Stop obsessing over grammar: focus on this instead

What's more important, vocabulary, words, or grammar, or the structure,

the usage pattern of a language?

As you know, I emphasize vocabulary as the key measurement of our potential.

And I showed you last time how I add to my word total.

In fact, I should point out, I am now at 15, 000 known words in Turkish.

I've added 5, 500 new known words to my known word total just in the past month.

And why is this important?

And I want to.

Refer to some of the comments and criticisms that I

received from that last video.

I will also show you how I do this on my iPhone, that is to say how I am able

to focus in every day on pushing that known word total to the level that I

think I need in order to be able to eventually do well in Turkey when I visit.

So the first thing is, people said in Turkish there's so many

different forms of the same word.

Different forms of verbs.

All of this is true, but some forms are easier to remember than others.

If we take the case of Spanish, for example, I find that the imperfect

amaba is easier to remember than the pure past tense, the preterite,

which has different endings.

To me, it's much more difficult because there is a natural

order of learning things.

We don't know why some things are easier than others.

But different forms of the word, in my opinion, they're different words,

they have different functions, so I don't mind counting them as extra.

But the main thing, the point that I wanted to make was that this word count

is an indication of your activity level.

But then I started thinking about why am I so keen on adding words?

So I was reading a book, or at least, rather, I should say that

the summary of a book came up in a Turkish language podcast.

That I was listening to.

And the book was The Happy Brain by, I think it's Dean Burnett.

And the book makes the point that once we are accustomed to certain

things, we kind of derive less pleasure or less joy from those things.

He uses the example of monkeys who were given asparagus to do certain tasks, and

then they started losing interest and then they gave them fruit juice and then

they got even more motivated and then.

When they tried to go back to asparagus, the monkeys got all upset.

The example that, you know, a joke is only funny the first time.

It's also pointed out in the book that we are always keen to eat because

we have a biological need for food.

But for things where there is no biological need, newness is important.

And Manfred Spitzer often points this out that in learning things,

the brain requires repetition, but the brain also requires novelty.

The big thing about adding words is that each word is a new word, at

least When I discover it and when I see it for a second time and I

add it to my Known words, total.

I have a sense of something new and better is happening.

It's, it gives me a sense of joy and achievement.

The fact of the matter is the number of words we could potentially learn

in a language is almost infinite.

Whereas the rules of grammar, the rules of usage, it's a finite number.

You can get a grammar book that's this thin for just about any language,

and it'll cover almost all of the important things you need to know.

Beyond that.

You have to get used to the language, used to how words sort of appear

with other words to sound more and more like what is considered normal

usage for speakers of that language.

But the other thing is I do read grammar books.

It's not like I spent all my time.

Adding words to my word total.

I got tons of books.

Elementary Turkish.

500 words, Turkish words in context.

I've got my complete Turkish.

I've got my, you know, Asimil, Le Turk, and so on and so forth.

That's, that's not even all of them.

But until I added those 5, 500 words to my known words total, I

had a lot of trouble reading them because I didn't know the words.

If you are trying to understand and get used to a structure in the language

and you don't know half the words in that sentence, it's not very effective.

So I now find a month after I started into Turkish or started up again,

where I've added all these known words.

Now I go through these books and I understand the examples.

So you need the words in order to see the examples because it's the examples

of usage in the target language, Turkish in this case, it's not the explanation in

English that's going to help us that much.

It's going to be exposure to patterns over and over again, and

you need words to achieve that.

And there's no question that my strategy of adding known words, you

know, making sure that I get 100 and 150 new known words a day has enabled

me to access these books in a way that was much, much more difficult before.

Now let's look at this on my iPhone.

I go in, grab a course from our library, bring it up here.

This is a lesson in the course has some blue words.

So I go to the vocabulary review and rather than doing the

links, I go to the new words.

Blue words, some of which I know, but if I come across words that I

don't know, I convert them to yellow so that I can review them later on.

Words that I do know, I can claim.

I make the odd mistake.

It doesn't matter.

I see that a word that I claim is known that I don't know.

I'll save it later.

A word that I put in the garbage can, cause I thought it was a word, a

name, cause I was moving too quickly.

I can always go back later and undo that.

So.

Nothing here is perfect, but in principle what I'm doing is claiming words that

I know, anything that's a name that I don't want to add to my words, known

words total, I basically reject it.

And go through in this way, claiming words as known or moving them to the saved links

category, like gladiator I don't want to take because Maybe I could, it's a

word, but it's, it's also a foreign word.

It's all pretty arbitrary.

These are your own personal statistics to do with whatever you want.

The main thing is it indicates that you're active.

So then I moved to the links, which words that I had previously saved or

words that I have moved to links here.

I can edit some of them.

Like this is Germany's apostrophe S rather than just Germany.

So I edit that.

By looking it up in the dictionary, confirming, you

know, what part of speech it is.

And words that I know, I can, sometimes I can claim them as known.

Sometimes I just want to move them up in status because I'm kind of getting

more familiar with them, but I'm not totally ready to claim them as known.

Others I leave as status one and you'll see I have various status words.

The advantage of moving words to status three is that eventually I

can go into the vocabulary section and harvest those status three words.

And there you have it.

In my previous video on this subject, I said that accumulating words was a bit

like where, when I was a child, we played the kissers with our hockey cards, and

they would eventually, as we dropped them, fluttering to the floor, some

cards would land on top of another card and I got to collect all those cards.

I think a better.

Example or a better simile might be a jigsaw puzzle where

you have this enormous puzzle.

And in the case of the language, it's a humongous puzzle.

And as more and more of the pieces of the puzzle start to show up, you get a better

sense of the blanks of the areas of the puzzle that are not yet covered by pieces.

And so you have to continue adding to that so that slowly the puzzle Puzzle

starts to take shape and you're able to access more and more difficult content.

Remember in sports, you only improve if you are playing against people who are

at least as good as you or better than you, you have to challenge yourself and

it's very important to challenge yourself with more and more difficult content.

And we also know that the brain.

Gets tired.

As I say, there's less of a dopamine kick when you're going over the same

material many, many times, far better to be able to access new material, where

you start to know more and more of the words you start to see structures of the

language in different contexts, which makes it easier for to remember them.

Research on the brain shows that vocabulary accumulation, especially when

it comes to verbs, is more dependent on seeing these in different contexts than

in how many times you come across them.

So enabling yourself to access words and structures in different contexts,

because you have more and more words, It's going to help you, you know,

improve faster and remember those words and remember those structures better.

Also, when we are reading and our ability to sort of become familiar

with the grammar has been called error driven probabilistic process.

In other words, we start to predict what's coming at us.

We have to be able to predict what's coming at us.

If we don't have enough words, if all the words that are coming

at us are meaningless to us, we can't predict anything.

We can't predict the structure.

We can't predict what word is going to be used.

We can't predict whether that word or some other word is in fact,

the one that should be used there.

So the more words we have, the better we are at predicting and therefore the

faster we're going to learn the language.

Now, the same is true when we come to speak.

Again, through the magnetic imaging, we know that when we go to make an utterance

in a language, The first thing we do is a word comes up that somehow we think of

a word, and I've experienced this in my, even in my conversations with my Turkish

tutor, that I'll just trot out a word.

I see it there, out it comes.

Bingo.

It keeps me in the conversation.

And then we trot out a structure that we have used before, that we're confident in.

And the third thing we do is we suppress those things that don't belong.

In my case, it's going to be a word from Farsi.

From Persian, which I kind of think doesn't belong, but I'm not

sure, but I'd have to suppress it.

So that's the process.

But there again, we need this reservoir of words so that we can trot out the

word and we can trot out the structures in order to stay in the conversation,

hear what comes back and slowly improve our ability in the language.

It all requires words.

But finally, you know, I've said that, that working on my word

count is a motivator for me.

It enriches my grasp of the language.

It enables me to access grammar books.

It enables me to access more and more challenging and more

and more compelling content.

The words, when I review them, I make sure that they are Reviewed right after having

read and listened to a bit of content.

And after doing that, I'll go back in and read the content.

So I'm not just studying words in isolation.

So it is a motivator, but it also drives me to get exposed to more and more.

Content, I get enjoyment from doing it, but I know that it's also improving

my capability in the language.

I'm at 15, 000 words today.

My goal is to get to 30, 000 words so that when I get to Turkey, I

can take advantage of being in that Turkish language environment.

So I hope that's helpful to you.

And please let me know what you think.

And maybe your experience is different than my experience.

Bye for now.