Advice for an efficient system for learning vocabulary

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Kraut
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Re: Advice for an efficient system for learning vocabulary

Postby Kraut » Sat Jan 05, 2019 3:30 pm

CompImp wrote:

My opinion, as i stated already, is that reading is superior to everything else and with enough of it, nothing else is necessary. People say what about rare words but in reality not remembering these in the real world isn't a problem for functionality in a language.

You don't know what languages are out there. With Spanish this might be ok: the written language is very phonemic, you know how to pronounce a word when you read it. In Lithuanian, however, you have no fixed word stress in a declination, the stress wanders; Lithuanian is said to have 3/4 pronunciations of a written "e" etc. In Lithuanian texts they don't give you all diacritical marks on a letter that might be helpful for pronunciation.
You can devote your 10 000 hours to reading Lithuanian texts and acquire tons of new words and consolidate them, and you will continue being crippled when you have to speak using these words.
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Re: Advice for an efficient system for learning vocabulary

Postby SGP » Sat Jan 05, 2019 3:49 pm

Kraut wrote:In Lithuanian, however, you have no fixed word stress in a declination, the stress wanders; Lithuanian is said to have 3/4 pronunciations of a written "e" etc. In Lithuanian texts they don't give you all diacritical marks on a letter that might be helpful for pronunciation.
You can devote your 10 000 hours to reading Lithuanian texts and acquire tons of new words and consolidate them, and you will continue being crippled when you have to speak using these words.

Reminds me of something (stress or anything else) that cannot be known by only reading Russian.
And then there are the types of tonal/semi-tonal languages where the tones aren't represented by writing. Like Norwegian (maybe SV/DA, too), one or more of BCSM (Bosnian, Croatian, Serbian, Montenegrian, even if some consider them one anyway), etc.
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Beli Tsar
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Re: Advice for an efficient system for learning vocabulary

Postby Beli Tsar » Sat Jan 05, 2019 7:25 pm

CompImp wrote:
Kraut wrote:
CompImp wrote:

My opinion, as i stated already, is that reading is superior to everything else and with enough of it, nothing else is necessary. People say what about rare words but in reality not remembering these in the real world isn't a problem for functionality in a language.

You don't know what languages are out there. With Spanish this might be ok: the written language is very phonemic, you know how to pronounce a word when you read it. In Lithuanian, however, you have no fixed word stress in a declination, the stress wanders; Lithuanian is said to have 3/4 pronunciations of a written "e" etc. In Lithuanian texts they don't give you all diacritical marks on a letter that might be helpful for pronunciation.
You can devote your 10 000 hours to reading Lithuanian texts and acquire tons of new words and consolidate them, and you will continue being crippled when you have to speak using these words.

But this is about 'learning' new words, not 'producing' new words. There's a difference.

That's not quite true. I face a similar problem with Farsi. It might be possible to 'learn' a word by reading, but that won't help me with listening unless I know the vowels. It's not just production that is affected if you learn an abjad-based language - it's a whole range of skills. I imagine from the description above that Lithuanian is similar?
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Kraut
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Re: Advice for an efficient system for learning vocabulary

Postby Kraut » Sat Jan 05, 2019 8:49 pm

CompImp,
there is something basic that you don't understand.
"Learning" a new word means you acquire four skills for using it: reading, writing, listening and speaking.
Now ask yourself which of these you achieve with your forced definition of "learning vocabulary"? Madre mia!
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Re: Advice for an efficient system for learning vocabulary

Postby Daniel N. » Sat Jan 05, 2019 9:48 pm

SGP wrote:And then there are the types of tonal/semi-tonal languages where the tones aren't represented by writing. Like Norwegian (maybe SV/DA, too), one or more of BCSM (Bosnian, Croatian, Serbian, Montenegrian, even if some consider them one anyway), etc.

The BCMS stress also varies (there are 3 groups od stress patterns) but it also varies in different regions, and in some cities in Croatia - Zagreb included - there are no tones at all, and most nouns have fixed stress which can be on any syllable.
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SGP
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Re: Advice for an efficient system for learning vocabulary

Postby SGP » Sat Jan 05, 2019 10:55 pm

CompImp wrote:
Kraut wrote:CompImp,
there is something basic that you don't understand.
"Learning" a new word means you acquire four skills for using it: reading, writing, listening and speaking.
Now ask yourself which of these you achieve with your forced definition of "learning vocabulary"? Madre mia!

My 'forced' definition ? Who decided to 'officially' say you only learned a word when you could do the above ? Have native illiterates not learned any words ?

It's a known fact that we 'know' many more words in any language than we can use. This is true of anyone. Do those words not count ? We didn't 'learn' them because we can't/don't use them ?

Those who can only read in an L2 haven't learned any words ? :lol: :lol: :lol:
As for these Laughing Out Loud Smileys and so on, if I would have written that post which is being quoted right now, I wouldn't have included any of them.

And as for the underlying message (apart from that)... I am someone who cares especially about what is being said, rather than being too concerned about what particular person said it. No matter how strange the following may sound to CompImp in particular (because of some recent, past, disagreements), but I do agree to a lot of what has been stated in that very post I am quoting right now. Native illiterates may be illiterate, but I don't support the idea of negating that some of them learned an incredible and even stunning amount of words. There were too many Entirely Fluent And Expressive But Nevertheless Illiterate Native Speakers of <Whatever Their Language May Be> in the past, including, but not limited to, those who grew up at any time or place where no writing system was used at all. And there are many of them today as well.

Sometimes it even could be more helpful to not simply confirm or negate something (like "they learned so many words" or "they didn't learn any word at all") without any additional clarifications on what exactly is being confirmed or negated. As surprising as it may sound to some, but not everyone uses those Very Basic Every-Day Terms like "learning" and "teaching" in the very same way. Sometimes any two particular persons may be speaking about the same thing even, while each of them would use different words, thus (seemingly) causing a disagreement, even if both of them agree on the underlying intended meanings. They just used different words to speak about them.
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reineke
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Re: Advice for an efficient system for learning vocabulary

Postby reineke » Sun Jan 06, 2019 12:27 am

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Last edited by reineke on Fri Dec 27, 2019 4:02 am, edited 2 times in total.
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Beli Tsar
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Re: Advice for an efficient system for learning vocabulary

Postby Beli Tsar » Sun Jan 06, 2019 7:38 pm

Reineke, that's amazing -looking forward to digging into some of those links over the next couple of days.
CompImp wrote:
Without having encountered the equivalent degree of exposure to the target language characteristic of native speakers, L2 learners typically have sub-optimal aural vocabulary knowledge; that is learners have difficulty recognizing words in the spoken form.

Sounds like 'you need to put in more time' to me.. :D

That is precisely the point. Why put in the thousands of hours you have mentioned in other threads if there is a more efficient way? So that you can get to the point of using and enjoying the language more quickly? Language learning is long and slow enough already without adopting inefficient methods.
Last edited by Beli Tsar on Tue Jan 22, 2019 4:18 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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zKing
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Re: Advice for an efficient system for learning vocabulary

Postby zKing » Wed Jan 09, 2019 11:07 pm

(Mangling the iron triangle rule a bit...)

1. Fast
2. Easy/Fun
3. Effective

You can pick two.
-----------------------
I've used the analogy of climbing a mountain before, so I'll abuse it further:

There are an uncountable number of paths one can take to climb up the language mountain, and none of them are 'wrong' per se.

Some climbers like to go vertically straight up as it may be faster, but this is a lot of hard work and they may not get to see all the interesting places around the mountain along the way. But perhaps they will get to enjoy those views when they reach the top.
Some who try this approach give up because it is such hard work. Others actually enjoy the difficulty.

There are other folks who take a more winding path up the mountain, the path is longer, but the slope is easier and it can be more like a very long enjoyable stroll than a grueling vertical climb.

Many climbers do a mix: climb vertically a bit, stroll for a while, perhaps trying out a few different paths to see where they lead.

Some mountains are much bigger (3x-4x) than others. Some mountains already have a few stairs and trails cut into them by previous climbers for at least part of the way up. Other mountains are huge opaque rocky jungles that very few have climbed before (I'm looking at you Cantonese).

Some 'climbers' spend all their time at base camp, preparing their equipment and talking to other climbers, but don't actually do much climbing. Some climbers fiddle with some climbing contraption for months on end in the hopes that it will be a magic carpet, but often weeks or months later they realize the contraption hasn't moved them very far at all.

One thing is for sure: No one is going to carry you up the mountain. You've got to do it yourself. :)

And these mountains have one Twilight Zone like magical property: whenever you _think_ you're about to reach the peak, the clouds part and there's an even higher one behind it.

Some climbers only climb a little ways up the mountain and love the view... and don't feel the need to climb up any further.
People climb for different reasons and may enjoy different things about it.

There is no single 'right' way to climb, for most of us, this is a hobby. The trade offs between say, Speed and Ease/Enjoyment are a personal thing.

Just keep climbing and enjoy the view, wherever you are.
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reineke
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Re: Advice for an efficient system for learning vocabulary

Postby reineke » Thu Jan 10, 2019 1:58 am



zKing wrote:(Mangling the iron triangle rule a bit...)

1. Fast
2. Easy/Fun
3. Effective

You can pick two.
-----------------------
I've used the analogy of climbing a mountain before, so I'll abuse it further:


I'd pick the first two. Or the last two. Hmmm... What about this:

1 Quality (vocabulary depth, speed of retrieval and aural processing speed)
2 Quantity (vocabulary count)
3 Time

Pick two.
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