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Steve's Youtube Videos - Vocabulary, Learning vocabulary

Learning vocabulary

Hi there, Steve Kaufmann here again.

Today I'm going to talk about learning vocabulary. Now, I did say in my previous video that I would be amenable to doing some videos in different languages and we've had some requests. Today I'm going to speak in English, but I'm going to aim for the next one maybe in Portuguese, because that was the largest number of requests, followed by Japanese, French, I think there was some Italian, Spanish and Mandarin. So we'll try and sneak all of those in, but I won't do them one after another. I'll intersperse it with English videos because most people only understand English. Now, vocabulary, we have a very interesting thread going over one of our forums at LingQ.

Someone started a thread on how many words can you learn in a day and I'm going to post a link to this thread on my blog The Linguist on Language, which I leave a link to here in the explanations or information box underneath the video. So, how many words can you learn in a day? We've seen a number of sort of extreme positions. I tend to take the extreme position that you can learn a lot of words, hundreds in a day, a hundred anyway. One person on our forum thinks the number is one, three, five, depending on the language. So let's, first of all, define our terms. What do we mean by learning a word?

Well, to me, learning a word means being able to recognize a word in a specific context, in a context when you are reading or listening. My focus is on comprehension. Some people feel that you only know a word when you can actually use it and produce it. So that's point number one and I'll get back to that. The second thing is what do we mean by a word?

At LingQ at our website, at our learning community, we count every form of the word as a different word and we do this for a specific reason. In those languages like Russian or Slavic languages which have a lot of declensions or Korean which has a lot of different endings to words, I find it useful to treat each word as a different phenomenon, see how it performs in a phrase or sentence, try to understand how that word functions, depending on its form, but it doesn't matter. I think if you only want to count word families it becomes a little more difficult to define. In English, for example, it's active, activity, reactive, act.

Are they the same word or different words? It's a little difficult to define. However, I know that Paul Nation, who is a leading expert on English vocabulary acquisition, feels that the ratio between word families to words is 1 to 1.6 in English. It's probably 1.3 in some languages. Maybe in Russian it's 1.5. I don't know. The way I count them, every form of a word is a different word and, of course, if I can recognize a word I consider that word known. A lot of people don't like that. It also depends on how similar the new language is to a language you already know. For example, in Romanian I went in there and 70% of the vocabulary is at least recognizable, based on my knowledge of romance languages. My numbers for Romanian in two months, my LingQ statistics tell me that I know over 20,000 words and that I have also saved, in other words linked on our site, another 10,000 words in this two-month period.

Now, many of the links that I created were phrases and, of course, I don't know all of those words because those are words that I'm trying to learn, but I think I know about half of them. So like 24 or 25,000 words in two months, that's over 400 words a day, based on being able to recognize them. In Czech, over maybe a 15-month period, I have some 50,000 known words and I created I think some 44,000 links. I had to do more linking, more saving of words and phrases, because there were less freebie words in Czech than in Romanian. So that's one extreme and I'll get back to that extreme. Of course another person on the thread says “No.

To me, learning a word means learning it and slowly making sure I know what it means. Many people work on flashcards and so they deliberately learn these words and make sure they can use them. Only then can they say they know them and, on that basis, the number is five words a day in French and maybe three words or even one word in Chinese and so forth.” Okay.

Granted, there are lots of variables here, but some of my basic principles are that if you are focused on being able to use the word and if you try to deliberately learn that word so that you can recognize it out of context in flashcards so that you can use it, I think you are doing yourself a great disservice. I think that is counterproductive when it comes to language learning and when it comes to language acquisition because the time you spend say on flashcards scratching your brain trying to remember what the word means to my mind is wasted time. For that matter, if you are struggling to use the few words you know and you're having this very limited conversation with someone but trying to nail down the 10 words you learned yesterday, to me, is also counterproductive. I feel you're much better off to be constantly exposing yourself to more word-rich content through reading and listening.

The bulk of the words that I learn, I acquire them incidentally. So the more words I can recognize, the more interesting and word-rich material I can read and listen to and, therefore, harvest all of these free words. As my statistics in learning Romanian and Czech point out -- and it's the same in other languages -- most of my so-called known words are words that showed up in our lessons that I didn't save. The system recognizes that these are words that you didn't need to save, therefore, you know them. Therefore, the biggest growth in my vocabulary was from words that I picked up incidentally. So the more words that I can recognize, the sooner I can move into interesting content, whether it be history in my case or literature. For other people it might be sports or whatever it is. So trying to limit yourself to sort of nailing down bits of vocabulary that you struggle to study off lists and in flashcards and Anki and you want to make sure you can use them and stuff like that, on that basis you will learn very few words.

When it comes to this whole passive vocabulary, active vocabulary dichotomy, in my view, when you have an opportunity to speak more or you have the need to speak more, then a lot of this passive vocabulary will become active. Sometimes you'll remember this word and the next time you won't, but they're all sitting there in your brain and as you struggle to speak in meaningful situations then you will find yourself reaching back there for these words. Again, as we do on LingQ, when you are reading you are noticing words.

When I read and I see a handy phrase that I want to be able to use I save it. That means it will show up again highlighted in yellow any time that word or phrase appears in any future lesson that I either find on the LingQ library or bring in from the Internet. So I'm training myself to notice and as I train myself to notice these words and I see them again and again slowly they become a part of my active vocabulary, but I don't focus on trying to develop my active vocabulary. I think that that is a better strategy for people who study and live in places where the language isn't spoken. It's far easier to expose yourself to this rich content rather than trying to deliberately nail down words. Now, a couple comments here.

In my opinion, it's important that what you are listening to and reading is interesting, has a sort of resonance with you, you like it and that's true in all language learning. A couple of the comments to my previous video where I said one of the problems people have in language learning is they haven't done it before and once they've done it once or twice they feel confident, a number of people said well, I learned English and German, but I'm having real trouble with French. Then I went back to that person and it turns out this person feels less attraction to French culture than he felt towards English or German culture. Well, certainly, if you don't feel an attraction to the language, to the content you're studying, all of this makes the learning less effective, so it is important to use material that has resonance with you. So on the subject of how many words you can learn and how to go about learning it and so forth and so on, yes, it depends on how similar the languages are.

Obviously, Romanian was very easy for me. There I was, I don't know, 400 words a day would be the count. Czech was more difficult, so it's 200 words a day. Czech has a lot of declensions and things, so if you try to equate that to English maybe it's only 70 words a day. I don't know. It's a large number if you do it, in my opinion, the way I do. On LingQ I link furiously.

I created, as I say in Romanian in two months, over 10,000 links. That's over 10,000 words that I have deliberately saved and that appear highlighted in yellow every time I read. By exposing myself to a lot of content listening and reading, I've been sort of washing all these words over me. A lot of them are retained without me having to make any special effort and so I can simply engage in this enjoyable activity of reading and listening to things that interest me and the words just accumulate, which is kind of the way kids learn. Kids don't do flashcards. So, enough, I see I've kind of spoken quite a bit on this.

I know this is a bit of a controversial issue. Let me see on my notes if I forgot anything. No.

All right, I look forward to your comments and I'm going to see if I can't sneak a Portuguese video in towards the end of the week. Thank you very much.

Bye for now.


Learning vocabulary Wortschatz lernen Aprender vocabulario Apprendimento del vocabolario 語彙の学習 Aprender vocabulário Kelime öğrenme Вивчення лексики 学习词汇 學習詞彙

Hi there, Steve Kaufmann here again.

Today I’m going to talk about learning vocabulary. Now, I did say in my previous video that I would be amenable to doing some videos in different languages and we’ve had some requests. Today I’m going to speak in English, but I’m going to aim for the next one maybe in Portuguese, because that was the largest number of requests, followed by Japanese, French, I think there was some Italian, Spanish and Mandarin. So we’ll try and sneak all of those in, but I won’t do them one after another. I’ll intersperse it with English videos because most people only understand English. Now, vocabulary, we have a very interesting thread going over one of our forums at LingQ.

Someone started a thread on how many words can you learn in a day and I’m going to post a link to this thread on my blog The Linguist on Language, which I leave a link to here in the explanations or information box underneath the video. So, how many words can you learn in a day? We’ve seen a number of sort of extreme positions. I tend to take the extreme position that you can learn a lot of words, hundreds in a day, a hundred anyway. One person on our forum thinks the number is one, three, five, depending on the language. So let’s, first of all, define our terms. What do we mean by learning a word?

Well, to me, learning a word means being able to recognize a word in a specific context, in a context when you are reading or listening. My focus is on comprehension. Some people feel that you only know a word when you can actually use it and produce it. So that’s point number one and I’ll get back to that. Deci asta este punctul nr. 1 și mă voi întoarce la asta. The second thing is what do we mean by a word?

At LingQ at our website, at our learning community, we count every form of the word as a different word and we do this for a specific reason. In those languages like Russian or Slavic languages which have a lot of declensions or Korean which has a lot of different endings to words, I find it useful to treat each word as a different phenomenon, see how it performs in a phrase or sentence, try to understand how that word functions, depending on its form, but it doesn’t matter. I think if you only want to count word families it becomes a little more difficult to define. In English, for example, it’s active, activity, reactive, act.

Are they the same word or different words? It’s a little difficult to define. However, I know that Paul Nation, who is a leading expert on English vocabulary acquisition, feels that the ratio between word families to words is 1 to 1.6 in English. It’s probably 1.3 in some languages. Maybe in Russian it’s 1.5. I don’t know. The way I count them, every form of a word is a different word and, of course, if I can recognize a word I consider that word known. A lot of people don’t like that. It also depends on how similar the new language is to a language you already know. For example, in Romanian I went in there and 70% of the vocabulary is at least recognizable, based on my knowledge of romance languages. My numbers for Romanian in two months, my LingQ statistics tell me that I know over 20,000 words and that I have also saved, in other words linked on our site, another 10,000 words in this two-month period.

Now, many of the links that I created were phrases and, of course, I don’t know all of those words because those are words that I’m trying to learn, but I think I know about half of them. So like 24 or 25,000 words in two months, that’s over 400 words a day, based on being able to recognize them. In Czech, over maybe a 15-month period, I have some 50,000 known words and I created I think some 44,000 links. I had to do more linking, more saving of words and phrases, because there were less freebie words in Czech than in Romanian. So that’s one extreme and I’ll get back to that extreme. Deci asta eo extremă și mă voi întoarce la acea extremă. Of course another person on the thread says “No.

To me, learning a word means learning it and slowly making sure I know what it means. Many people work on flashcards and so they deliberately learn these words and make sure they can use them. Only then can they say they know them and, on that basis, the number is five words a day in French and maybe three words or even one word in Chinese and so forth.” Okay.

Granted, there are lots of variables here, but some of my basic principles are that if you are focused on being able to use the word and if you try to deliberately learn that word so that you can recognize it out of context in flashcards so that you can use it, I think you are doing yourself a great disservice. I think that is counterproductive when it comes to language learning and when it comes to language acquisition because the time you spend say on flashcards scratching your brain trying to remember what the word means to my mind is wasted time. For that matter, if you are struggling to use the few words you know and you’re having this very limited conversation with someone but trying to nail down the 10 words you learned yesterday, to me, is also counterproductive. I feel you’re much better off to be constantly exposing yourself to more word-rich content through reading and listening.

The bulk of the words that I learn, I acquire them incidentally. So the more words I can recognize, the more interesting and word-rich material I can read and listen to and, therefore, harvest all of these free words. As my statistics in learning Romanian and Czech point out -- and it’s the same in other languages -- most of my so-called known words are words that showed up in our lessons that I didn’t save. The system recognizes that these are words that you didn’t need to save, therefore, you know them. Therefore, the biggest growth in my vocabulary was from words that I picked up incidentally. So the more words that I can recognize, the sooner I can move into interesting content, whether it be history in my case or literature. For other people it might be sports or whatever it is. So trying to limit yourself to sort of nailing down bits of vocabulary that you struggle to study off lists and in flashcards and Anki and you want to make sure you can use them and stuff like that, on that basis you will learn very few words.

When it comes to this whole passive vocabulary, active vocabulary dichotomy, in my view, when you have an opportunity to speak more or you have the need to speak more, then a lot of this passive vocabulary will become active. Sometimes you’ll remember this word and the next time you won’t, but they’re all sitting there in your brain and as you struggle to speak in meaningful situations then you will find yourself reaching back there for these words. Again, as we do on LingQ, when you are reading you are noticing words.

When I read and I see a handy phrase that I want to be able to use I save it. That means it will show up again highlighted in yellow any time that word or phrase appears in any future lesson that I either find on the LingQ library or bring in from the Internet. So I’m training myself to notice and as I train myself to notice these words and I see them again and again slowly they become a part of my active vocabulary, but I don’t focus on trying to develop my active vocabulary. I think that that is a better strategy for people who study and live in places where the language isn’t spoken. It’s far easier to expose yourself to this rich content rather than trying to deliberately nail down words. Now, a couple comments here.

In my opinion, it’s important that what you are listening to and reading is interesting, has a sort of resonance with you, you like it and that’s true in all language learning. A couple of the comments to my previous video where I said one of the problems people have in language learning is they haven’t done it before and once they’ve done it once or twice they feel confident, a number of people said well, I learned English and German, but I’m having real trouble with French. Then I went back to that person and it turns out this person feels less attraction to French culture than he felt towards English or German culture. Well, certainly, if you don’t feel an attraction to the language, to the content you’re studying, all of this makes the learning less effective, so it is important to use material that has resonance with you. So on the subject of how many words you can learn and how to go about learning it and so forth and so on, yes, it depends on how similar the languages are.

Obviously, Romanian was very easy for me. There I was, I don’t know, 400 words a day would be the count. Czech was more difficult, so it’s 200 words a day. Czech has a lot of declensions and things, so if you try to equate that to English maybe it’s only 70 words a day. I don’t know. It’s a large number if you do it, in my opinion, the way I do. On LingQ I link furiously.

I created, as I say in Romanian in two months, over 10,000 links. That’s over 10,000 words that I have deliberately saved and that appear highlighted in yellow every time I read. By exposing myself to a lot of content listening and reading, I’ve been sort of washing all these words over me. A lot of them are retained without me having to make any special effort and so I can simply engage in this enjoyable activity of reading and listening to things that interest me and the words just accumulate, which is kind of the way kids learn. Kids don’t do flashcards. So, enough, I see I’ve kind of spoken quite a bit on this.

I know this is a bit of a controversial issue. Let me see on my notes if I forgot anything. No.

All right, I look forward to your comments and I’m going to see if I can’t sneak a Portuguese video in towards the end of the week. Thank you very much.

Bye for now.