Advice for an efficient system for learning vocabulary

[CardiffGiant]

I have also used notebooks, writing down phrases or words, in what became a bit unworkable and disorganized. At this stage, I am interested more in a repeated system that others have found effective and efficient. Thanks!

One of several methods I have been using (and I still do so, by the way):
Using a notebook . But an organized one. I only write down what I consider the most important. And then I re-read some phrases from time to time.

Can I ask how you organize your notebooks and how you personally decide what is important? I find that my notebooks are a mish moss of random phrases and vocabulary terms.

Thanks for all for you suggestions!

[SGP]

Can I ask how you organize your notebooks and how you personally decide what is important? I find that my notebooks are a mish moss of random phrases and vocabulary terms.

Some time ago, I entirely switched to On Demand Learning. Because of that reason, I queued Spanish, even if it is my most advanced below-C2 one, 'longside Dutch (and maybe French, too) only. But I said to myself, "I wouldn't want to learn it just because, no matter how much progress had been possible in the past already".

And why does that On Demand Learning matter right now? Because that approach also includes not writing down any phrase, expect in a single case (i.e. a phrase of any langue I am actively learning right now). That single case is about either intending to use it very soon in a conversation with anyone (no matter if spoken or written). Or about a high probability of it being said to me (that part is more about spoken conversations, because I can take my time to look it up first in a written one).

[CardiffGiant]

Can I ask how you organize your notebooks and how you personally decide what is important? I find that my notebooks are a mish moss of random phrases and vocabulary terms.

Some time ago, I entirely switched to On Demand Learning. Because of that reason, I queued Spanish, even if it is my most advanced below-C2 one, 'longside Dutch (and maybe French, too) only. But I said to myself, "I wouldn't want to learn it just because, no matter how much progress had been possible in the past already".

And why does that On Demand Learning matter right now? Because that approach also includes not writing down any phrase, expect in a single case (i.e. a phrase of any langue I am actively learning right now). That single case is about either intending to use it very soon in a conversation with anyone (no matter if spoken or written). Or about a high probability of it being said to me (that part is more about spoken conversations, because I can take my time to look it up first in a written one).

That is a good metric for inclusion in a notebook, essentially the words with the highest chance that will use or encounter them. Very helpful.

I was wondering if the notebook was organized by topic, the type of word(eg verbs in one sections, nouns in another) and maybe phrases? (Obviously I am trying to avoid having my notebook become a bit unwieldy this time)

[SGP]

I was wondering if the notebook was organized by topic, the type of word(eg verbs in one sections, nouns in another) and maybe phrases? (Obviously I am trying to avoid having my notebook become a bit unwieldy this time)

Because it is a multi-language one, it (currently) is organized by languages only. But I didn't reserve five pages for e.g. Polish and another five for Russian. Because it is Very On Demand Learning Oriented, even the headings (containig the language only for now) are written on demand as well.

I personally wouldn't care too much about writing nouns first, then verbs, then phrases. What I would do instead is to apply that On Demand Attitude here as well. Any language consists of many parts, no doubt. But I really love Holistic Learning.

You could organize your own notebook by topic, by day, or by something else.
It's just that there is a little pitfall related to the different categories like colors and animals.
It has been mentioned by one of the polyglots, namely Gabe Wyner. He said that when it comes to French, it still is a bit difficult to remember the correct word for green and blue. Because he learned both of them at the same time. End quote.

This is about the possibility of mixing up similar words. Is blue that similar to green? Wouldn't say so. Even if some languages use a single word for both of them. That's why there is an English translation of a (non-commercial) Japanese Vegetable Advertisement Song that calls people to buy "the big pale blue juice" . But back to the main topic. The colors blue and green aren't too similar. However, the words do have some big similarities, in regard of their Learning and Recalling Aspect. This is because they both belong to the same category. And because of that, one could easily mix them up. You could ask "anyone" who tries to learn all major colors at the same time, especially (but not exclusively) when using some "Brute Force Rote Memorization"...

What I like to do in cases like these is not to even write all of them on the same page, but "scattered". Some language courses (no matter if audible or written) do it the same way when introducing words like "I", "you", "he", etc.

And if I would be writing all colors on a single page, I'd still learn one at a time only, while also noting which one currently is in my Yet to Be Learned Queue. If I'd start with blue, I'd mark it with a pencil (not with any color, because marking blue with red and green with orange is... something I'd rather not do). And after having learned it, I could thicken that marking, or write a "check" symbol.

[MorkTheFiddle]

The following is for any vocabulary learning method that includes writing in any foreign language alphabet:
Yes, it can be a bit difficult or even exhausting at first. In the beginning, I didn't really like writing down any Russian words because of not being too familiar with the alphabet. But then I pushed myself just a little bit, without applying any pressure. Writing in another alphabet is something doable, especially when starting by making some small steps only.

You make a good point. I am going to give the matter further thought. Thanks.

[CardiffGiant]

My solution is to do triple column wordlists as described in my Guide, but that solution won't work for everyone - for instance it's something you do alone, and some learners need social contact and real situations to find any relevance in the words they are supposed to learned - and then wordlists isn't the answer (and Anki isn't the answer either). Others simply don't like methods based on memorization, and then you can't expect them to work.

As an example I got through something like 360 Greek words in two days this week with my wordlists (plus some in other languages), and when I have done the first repetition tomorrow (OK... later today, considering the time now) I expect to remember at least 70-80%. That ratio what I have seen again and again, and with a fairly wellknown language I don't see any reason why it should be different this time. I have also done experiments that show that the effect on the percentage of a dictionary is permanent - I recognize the words when I see them again in a text or when I do wordlists the next time.

The idea that everything that is learnt fast also disappears fast is wrong if you just do a proper job in the first place - but only if you like what you do and don't skip essential parts of the learning process (like the repetitions).

Morkthefiddle mentions the expections you come with. It must be emphasized that memorization only gives you a passive vocabulary, and this is true both for wordlists and for SRS programs. To make at least a small part of that vocabulary active you need to use the words for something. For me writing short texts and thinking (best after a heavy dose of input that makes my head spin) is necessary to push me from passive skills to active ones, and this time I do think that this is a rule without exceptions. But of course you can activate a language faster if you already know its basic words and sentence patterns. 'Getting the gist' is a bad excuse for not having learnt the essentials from your input - if you skip all the small grey words you won't be able to construct valid sentences - you need a solid foundation for that.

PS: my wordlist method is explained in the wiki, but the description in the guide is newer and better.

Thanks for this. Very interesting. I am curious if you add phrases to your lists or primarily just one word and then the translation and then progress in the fashion in your guide? Also, have you experimented with starting the column in the mother tongue first and then the target language(I know you ultimately do this as you progress to the right in your columns). Starting with the mother tongue first is like a flashcard that starts with that side as opposed to the target language which flash card gurus have said is more effective.

[Iversen]

(...)I am curious if you add phrases to your lists or primarily just one word and then the translation and then progress in the fashion in your guide? Also, have you experimented with starting the column in the mother tongue first and then the target language (...)

There are actually two questions here: what to do with phrases and why not put words in your mother tongue in the leftmost column. And both need a fairly long and complicated answer.

First the phrases: there isn't room for whole phrases in my standard layout - at most combinations of two, maybe three words - and they'd better be short. However I may put a long word in one row and then some expression with that word in the next row, and then I can abbreviate the long word.

This answer is of course not satisfactory because it doesn't solve the problem with phrases. The solution that first comes to my mind is to make a wordlist with extremely broad columns where you can fit whole longs idiomatic expressions, and I have actually experimented with this, but it is not something I do regularly. I have tried to come up with a reason, and my best answer is that the wordlist method can accommodate very short expressions which are perceived as single units in units in your brain. Longer expressions which are perceived almost as sentences are seen as fragments of texts, not items in a dictionary, and you expect to see them in a context. So my main solution to the problem with longer expressions has become to write a note about them on a piece of paper and then find a way to use them in practice. The point seems to be that I see single words as items in a dictionary, but anything longer than two to three words as items in an article or a book.

It is also a problem to decide what the right translation is of an expression. If an idiomatic expression is worth noting down it must be because its 'real' meaning isn't obvious. On the other hand I'm strictly against learning whole expressions as blocks without knowing the meaning of their constituents. The result is that I tend to prefer a hyperliteral translation, but with an explanation added if it is necessary - and it mostly isn't. And this brings us closer to the second question: why not start out with the words or expression in your mother tongue and then proceed to their foreign equivalents?

Actually I often feel that I want to find the idiom in a foreign language that most closely corresponds to one in Danish (or English or some other language), but not nearly as often that I search the closest equivalent of a foreign expression in Danish. The politically incorrect answer is that idiomatic expressions in other languages rarely are as incomprehensible as they are said to be. OK, the first time you may not get the joke or pun involved, but once you have got the explanation you won't forget it again - partly because of the fact that when you know the explanation you can usually guess how the expression originally came into being. The real problem is, as I have suggested, that idiomatic expressions by definition can't be guessed - if they could they wouldn't be truly idiomatic. In other words you have to see (or hear) them and then remember them for later use. So if I had to choose I would prefer a list of expressions in Danish with their equivalents in another language to a list of foreign expressions with their Danish equivalents.

And why doesn't this apply to single words (or very closely connected compunds)? Of course it does to a certain extent - otherwise we wouldn't be using dictionaries from our mother tongues into a target language. But wordlists aren't places where we look things up: they are places where we learn things, and the words I don't know and want to learn are those in the foreign language, and therefore I put them in both the 1. and the 3. column. The words I already know then have to make do with one single column (no. 2), and that's more than enough for them. Besides there is an added bonus if I take the foreign words directly from a dictionary: the alphabetical order in column 1, which helps me during the memorization phase. I wouldn't get that if I took the words from a dictionary with headwords in Danish or English.

[SGP]

Some keywords and possibilities:

- Incremental learning (step by step, towards a More Complete Bigger Picture)

- Holistic learning

- Singling out some words one has a deep personal connection to, for a small notebook / a small Series of Loose Sheets of Paper. There, one could collect some additional example sentences. Or write down related words. Or simply do some doodling if you like. Some learners (of anything) mentioned that it can have some brain-stimulating effects. As for me, I sometimes really had them, because of the Fun Factor maybe. #DoodlingIsUnderrated

[SGP]

- Singling out some words one has a deep personal connection to, for a small notebook / a small Series of Loose Sheets of Paper. There, one could collect some additional example sentences. Or write down related words. Or simply do some doodling if you like. Some learners (of anything) mentioned that it can have some brain-stimulating effects. As for me, I sometimes really had them, because of the Fun Factor maybe. #DoodlingIsUnderrated

Some Ways of Connecting Drawing to Immersion-Based Word Exploration #ArtInformationOverload

[SGP]

Reading beats everything else hands down. With enough of it, SRS isn't necessary.

I, personally, wouldn't recommend any particular approach (including reading) as sort of an All Purpose Solution that "beats everything". But on the other hand, I agree that a SRS (in the sense of "flash cards") isn't necessarily a requirement. There are other SRSs (Spaced Repetition Systems) that can take its place, including, but not limited to, reading.