up in the dictionary every time, write them down, memorise or what?


First I decide whether my life depends on knowing this word or not. If not, I don't care enough. If it keeps cropping up, I'll look it up. Clearly it's important. Sometimes I guess from context or morphological clues.
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Re: How to learn vocabulary?

Postby Cavesa » Mon Oct 30, 2017 6:21 pm

AmitS wrote:
Cavesa wrote:
rdearman wrote:If you want to learn new words. You want to learn them in context. You don't want to use SRS or lists. Then you just need to read, a lot. Read, read, read, read. You'll learn the word in context, you'll not have to bother with electronic stuff, and you can visually see it on the page. It is what people did before computers, so we know it will work.


I still cannot understand why people take it as two exclusive options. I find a mix of SRS and tons of context to be the best. Of course it is possible to learn without SRS! But SRS, unless you hate it, can make the process faster.

Reviewing in Anki doesn't mean you are not learning in context. As long as it is a word encountered somewhere, as long as the learner has a lot of input.

It is possible to learn without SRSing, I have great experience with extensive reading. A mix is great. But SRS only is a problem. I have no clue why there are people who just SRS wordlists as their main learning activity. There are people on the internet, who keep recommending each other to learn with Duolingo+Memrise and "then just speak and speak". This is a sure way to fail and get disappointed.

rdearman wrote:I recommend both anki and reading, but the OP specifically set out the criteria. So no electronic devices and no lists is basically just reading. :lol:

By saying a combination of both reading and SRS is the most effective trick, how does SRS get into the picture?
I mean, how do you actually use it? Do you add every difficult word/expression you encounter during your readings into Anki? Do you review the words out of context or including context? And what are you doing in a case in which a word has different definition(s) as well, but you encountered only one of them? You add the rest of the definitions as well, without getting familiar with them, or only the one being encountered?


I don't necessarily mix them this way. I read extensively, I don't have time to dissect paper books in a tram. Readlang is an exception but I use it more like an easy dictionary on the go than SRS. But either with a dictionary or just from the context: the books themselves are an SRS, as some words are there more often than others. SRS is for the stuff I need but I don't encounter it naturally all the time. Because some otherwise very useful words are simply not that frequent even in 20000 bookpages.

For SRS, I have found already made huge decks of good quality to be the best for me. Making a deck takes ages and much more consistency than I am usually capable of. Fortunately, some people have already done the work. Like Eunoia on Memrise, whose +French courses contain like 2O000 words and I guess +Spanish will be similar, I haven't counted it together yet.

When I make a deck, which happens for example in German, as I haven't found premade ones I would like enough, I add stuff from a coursebook, from a vocab workbook or overviews. My occasional lists from elsewhere usually get lost before I put them into anki. I don't put example sentences or other context in, I get the context everywhere else, SRS serves just as a reminder, a memorisation tool, not The Source. There is very little problem with multiple definitions or synonyms for me. Multiple definitions can lead to creation of more cards with the same answer. Multiple words for one definition: a card asking me for two answers, a card giving me the first letter, or preferably a card telling me not to answer the easier word like "question (not that)".

I don't necessarily learn the one thing from various sources at once. If I remember it from the book immediately: great. If not, it is no tragedy, I'll see it again in another resource. I am in no hurry, so doing the individual parts of the learning process at different times works for me.

I know it sounds weird but it has already worked a few times for me. It's like a series of long chaotic phases, each concluded with a -click-, where stuff finally happens to be stored in the right places.
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Re: How to learn vocabulary?

Postby Iversen » Wed Nov 01, 2017 11:08 pm

I looked at a number of research reports about vocabulary learning up to the Novi Sad conference, including some that specifically tested for the effects of extensive reading and/or listening without any other support techniques. Most of these reports used multiple answer questionnaires to gauge the effects, but those few reports that used both multiple choice and 'open' questions consistently showed that multiple choice exaggerates the effects ... so taking that into account, it seems that just reading and/or listening without any specific attempt to learn new words isn't very efficient. Tests using multiple choice only test passive knowledge - and even passive knowledge with an outside help source. 'Open' questions are much closer to testing active knowledge, even though some variants (like cloze questions) do provide you with a context.

On the other hand we know from other sources that heavy readers have larger vocabularies than those that never read a book or something more demanding than SMS messages or street signs. How come? Well, the point could be that if you do read with your mind set to sucking up new words and constructions then you may also get something from extensive reading or listening. If you just read/listen to get the gist and let the concrete words fly through your head without any attempt to retain anything, then you probably won't learn anything new about the language in question - which doesn't preclude the possibility that you may remember some information about the topic. But you could also end up having a hard time even remembering what the topic was .. like when you forget you dreams unless you deliberately try to remember them.

There may be individual differences insofar that some persons are better to remembering ephemeral tidbits of information than others, but I personally have to get things down on paper and repeat them a couple of times to make them stick. And that includes new vocabulary. And I prefer wordlists because I there also can control how and when I do my repetitions. SRS programs would make me feel like a human dartboard.
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Re: How to learn vocabulary?

Postby Cavesa » Thu Nov 02, 2017 2:37 pm

Iversen wrote:I looked at a number of research reports about vocabulary learning up to the Novi Sad conference, including some that specifically tested for the effects of extensive reading and/or listening without any other support techniques. Most of these reports used multiple answer questionnaires to gauge the effects, but those few reports that used both multiple choice and 'open' questions consistently showed that multiple choice exaggerates the effects ... so taking that into account, it seems that just reading and/or listening without any specific attempt to learn new words isn't very efficient. Tests using multiple choice only test passive knowledge - and even passive knowledge with an outside help source. 'Open' questions are much closer to testing active knowledge, even though some variants (like cloze questions) do provide you with a context.

On the other hand we know from other sources that heavy readers have larger vocabularies than those that never read a book or something more demanding than SMS messages or street signs. How come? Well, the point could be that if you do read with your mind set to sucking up new words and constructions then you may also get something from extensive reading or listening. If you just read/listen to get the gist and let the concrete words fly through your head without any attempt to retain anything, then you probably won't learn anything new about the language in question - which doesn't preclude the possibility that you may remember some information about the topic. But you could also end up having a hard time even remembering what the topic was .. like when you forget you dreams unless you deliberately try to remember them.

There may be individual differences insofar that some persons are better to remembering ephemeral tidbits of information than others, but I personally have to get things down on paper and repeat them a couple of times to make them stick. And that includes new vocabulary. And I prefer wordlists because I there also can control how and when I do my repetitions. SRS programs would make me feel like a human dartboard.


Yes, I am obviously one with very good ability to remember the "ephemeral tidbits" (too bad it doesn't apply to medicine), but I don't think that is the only reason why it works.

I have read some of the papers on intensive vs. extensive reading. And they all had the same flaw: they did too little extensive reading. Yes, one hour of each will prove intensive is better. Ten pages of each will prove intensive is better. But several years with each activity have never been tested. 200 hours (that may be something like 8000 extensive pages or 800 intensive) have not been tested. 10000 pages extensively have never been tested.

Extensive doesn't mean reading just for the gist. That is so just in the first book, or the second, but not the whole time by far. The words are being learnt in the context and they are being encountered repeatedly. Gradually, the reader understands more and more. And the knowledge of the new words improves with the new examples we find them in.

Extensive reading and listening works, we have various examples of Super Challenge progress here on the forums. It works the best when associated with other kinds of studying.

I really think it is a matter of personal choice AND realistic expectations. Just as it is not realistic to expect results of extensive reading after 20 pages, it is also not realistic for many of us to believe we can get through a whole book while damaging the immersion by dictionary use and writing stuff down all the time.

Also, I believe the other benefits of extensive vs. intensive reading are being widely underestimated. I have no problem believing that as far as vocabulary goes, intensive could prove more efficient, if a real research was made. That means one giving extensive reading a chance. But intensive reading simply doesn't force people to think in the language, to absorb the examples for the "this looks correct and this doesn't" sense that we have in our native languages. That is much more than "passive" knowledge. That is the base of actually speaking or writing.

The choice of extensive vs. intensive depends on the learner's character and type of intelligence (yes, type. not IQ.) and on their goals. Extensive reading can be an extremely awesome tool (I had to gain a large vocabulary for C2 French and I would never have achieved that without extensive reading and listening). But if you are in a hurry and don't want to look for several methods to combine, the choice of intensive reading is pretty clear to most learners. If you have limited resources, than intensive reading is most probably the better way to use the only books the learner has got.
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Re: How to learn vocabulary?

Postby reineke » Thu Nov 02, 2017 4:13 pm

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Last edited by reineke on Fri Dec 27, 2019 4:19 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: How to learn vocabulary?

Postby sketchc89 » Thu Nov 02, 2017 4:48 pm

I believe that learning through sentences is more effective than learning single words because by learning sentences you can pick out common collocations. Collocations are common chunks of language used together. For example, even though strong and powerful are fairly similar in meaning, one would say strong coffee and powerful computer rather than powerful coffee and strong computer. I also think that learning these chunks of language makes it easier to speak, since you can store only store so much in your limited working memory and these chunks would allow you to store more in each slot. I haven't done the research to know whether that last point is true.

Anthony Lauder goes into this a bit in one of his talks at a Polyglot Conference. Research has also been mounting that collocations are useful

Over the years, there has been a growing realisation that the key to efficient and effective L2 learning may well lie in shifting our focus from single words to phrases and formulaic multi-word expressions. Though interest in these lexical phrases, idioms and the more formulaic aspects of language use go back at least 40 years (Bolinger, 1976), it is thanks to both the corpus linguistic revolution of the early nineties and the cognitive turn that was taking place at the same time that the lexicon and aspects of L2 vocabulary acquisition got into their own.


De Ryker A, "Encouraging Collocational and Colligational Fluency: Pedagogical Chunking, Word and Verb Mapping, Pause Reading and Other Strategies" Journal of Interdisciplinary Research in Education 4-1 11-26 (2014) link

I use Anki a lot (190k reviews of 11k cards that I haven't deleted). In my personal experience, learning single characters for Chinese was not especially useful. I'm constantly choosing the wrong word when trying to translate what I'm thinking to Chinese. I switched to using sentences only and I think its gotten better.
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Re: How to learn vocabulary?

Postby MorkTheFiddle » Thu Nov 02, 2017 6:00 pm

Cavesa wrote:(I had to gain a large vocabulary for C2 French and I would never have achieved that without extensive reading and listening).

I learned thousands of words of German and tens of thousands of words in French and Spanish using first LingQ and then LWT. With those apps it's a matter of looking up and recording a word. The next time you see the word, if you don't remember its meaning, you hover the mouse over the word and see the definition you recorded earlier. You can use SMS systems with either LingQ or LWT, but I very quickly stopped using them because they seemed nothing but a nuisance to me.
Extensive reading did not work for me with Latin because for me almost (I say, almost) all Latin literature is a bore, and it does not work for me with Ancient Greek because Ancient Greek does not have enough texts. Just today I discovered that the word βεβώς (transliterated as, I suppose, bebws) occurs but seven times in all of Greek literature, 6 times in Euripides and once in Sophocles [using tools at perseus dot org]. Ancient Greek has no Proust or War and Peace or Harry Potter or Steig Larsen, so I have to use intensive techniques, including Iversen's word lists, as well as vocabulary apps like Cram and Study Stack to "engage with the language," as Kaufman puts it.
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