How much words should you learn in a day? What technique to use and how not to forget them?

[StringerBell]

Depends on what you mean by success.

I define success as reaching a level in a language where you can read modern novels, formal and informal articles, watch TV & movies and listen to podcasts/radio effortlessly, and hold conversations with native speakers where you can communicate ideas almost as easily as in your native language (making few mistakes and not relying on work-arounds due to lack of vocabulary or expressing things significantly simpler than you would in T1).

Memorizing random words from a dictionary that are mostly forgotten months or years later means they were memorized in a really superficial way and I'd argue that the person didn't really "know" them to begin with. There are plenty of words in English that I've come across only once, twice or three times in my life but 20 years later I still remember what they mean and could use them correctly in a sentence. If you could do that with 5,000 random words from a Serbian dictionary, I'd be shocked and impressed but I still would never suggest to anyone new to language learning that they should memorize thousands of random words from a dictionary.

[Skynet]

Number:

How long is a piece of string?
It depends entirely on what your goals are, how much time you are spending learning the language and how vast and deep the TL content that you're absorbing is.

Technique:

1 a. If it's a colloquialism (usually from listening to news interviews), I simply brush it aside because as Colloquial French 1 & 2 taught me, "Not knowing the most recent catchphrases is nothing to concern oneself with at the B-level."

1 b. If it's a proverb/idiom, I simply write it down, use them in a sentence and then repeat them verbally (to work on stress and intonation).

2. If it's a noun/adverb/onomatopoeia/etc, I simply write it down, then again in a sentence. (Repeating them verbally is optional.)

3. If it's an adjective, I write it down in all of its gender-based variations, then again in sentences. (Repeating them verbally is optional.)

4. If it's a verb...Err, this is where I go ballistic and I get into OCD overdrive: I conjugate the verb using the 6 tenses that I currently know. (Repeating them verbally is optional.)

[Ani]

Lots of people front load vocabulary. I did 50-100 new words a day + reviews (which were often 600+) when I first started French. I stopped somewhere after 2500+ when I realized I could decrypt novels with the Kindle pop up dictionary but in retrospect, I should have continued at least minimally with my vocab srs-ing. Tons of those "random useless words" really come in handy although you may not realize it while reading & therefore be less likely to retain it.

I think we might be talking about different things. I'm not talking about front-loading or previewing vocabulary that you will come across in a book or a story, I'm talking about memorizing thousands of words in isolation that you will not come across for a very long time (or ever).

No that's basically what I'm talking about. I used "random" word lists. I mean hopefully whoever assembled them wasn't picking words I'd *never* see again, but I don't try to judge words on utility. I'd gladly include the words for armadillo, potholder and stump on my initial vocab run. The word gibier game meat, was in my first 400 French words. I remember laughing that it was so random to be learning but you know how many times I've seen it since then? Oodles. I even had a conversation about it on Tandem this weekend.
IMO, if it's probably within the first 20,000 words by frequency, if it's part of an idea you've expressed in the last year in your native language, if it's something a native speaker could name (even if they don't do it very often), then it's a word I'm interested in learning.

[DaveAgain]

... if it's part of an idea you've expressed in the last year in your native language, if it's something a native speaker could name (even if they don't do it very often), then it's a word I'm interested in learning.

I use L2 for shopping lists, I suspect a diary would eventually touch every situation you'd ever need, but I do not have the diary habit

[Ani]

... if it's part of an idea you've expressed in the last year in your native language, if it's something a native speaker could name (even if they don't do it very often), then it's a word I'm interested in learning.

I use L2 for shopping lists, I suspect a diary would eventually touch every situation you'd ever need, but I do not have the diary habit

Me either at this point I have an L2 diary on my night stand and I filled about 3 pages in the last year :-/ I get a little perfectionistic and I'm always writing with one hand while double checking everything on the phone with the other and that's not super fun or relaxing

I've been putting my conversations & corrections with natives into Anki lately. As long as I can convince people to talk to me more broadly than "hey how's your day going" I should eventually have a good repository.

[trui]

I'm studying Dutch in Leiden now and for one of my courses we're expected to learn 15 words a day from Thematische woordenschat voor anderstaligen. The book is a sort of thematic dictionary with definitions of words in relatively simple Dutch. It contains 6000 words, 3000 basic words with 1000 of said words being elementary and 3000 more advanced words. It also includes idiomatic phrases that use said words. And some pictures! Leiden is likely the best university in the Netherlands when it comes to languages and they consider their Dutch program to be fairly intensive. In other words, 15 is their answer to this question (including weekends and holidays ) and from my experience, I'd agree. Any more is really a bit too much IMO if we're talking about explicitly studied vocabulary.

Personally, I'm super happy about their choice of book. I've always wanted to just pick up a dictionary and start learning words, but I know that's a bad idea. But with this I can do just that. I think that when it comes to word lists, you don't need them but I've found them super helpful in the beginning. I learned a few hundred words from a 1000 words list when I had just started Dutch years ago and I plan on learning every one of these 6000 words like the back of my hand, even if it wasn't required. 6000 is also the sweetspot for a language like Dutch I feel. More and you'd be getting into vocab that'd vary with each individual but if someone wants to learn a language fully (and not just for one specific purpose) then I think a specially prepared source for the first 6000 or so words (not a frequency list! There's lots of problems with those) is safe to memorize.

As for how to memorize them, well, the course focuses on vocabulary and writing. We learn words and then write things with them. And that's also the method that I've found works best for me. Speaking helps too of course (and there's courses for that too) but writing is all I personally need to learn the vocab.

Why do all my posts about materials sound like ads? Ugh. Haha. Though I do sometimes talk about resources I don't like so hopefully that makes up for it.

But yeah. I think that you don't need word lists and that you could learn everything through reading, but I find them helpful if done properly and then I have something that I know someone somewhere thinks I should learn. And that makes me feel like even if I'm not on the best path, at least I'm on some path!

[patrickwilken]

No that's basically what I'm talking about. I used "random" word lists. I mean hopefully whoever assembled them wasn't picking words I'd *never* see again, but I don't try to judge words on utility. I'd gladly include the words for armadillo, potholder and stump on my initial vocab run. The word gibier game meat, was in my first 400 French words. I remember laughing that it was so random to be learning but you know how many times I've seen it since then? Oodles. I even had a conversation about it on Tandem this weekend.

I am doing something slightly different for Spanish. I first learnt all the words in my A1 textbook (about 2300) and now slowly working through the first Harry Potter book and adding any word I don't know (at least one per sentence) into Anki. So now I am learning lots of useful words and phrases, but many of these I probably wouldn't see again for a while (e.g,. flocks of owls; lace handkerchief) but that I am sure will be useful at some point. For some reason my first book in German was a trashy autobiography of a woman's experience in the redlight milieu in Berlin (don't judge!). This created a very different, but also useful, Anki deck.

IMO, if it's probably within the first 20,000 words by frequency, if it's part of an idea you've expressed in the last year in your native language, if it's something a native speaker could name (even if they don't do it very often), then it's a word I'm interested in learning.

I think once you get to a certain point I think it's more effective (if you still want to use Anki) to simply have cards where the question is a sentence with the problematic word and the answer blank, or short definition. I find L1-L2 word lists once you are at B2 a bit of waste of time, as you have to do a lot more work to learn a single word as a translation (which is never perfect) rather than learn more gently in context.

[JohnAllen9090]

I would say the number of words should not be set in stone because as humans it is quite hard for us sometimes to stick to the same pattern in learning...but there can certainly be a "reasonable" minimum...

the most important thing is perseverance - even if you learn three words every day and persevere with this at the end of the month this will be 90 words which is not bad...so perseverance is very important and also not burdening yourself with a number of words beyond your capacity....

using words in sentences and writing them quite a few times - I found- to be a very useful method to remember new words

[Iversen]

But now that I have been reminded about my Serbian campaign I think there still is one figure that might be interesting, namely which percentage of the words in the same dictionary I still would be able to understand or guess today.

And yesterday I did exactly that. I copied the words on pages 6, 26, 46, 66, 86 and 106 from my Serbian dictionary in three different colors - blue for definitely known and understood, red for not known, nor remembered, nor liable to be guessed, and yellowish orange for the greyzone in between the clear cases. All in all I checked 495 words and found that 333 (or 67%) definitely were known, 48 were so-so (10%) and I didn't remember (or never learned) the remaining 114 words (23%). The 67% would correspond to around 10.000 head words, which is enough to read most ordinary texts, but slightly below the vocabulary needed for literature. Taken as an isolated exercise this must be defined as a success since I haven't done much about Serbian since the conference in Novi Sad in 2014. I have listened to my Montenegrin, Serbian and Croatian TV channels, but mostly during the first couple of years - after that I have spent too much time on music.

I define success as reaching a level in a language where you can read modern novels, formal and informal articles, watch TV & movies and listen to podcasts/radio effortlessly, and hold conversations with native speakers where you can communicate ideas almost as easily as in your native language (making few mistakes and not relying on work-arounds due to lack of vocabulary or expressing things significantly simpler than you would in T1).

As I read this description I think C1 or C2. That's pretty hard - I would consider it a success even to reach B2 in a language you don't need to learn and rarely are confronted with during your daily life. But as I also wrote I have only gone halfway with my Serbian since it has remained a written language for me. This would still be a good departure point for activating the spoken part of it, but I have prioritized adding a number of new (written) languages. Maybe I'll do something substantial about this glaring case of neglect next time I visit any part of the former Yugoslavia, but I have not booked such a trip yet (I am not going to participate in Ljubljana - and anyway, they speak Slovene there so...)

[Ani]

IMO, if it's probably within the first 20,000 words by frequency, if it's part of an idea you've expressed in the last year in your native language, if it's something a native speaker could name (even if they don't do it very often), then it's a word I'm interested in learning.

I think once you get to a certain point I think it's more effective (if you still want to use Anki) to simply have cards where the question is a sentence with the problematic word and the answer blank, or short definition. I find L1-L2 word lists once you are at B2 a bit of waste of time, as you have to do a lot more work to learn a single word as a translation (which is never perfect) rather than learn more gently in context.

I'm not sure if I agree here. I guess it depends. I switched out to L2-L2 cards pretty early on and that's something I wish I hadn't done. Single word? Maybe not in bulk. But I find myself looking up most things now on wordreference and Linguee trying to hone in on the best L1 translation or equivalent phrase so I have a better shot at linking the exact shade of meaning.
I realized at one point I had so many words vaguely defined because of extensive reading & monolingual dictionary use. It really took some work to sort it out. I'd see a word and think "a sound your make when you cry" -- but have no idea which sound in particular. Ya know?
I also at this point am way too lazy to read a whole sentence just to be interested in one part. Some whole sentences are interesting, but if all I'm interested in is the preposition, the gender, etc then a phrase is better.