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How much time studying vocabulary? | ||
Tags: Time to learn | Vocabulary learning | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Learning Techniques, Methods & Strategies |  | |
| Jeffers Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4711 days ago 2151 posts - 3960 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: Hindi, Ancient Greek, French, Sanskrit, German | Message 145 of 350 17 May 2015 at 8:11pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
Wow, this part of your post has been making me think, as I'm getting close to 50 myself (I'm 47 in 10 days). Somewhere on HTLAL I remember calculating the hours of immersion a child has to learn their language and concluded that "learn like a child" is inefficient. For any adult, but particularly an adult who feels their time is limited in some way, we need to use tools to be more efficient: methods like vocabulary and grammar study. Nevertheless, time is still an essential ingredient in learning anything well, although my thinking is more in terms of 5-10 years than 50. Assuming 5-10 years spent on each of your languages, I sincerely hope you've still got 15-30 years left in you rdearman! Last year I had to face the "long term task" vs mortality issue, as my brother died when he was 50. I remember sitting in his hospital room doing reps on Anki and wondering, is this really worth it if I die in a couple of years? My final answer was that if I live another 20 years and didn't do things because I might die I would be very disappointed, but if I die before that I won't be disappointed that I tried to learn a language. So even for us "olies" there's hope we have time to learn our languages! 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
 jeff_lindqvist Diglot Moderator SwedenRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6711 days ago 4250 posts - 5710 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English Studies: German, Spanish, Russian, Dutch, Mandarin, Esperanto, Irish, French Personal Language Map | Message 146 of 350 18 May 2015 at 12:22am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
I was merely thinking that not many people learn a whole lot of words totally out of context (I'm not saying that's what you did, not at all), but if they do, they are well prepared for a lot of content thrown at them, including tests. Whether that's time well-spent or not, I can't say. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| smallwhite Pentaglot Senior Member Australia Joined 5110 days ago 537 posts - 1045 votes Speaks: Cantonese*, English, Mandarin, French, Spanish | Message 147 of 350 18 May 2015 at 4:12am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
Exactly.
In fact those collocation phrases aren't the norm or what I would've put in in an ideal world. I think I learned "open" and "door" first, then later downloaded a deck with "open the door", and I added that as well OR I replaced "open" and "door" with "open the door". I remember trying to boil down my cards to word families or something like that, I forget, but I remember arriving at the ratio 1:1.5 (2:3) for something. But the thing is, if I should ever trim my deck down to 5000 cards, I would then add new cards to get back to 8000 cards as that is my goal.
To answer both s_allard and Serpent: My goal is usually solid B2, all skills. Based on research, I believe that a solid B2 person would know or should know 8000-10000 words (dictionary headwords). I give myself maybe 500 days to reach this B2, after which I will stop learning, so I have to reach all my goals within 500 days. The reason I will stop is simply because I think you learn, you know, you stop. You graduate from high school, you graduate from German. So I learn languages in case I shall need them one day, and so today I don't know yet what I will need, so I learn everything or general stuff, whatever's in textbooks and course or exam syllabi. Frequency lists therefore fit my purpose (I trust numbers and I trust probabilities). Also, I believe this is a culture thing, I don't think I am unique, I don't think I have very different needs, I think I'm just 1 in a million, so I just learn whatever others learn; I don't have this notion of "I need this, I don't like that", though I do sometimes get the thought "I don't even know this in English!" But if the word manages to reach the "easiest top 10", I just go ahead and SRS it anyway. I love efficiency, I love mass production, I hate special treatment on individual items. To make it easier to remember, you can think of my goal as to score 90% in all papers of a B2 exam, and really deserving it.
Exactly. The words that I SRS, ie. those that reach the "top 10 easiest", come from 3 sources: Source 1. More or less same as s_allard, just that I don't write the notes myself. I read a grammar or I listen to a song, then when I filter my master wordlist, I spot words from the lyrics, I find them easy as they're still fresh, so I SRS them. Or I actually remember a certain word from the lyrics, and go search for that word in the master list, and then SRS it. The master list is there to save me from typing. Source 2. Also more or less same as s_allard. I learn adverbs from a website, then I copy those adverbs to my master list, I don't remember all 10 adverbs yet but I do remember 7, and I SRS those 7. (The difference between me and most people is probably that I don't force in the remaining 3, the hardest 3. That's what makes my SRSing super easy and relatively leech-free). Source 3. As I filter my master list, I have to read or at least skim through the entries, and with time some of them become familiar, or I notice words that are similar to ones I already know, or I notice patterns, etc etc, so with time some of these entries make it to the "top 10 easiest" as well although I've never encountered them elsewhere. Kind of a by-product. They say your brains notice patterns, so with just words in front of you and no interference like grammar and storyline, you notice even more patterns. You can consider this part of my "input" and "reading", and this reading material is really lean and makes for efficient reading because it only contains new words, words that you should learn, it's better than real-life books where frequent and easy words make up 70% of the page and if you're already at 98% comprehension you only encounter 1 new word out of every 50, no, in my master there're more new words than known words (the definite articles unfortunately have to be there). Indeed, source 1 & 2 above are really, as s_allard sees it, just note-taking, and indeed I feel that many people read a lot, yet let the words therein slip past forgotten. Like through a colander. What I'm doing is just I plug my colandar so fewer words slip past. I wasn't rushing for the 8k words, I had 500 days. They just accumulate so quickly themselves, when your colander is plugged. Edited by smallwhite on 18 May 2015 at 4:54am 4 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| smallwhite Pentaglot Senior Member Australia Joined 5110 days ago 537 posts - 1045 votes Speaks: Cantonese*, English, Mandarin, French, Spanish | Message 148 of 350 18 May 2015 at 5:37am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
While I think that it's because you're doing recognition cards as opposed to production cards. The two aren't quite comparable. Do you have data for production cards?
We have the same goals in this regard, I aim to speak, too, I just achieve it differently than you do. You mentioned writing emails and getting corrections. I would, instead, read other people's emails, assimilate, and only then write my own emails. So I need reading ability.
Sorry, Jeff, I quoted you but I wasn't actually responding to what you wrote! I was just thinking out loud, lol. I was just thinking, if the notion of learning words "upfront" annoyed people, then all you have to do is to keep learning more, such that nothing is "upfront" anymore, the "upfront" becomes part of a continued stream. But problem is I don't really know what's annoying people. 8k, or 2s, or upfront, or SRS; it seems different for each poster... Edited by smallwhite on 18 May 2015 at 6:42am 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| smallwhite Pentaglot Senior Member Australia Joined 5110 days ago 537 posts - 1045 votes Speaks: Cantonese*, English, Mandarin, French, Spanish | Message 149 of 350 18 May 2015 at 9:09am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
I'd like to mention that I think people who aim at learning just 1 or 2 skills of the language (eg. only reading and not speaking) cannot really be compared with those who aim at broad skills (let's take that to mean the big 4, reading writing listening speaking). Of course different goals call for different strategies, and with that different evaluation critieria and thus different conclusions. If we compare the two, we're really comparing what's needed to read vs what's needed to speak; that's worse than comparing apples with oranges.
I spent 90 minutes writing and posted a very long reply, and then I deleted it. On purpose. I realised that it's not necessary. That underlying question can only be answered by you yourself (since you might disagree with others' answers), and what you need in order to answer that question is an understanding of how the method works, not my personal profile. You need to understand the steps, visualise the steps, imagine the outcomes... or simply try it out yourself. But what is "my method", really? Edited by smallwhite on 18 May 2015 at 10:00am 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| Jeffers Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4711 days ago 2151 posts - 3960 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Hindi, Ancient Greek, French, Sanskrit, German | Message 150 of 350 18 May 2015 at 9:59am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
That's an interesting point, and I agree that for learning vocabulary (and even grammar) there's a point where reading no longer does as much for you. On the other hand, I think that's the point where real learning begins. Once you no longer struggle with understanding--that tricky stuff like the meaning of words, the structure of phrases--that's when you begin to assimilate the language in a deep way so that it becomes a part of you. These are the less quantifiable aspects of language use, the unquantifiable aspects that define quality. Or, to put it a different way, the quality of language output of a native speaker is strongly correlated to the amount of reading they do. Language learners who have attained a high level in a language can benefit from the same thing. 5 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6505 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map | Message 151 of 350 18 May 2015 at 12:21pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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If you study 5 languages and want a passive vocabulary of some 20.000 headwords then it may sound totally overwhelming that you should have to learn 100.000 headwords all in all. Luckily there is such a thing as guessable words, including international loanwords. I have counted many strange things, but not the percentage of words in any given language which are unique to that language. But similar words in related languages and loanwords are so numerous that the total number of items you have to learn will be much less than 100.000 unique headwords (or whatever that corresponds to in terms of word families). And if you set your target lower than the 50.000 mentioned by some you don't need to stay 50 years abroad per language.
Barring 50 years of immersion, reading a lot is definitely the key to getting a massive passive vocabulary, but a beginner't can read a lot. When you start a new language you may have to survive on boring textbook texts in the beginning - but at least these mostly come with simple wordlists. When you switch to genuine texts you can use bilingual texts, but in my experience you still need to look some words up - and not only with machine translations. It'll just be fewer look-ups than without that translation. But there comes a point - at least for me - where I get so irritated by having to look things up all over the dictionary that I feel I would be better served by tapping it directly, one page after the other and not one word here and another there (and a few which aren't even found in a standard dictionary). Luckily that feeling mostly comes at a time where I know enough to be able to form intralinguistic associations which compensates for the lack of a context. What then about the idiomatic use of the language - like which of several possible verbs you use at a given politeness or nerdiness level? You can only learn that from encounters with the real world. But you are better equipped to see patterns in genuine texts (or in conversations) if you don't constantly stumble over totally unknown terms. So all in all I wholeheartedly support the early bulk learning, but of course only as one element in a diversified learning strategy. Edited by Iversen on 18 May 2015 at 12:45pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| rdearman Senior Member United Kingdom rdearman.orgRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5038 days ago 881 posts - 1812 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Italian, French, Mandarin | Message 152 of 350 18 May 2015 at 12:53pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
Hear! Hear! 1 person has voted this message useful |
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