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Steve's Language Learning Tips, Language Learning Goal 1: Acquiring Words (1)

Language Learning Goal 1: Acquiring Words (1)

So the main thing is acquiring words so that I understand more things

so that when I'm listening to it, I find more words that I recognize.

Hi there, Steve Kaufmann here today and I'm going to talk about the most

important goal in language learning, in other words, how to learn words.

Language learning has always in my mind being about acquiring words and I'm

going to explain what I mean by that.

And you'll remember that I made this one video about the seven most

important goals in language learning.

And number one is learning words.

If you enjoy these videos, please subscribe, click on

the bell for notifications.

If you follow me on a podcast.

Uh, please leave a comment.

First of all, um, because there was a number of people commented on how my

microphone was a bit of a distraction.

Uh, I'm trying to set up here in such a way oriented with my camera that

you don't see the, um, microphone.

I hope that is the case.

In fact, I will check on that right now.

I think I can do that here, if you bear very with me...

and yeah.

Microphone is out of view.

Also, uh, I'm going to do, I mentioned in that previous video where I talked about

the seven goals, uh, of language learning, I'm going to go through each goal and

talk about how we, in fact, learn words.

For example, today I did a video about how I learned Ukrainian, and I'm going

to continue doing videos about how I learned these different languages.

Um, I wasn't happy with the video I did about learning Ukrainian

because I know I have a number of books at home in Vancouver, and

I wanted to show these to you.

So I'm going to either use that video or redo the video, uh, a month

from now when I'm home in Vancouver.

Uh, but I will be...

and so if you're interested in hearing how I learned the different languages, let

me know which languages you're interested in hearing about and I will try to make

videos about how I learned them, to the what degree, in fact, I did learn them.

So words, when we designed LingQ, it was designed around the idea that to

me, the simplest measure of where you are in the language is how many words

you know, and that the task of learning languages is one of learning words.

And I remember that, I remember that when we learned French at school

and I really couldn't speak French.

But, um, when I was, I was actually at a football game, professional football,

Montreal Alouettes, and I lost my ticket and I was explaining to the, uh, usher

in French and after 10 years of French, all I could do is put together words.

I couldn't use the verbs correctly ... uh, you know, just words.

And I think that the easiest thing to acquire is words.

And if we have enough words, we actually can do a lot with those words

and that the refinement with, with grammar and so forth comes later.

So, and therefore, when we designed LingQ, we built all kinds of things

into LingQ that measure how many words you've read, how many words you've

learned, how many words, you know, how many words you've looked up.

Uh, we have different highlighting to tell you what stage you are with that word.

So words, um, most of the words you acquire, you're going to acquire

subconsciously by being exposed to them.

And it's difficult to tell when certain words will click in, uh, some you learn

fast and some take forever to remember some we remember, and then we forget

again, and then we remember them again.

That's all fine.

But initially you say, if you're on LingQ and you've got a page

of text in a new language, let's say Finnish for me or Icelandic

or something, everything is blue.

And I have to look up every single blue word and ideally I do it in

sentence mode so I'm not having to deal with too much content at once.

And slowly, all of a sudden, each one of these blue words, I looked

them up and they are now all yellow.

And because each language has a different structure uh, the word order and so forth

may not be the same as English, but I can kind of figure out what the sentence says.

Very often there's a translation underneath, into English in my case.

Uh, and so I'm on my way to getting a grasp of the language, I'm on my way

to acquiring words, the ultimate goal, if we use again LingQ as the example is

that the whole lesson page will be white.

That the word...

the blue words will have become yellow words because I looked them

up and I mean, you know, I'm trying to learn these words, but eventually

these words do become known.

When they're known they're white.

And I noticed that over months or so, because any word, once I've learned

it and it's become white, it will show up white in every subsequent lesson.

And any word that went from blue to yellow will be yellow in any subsequent lesson.

So there's a gradual process of making these pages lighter and lighter in colour.

Now, some people say, oh, and I should also point out that the

only thing we can measure at LingQ is your passive vocabulary.

And I I've said this before in, in videos, I'm a great believer in

the power of passive vocabulary.

I'm a great believer in input, in comprehension.

So we, when we see a word in a context and we understand that

word in that context at least in my case, I consider that word known.

It is known in that context.

It is known passively.

It doesn't mean that I can use the word, but I'm on my way.

And it may be that in another context, I'll see that word

and I won't know what it means.

And then I'll simply move it back to unknow, to status one.

It doesn't matter because the process of acquiring words is largely

subconscious and it's largely a process of being exposed to these words.

Now, some people will say, phrases are more important than words, and I do save

a lot of phrases, but you have to know the meaning of the words inside the phrase.

When you see phrases with words that naturally belong together, you can then

save that phrase and try to remember that phrase so that you have a handy

ready to use phrase with the way these words are normally used in the language.

But the fundamental job is acquiring words.

And if you don't need to look a word up, LingQ will assume that you know

it, So another thing you often hear people say is, well, you don't really

need many words because, uh, 70% of any context, you know, is gonna consist

of 500, 800, 1000 most common words.

That's true.

But if you only ever want to have very limited conversations with people,

if you don't ever want to understand books or movies, maybe that's fine.

But most people, certainly in my case, when I learn a language,

I want to understand movies.

I want to have intelligent conversations with people.

To do all of that I have to have a large passive vocabulary, not just a thousand

words, 10,000 words, 20,000, 30,000.

That enables me then to listen to a variety of different content,

podcasts, movies, and all of that is helping the language come into

me and most of all I am driven by the desire to acquire more words.

Now, some people like using spaced repetition systems, I don't, because

I don't want to spend so much time going through these decks of words.

Also.

I'm not a big fan of flashcards, but other people do use them and swear

by them and think they're great.

And so that's fine.

I'm not against them, but even at LingQ where we have

flashcards, different activities.

I sometimes do them, but mostly I just work with lists, uh, in

every lesson behind every lesson page, behind every sentence I can

review the words from that page.

I can review the LingQs, words that I'm trying to learn.

I can review words that I have never seen before.

Blue words.

I can review words that I have long since moved to known.

I can review them if I want.

I like seeing words in lists.

Lists to me are better than flashcards because you can

see more of them more quickly.

And to me, reviewing words is just another form of exposure.

It gives you another kind of activity where you are being exposed

to the language, and with lists there are a number of advantages.

You can go through the list alphabetically so then you start to

see words that have the same prefix.

Very often you'll start to see connections between words.

You'll see that you have saved three, four or five, six words that begin the same

way and maybe share some common meaning.

I find that very helpful.

Uh, you can review your words in lists based on frequency.

And if you like, I'm often motivated to move some of the words that I have saved,

and I have a lot of them in all the languages, I want to move them to known.

So if I take my high-frequency words, I'm more likely to find words there that

I actually already know, but I haven't had a chance to move them to known.

So I'll go in there and I'll move a bunch of words to known.

It's good for my known words total, and also for my learned words total on LingQ.

Another thing you can do with lists is...yeah well, let's

move on to another subject here.

Words have different functions in the sentence.

So even without knowing, say, all of the conjugations of verbs, at least we're

aware that there are words that are verbs.

There are words that are nouns.

There are words that are adjectives, adverbs are conjunctions, in

other words connecting words.

So we can tag for these.

Um, and this is helpful because then you can go to your vocabulary section and you

go through just verbs or just adjectives.

And you can start to see things that these adjectives or verbs

or whatever have in common.

Another thing is it may be that in some languages, you have

trouble with a third person of the past tense you can tag for that.

So you can look at the third person of the past tense only as a list or you

might, if languages that have cases, you can look at just the instrumental case,

let's say in Russian or Slavic languages.

And you can just review those.

So lists to my mind are more useful in terms of reviewing for exposure

then flashcards, because I'm not actually that interested in racking my

brain to try and remember something.

I don't actually believe that that's all that useful.

So the main thing is acquiring words so that I understand more things so that

when I'm listening to it, I find more words that I recognize, even if I'm

fuzzy on the grammar, the words generally speaking, the meaning is redundant.

So even without having a full knowledge of the grammar, you can kind of figure

out the meaning if you have the words.

So goal number one to me is acquiring words, acquiring them naturally

varying your activity so that you can sometimes get tired of reading

and, and saving words and phrases.

And so you can go through lists of words for different reasons

in order to maybe move the status to known or whatever it might be.


Language Learning Goal 1: Acquiring Words (1) Sprachlernziel 1: Erwerb von Wörtern (1) Language Learning Goal 1: Acquiring Words (1) Objetivo de aprendizaje lingüístico 1: Adquirir palabras (1) Objectif d'apprentissage des langues 1 : acquérir des mots (1) Obiettivo di apprendimento linguistico 1: Acquisizione di parole (1) 言語学習の目標1:単語の習得(1) Cel nauki języka 1: Przyswajanie słów (1) Objectivo de aprendizagem de línguas 1: Adquirir palavras (1) Цель изучения языка 1: Приобретение слов (1) Dil Öğrenme Hedefi 1: Kelime Edinme (1) Мета вивчення мови 1: Засвоєння слів (1) 语言学习目标 1:习得单词 (1) 語言學習目標 1:習得單詞 (1)

So the main thing is acquiring words so that I understand more things Najważniejszą rzeczą jest więc przyswajanie słów, dzięki którym rozumiem więcej rzeczy

so that when I'm listening to it, I find more words that I recognize.

Hi there, Steve Kaufmann here today and I'm going to talk about the most

important goal in language learning, in other words, how to learn words.

Language learning has always in my mind being about acquiring words and I'm Nauka języków zawsze polegała dla mnie na przyswajaniu słów i jestem

going to explain what I mean by that. wyjaśnię, co przez to rozumiem.

And you'll remember that I made this one video about the seven most I pamiętasz, że nagrałem ten film o siedmiu najbardziej

important goals in language learning. ważne cele w nauce języków obcych.

And number one is learning words. Numer jeden to nauka słów.

If you enjoy these videos, please subscribe, click on Jeśli podobają Ci się te filmy, zasubskrybuj je, klikając na

the bell for notifications. dzwonek do powiadomień.

If you follow me on a podcast. Jeśli śledzisz mój podcast.

Uh, please leave a comment.

First of all, um, because there was a number of people commented on how my

microphone was a bit of a distraction.

Uh, I'm trying to set up here in such a way oriented with my camera that

you don't see the, um, microphone.

I hope that is the case.

In fact, I will check on that right now.

I think I can do that here, if you bear very with me...

and yeah.

Microphone is out of view.

Also, uh, I'm going to do, I mentioned in that previous video where I talked about

the seven goals, uh, of language learning, I'm going to go through each goal and

talk about how we, in fact, learn words.

For example, today I did a video about how I learned Ukrainian, and I'm going

to continue doing videos about how I learned these different languages.

Um, I wasn't happy with the video I did about learning Ukrainian

because I know I have a number of books at home in Vancouver, and

I wanted to show these to you.

So I'm going to either use that video or redo the video, uh, a month

from now when I'm home in Vancouver.

Uh, but I will be...

and so if you're interested in hearing how I learned the different languages, let Por isso, se estiverem interessados em saber como aprendi as diferentes línguas, digam

me know which languages you're interested in hearing about and I will try to make

videos about how I learned them, to the what degree, in fact, I did learn them.

So words, when we designed LingQ, it was designed around the idea that to

me, the simplest measure of where you are in the language is how many words 我,衡量你在这门语言中所处位置的最简单方法是有多少单词

you know, and that the task of learning languages is one of learning words.

And I remember that, I remember that when we learned French at school

and I really couldn't speak French.

But, um, when I was, I was actually at a football game, professional football,

Montreal Alouettes, and I lost my ticket and I was explaining to the, uh, usher

in French and after 10 years of French, all I could do is put together words.

I couldn't use the verbs correctly ... uh, you know, just words.

And I think that the easiest thing to acquire is words.

And if we have enough words, we actually can do a lot with those words

and that the refinement with, with grammar and so forth comes later. 语法等方面的完善是稍后才会出现的。

So, and therefore, when we designed LingQ, we built all kinds of things 因此,当我们设计 LingQ 时,我们构建了各种各样的东西

into LingQ that measure how many words you've read, how many words you've

learned, how many words, you know, how many words you've looked up.

Uh, we have different highlighting to tell you what stage you are with that word. 呃,我们有不同的突出显示来告诉你这个词处于哪个阶段。

So words, um, most of the words you acquire, you're going to acquire

subconsciously by being exposed to them.

And it's difficult to tell when certain words will click in, uh, some you learn

fast and some take forever to remember some we remember, and then we forget

again, and then we remember them again.

That's all fine.

But initially you say, if you're on LingQ and you've got a page

of text in a new language, let's say Finnish for me or Icelandic

or something, everything is blue.

And I have to look up every single blue word and ideally I do it in

sentence mode so I'm not having to deal with too much content at once. modo de frase para não ter de lidar com demasiado conteúdo de uma só vez.

And slowly, all of a sudden, each one of these blue words, I looked E lentamente, de repente, cada uma dessas palavras azuis, eu olhava

them up and they are now all yellow.

And because each language has a different structure uh, the word order and so forth

may not be the same as English, but I can kind of figure out what the sentence says.

Very often there's a translation underneath, into English in my case.

Uh, and so I'm on my way to getting a grasp of the language, I'm on my way

to acquiring words, the ultimate goal, if we use again LingQ as the example is

that the whole lesson page will be white.

That the word... Que a palavra...

the blue words will have become yellow words because I looked them

up and I mean, you know, I'm trying to learn these words, but eventually e quero dizer que estou a tentar aprender estas palavras, mas eventualmente

these words do become known.

When they're known they're white.

And I noticed that over months or so, because any word, once I've learned

it and it's become white, it will show up white in every subsequent lesson.

And any word that went from blue to yellow will be yellow in any subsequent lesson.

So there's a gradual process of making these pages lighter and lighter in colour.

Now, some people say, oh, and I should also point out that the Agora, algumas pessoas dizem, oh, e eu também devo salientar que o

only thing we can measure at LingQ is your passive vocabulary.

And I I've said this before in, in videos, I'm a great believer in

the power of passive vocabulary.

I'm a great believer in input, in comprehension.

So we, when we see a word in a context and we understand that

word in that context at least in my case, I consider that word known.

It is known in that context.

It is known passively.

It doesn't mean that I can use the word, but I'm on my way.

And it may be that in another context, I'll see that word

and I won't know what it means.

And then I'll simply move it back to unknow, to status one.

It doesn't matter because the process of acquiring words is largely

subconscious and it's largely a process of being exposed to these words.

Now, some people will say, phrases are more important than words, and I do save

a lot of phrases, but you have to know the meaning of the words inside the phrase.

When you see phrases with words that naturally belong together, you can then

save that phrase and try to remember that phrase so that you have a handy

ready to use phrase with the way these words are normally used in the language.

But the fundamental job is acquiring words.

And if you don't need to look a word up, LingQ will assume that you know

it, So another thing you often hear people say is, well, you don't really

need many words because, uh, 70% of any context, you know, is gonna consist

of 500, 800, 1000 most common words.

That's true.

But if you only ever want to have very limited conversations with people,

if you don't ever want to understand books or movies, maybe that's fine.

But most people, certainly in my case, when I learn a language,

I want to understand movies.

I want to have intelligent conversations with people.

To do all of that I have to have a large passive vocabulary, not just a thousand

words, 10,000 words, 20,000, 30,000.

That enables me then to listen to a variety of different content,

podcasts, movies, and all of that is helping the language come into

me and most of all I am driven by the desire to acquire more words.

Now, some people like using spaced repetition systems, I don't, because

I don't want to spend so much time going through these decks of words.

Also.

I'm not a big fan of flashcards, but other people do use them and swear

by them and think they're great.

And so that's fine.

I'm not against them, but even at LingQ where we have

flashcards, different activities.

I sometimes do them, but mostly I just work with lists, uh, in

every lesson behind every lesson page, behind every sentence I can 每节课在每节课页后面,在每句话后面我可以

review the words from that page. مراجعة الكلمات من تلك الصفحة.

I can review the LingQs, words that I'm trying to learn. يمكنني مراجعة LingQs ، الكلمات التي أحاول تعلمها.

I can review words that I have never seen before. يمكنني مراجعة الكلمات التي لم أرها من قبل.

Blue words. كلمات زرقاء.

I can review words that I have long since moved to known. 知名度を上げて久しい言葉を復習できます。

I can review them if I want.

I like seeing words in lists.

Lists to me are better than flashcards because you can

see more of them more quickly.

And to me, reviewing words is just another form of exposure.

It gives you another kind of activity where you are being exposed

to the language, and with lists there are a number of advantages.

You can go through the list alphabetically so then you start to

see words that have the same prefix.

Very often you'll start to see connections between words. 很多时候你会开始看到单词之间的联系。

You'll see that you have saved three, four or five, six words that begin the same 您会看到您已保存了三个、四个或五个、六个开头相同的单词

way and maybe share some common meaning. 方式,也许有一些共同的含义。

I find that very helpful. 我发现这非常有帮助。

Uh, you can review your words in lists based on frequency. أه يمكنك مراجعة كلماتك في قوائم حسب التردد. 呃,你可以根据频率查看列表中的单词。

And if you like, I'm often motivated to move some of the words that I have saved, 如果你愿意的话,我经常会被激励去移动我保存的一些单词,

and I have a lot of them in all the languages, I want to move them to known.

So if I take my high-frequency words, I'm more likely to find words there that

I actually already know, but I haven't had a chance to move them to known.

So I'll go in there and I'll move a bunch of words to known.

It's good for my known words total, and also for my learned words total on LingQ.

Another thing you can do with lists is...yeah well, let's

move on to another subject here.

Words have different functions in the sentence.

So even without knowing, say, all of the conjugations of verbs, at least we're

aware that there are words that are verbs.

There are words that are nouns.

There are words that are adjectives, adverbs are conjunctions, in

other words connecting words.

So we can tag for these.

Um, and this is helpful because then you can go to your vocabulary section and you

go through just verbs or just adjectives.

And you can start to see things that these adjectives or verbs

or whatever have in common.

Another thing is it may be that in some languages, you have شيء آخر هو أنه قد يكون لديك في بعض اللغات

trouble with a third person of the past tense you can tag for that.

So you can look at the third person of the past tense only as a list or you

might, if languages that have cases, you can look at just the instrumental case,

let's say in Russian or Slavic languages.

And you can just review those.

So lists to my mind are more useful in terms of reviewing for exposure

then flashcards, because I'm not actually that interested in racking my ثم البطاقات التعليمية ، لأنني لست مهتمًا في الواقع بإرهاق dan flashcards, want ik ben eigenlijk niet zo geïnteresseerd in het verzamelen van mijn

brain to try and remember something.

I don't actually believe that that's all that useful.

So the main thing is acquiring words so that I understand more things so that

when I'm listening to it, I find more words that I recognize, even if I'm

fuzzy on the grammar, the words generally speaking, the meaning is redundant. rozmyty na gramatyce, słowa ogólnie rzecz biorąc, znaczenie jest zbędne.

So even without having a full knowledge of the grammar, you can kind of figure

out the meaning if you have the words.

So goal number one to me is acquiring words, acquiring them naturally

varying your activity so that you can sometimes get tired of reading

and, and saving words and phrases.

And so you can go through lists of words for different reasons

in order to maybe move the status to known or whatever it might be.