How to memorize vocabulary

Hi there, Steve Kaufmann here.

I'm leaving today with my wife. We are going south to spend a month in the sun because it rains here; although, the month of October in Vancouver has been unusually dry. I'm quite happy to stay here in the rain and play my Old Timer's hockey three times a week and go skiing up at Cypress, cross-country skiing 20 minutes from where we live. But my wife watches the rainfall every day and likes to go south for November, which is the rainiest month here in Vancouver. I don't know whether I'll be able to do videos down there, so I thought I would do at least one here before leaving.

I want to talk about memorizing vocabulary with a little bit of reference to the conference again on multilingualism and cognitive processes that I attended at McGill. First of all, I can't answer the various comments and questions that have appeared below my videos here at YouTube because YouTube is completely messed up in terms of how they deal with comments and the ability to respond to comments.

If I get a comment, an advice by email that there's been a comment to reply or to respond click here, it takes me somewhere. It doesn't open up underneath the comment that I'm supposed to be responding to. Very often that comment is not to be found. It looks like the whole system whereby they deal with comments is completely messed up.

It never was great and then for a period it seemed to be working better and now it's completely messed up. I hope they fix it. Even if I click on my inbox, I can't get to the list of comments that have been recently made so that I can comment on them. If anybody has any advice on that, please let me know. Memorizing vocabulary -- One of the people I follow on Facebook, Anthony Lauder, who is that great self-effacing Brit who studies Czech and other languages based in Prague, he asked people what their favorite way was for memorizing vocabulary, so I wanted to talk a little bit about that.

In my opinion, the best way to memorize vocabulary is NOT to memorize vocabulary. I have always found trying to memorize vocabulary, whether from a list, whether with flashcards or however, any deliberate attempt to memorize, to put to memory these items of vocabulary, is an extremely low-efficiency activity. No matter how hard you try, some words are going to stick and some words will not stick until much, much later, so I don't do that.

I believe that the best way to acquire vocabulary is through lots of exposure and meeting vocabulary items in different context. The more content you consume through listening and reading, the more likely you are to encounter these vocabulary items again and every time you encounter them again, you encounter them in different context, which makes the whole scope of their meaning clearer each time. You get a better sense of which words they are used together with. You really start to experience these words in live settings and, also, in settings, hopefully, that are high resonance. If you are listening to content of interest, such as when I listen to my Czech “Toulky českou minulosti” (Rambles Czech History) which is interesting stuff about Czech history, if the content is of interest it's higher resonance and so you really want to kind of get a sense of the meaning of these words in that context, then you see it again in another context.

To me, therefore, trying to memorize it on a list -- I think it may go into short-term memory -- some things will stick, but a lot won't. To me, it's a low-efficiency activity; it's also a boring activity. I always the feeling when I'm devoting time to sort of studying a list of vocabulary, I'm stealing time away from meaningful interaction with the language as in listening and reading and/or speaking.

Speaking is also important. I don't want to underestimate speaking. Perhaps I have given the impression that I only work on input. I don't. It's just that input is easier to arrange. I was at an evening the other night here in Vancouver.

There was a Russian language meetup and there's no question that after sitting for two hours and speaking Russian left, right and center, the quality of my Russian goes up and my attentiveness to Russian goes up and I notice that the next time I listen and read. So you do need to also speak, but meaningful speaking, meaningful listening and reading. That's all meaningful interaction with the language. It's high resonance. As you encounter words, hear words, see words and use words eventually in those contexts, to my mind that is a better use of time than trying to memorize lists of words.

Exposure is key and I think this came out in the conference in Montreal. I'll give you an example from memory here, but so many of the case studies or research examples that were presented were very, very limited in scope. You'll have an opportunity to check this out on their website. I left a link to their website in my last video. You can also Google Multilingual Conference, McGill University and you'll find them. One presenter talked about attrition in L-1, your first language, and used as an example comparing Italian immigrants who had lived in Canada for 10 years to Italians in Italy and the reaction of their brain to sort of word order that might be acceptable in Italian -- I can't remember exactly -- either had been influenced by English word order or word order that was acceptable in Italian but very unusual.

So the reaction, by enlarge, by Italian immigrants who had lived in Canada for 10 years, the brain reacted differently to those changes in word order than the brains of Italians in Italy. There were also differences depending on the degree or level of education of people and so forth. To me, that's relatively uninteresting.

It seems to be obvious that a person who lives in Canada for 10 years will be influenced by English, even in their native language. That doesn't mean that there has been attrition in the language. I don't think it demonstrates. Even if people start to introduce, essentially, non-native patterns in their Italian, I don't consider that attrition because, necessarily, you will be influenced. Every language you learn is going to influence you in some way in the languages that you already speak. That doesn't mean attrition. As one commenter said on my previous video, it would be very interesting to see why it is that many of us experience this improvement in our language when we take some time away from it to study a third language.

I've experienced it and other people have said the same. I lived in Japan for nine years and didn't touch Mandarin Chinese, hardly spoke it at all.

Come back to Mandarin Chinese, I'm better. I decided to spend some time on Swedish listening to Swedish audio books. I can't remember what other language I was on, I come back to that language -- maybe it was Italian -- I understand it better. So this whole idea of not only is exposure to the language you're studying important, but exposure to language learning and sort of exposing your brain to different languages, different structures and different sounds seems to have the effect of making you more attentive to the language. As you'll remember, I firmly believe that language learning really revolves around three issues: Your attitude, how motivated you are to improve in different aspects, how interested you are, how much you like the language, time, the amount of time you spend in it therefore exposure and, also, the ability to notice.

Exposure in itself makes you more attentive to the language, that's not to say that other activities can't also help. I should also close here because we're getting close to 10 minutes.

It's not that I never study vocabulary; I very often whip through my flashcards.

At LingQ before studying a new lesson I'll review the saved links, the words that I have already encountered before in the process of learning, some of which I have not learned, I'll review them in flashcards. Often if I have five-10 minutes to kill while waiting somewhere I'll review my flashcards, but I always have my flashcards with all the information on the front. The hint, as we say, the translation on LingQ, the actual term, the translation and the captured phrase, which we capture in LingQ, I review them all on front. So, again, it's exposure.

I'm not wracking my brain trying to remember what this term meant because I personally find that inefficient, tiring, stressful and boring. So I always say to memorize vocabulary, give yourself more exposure mostly in interesting content. If you are going to review words of course you don't have to do it my way, I'm just telling you what I do. So even when I review words, say in flashcards, it's more of an exposure activity, going through them quickly to give myself more exposure and occasionally reviewing the saved phrased that we have in LingQ. I hope I'll be able to do some more videos down south.

I may even try using my iPhone. I saw Richard Simcott did a video from Iceland and he seemed to have his iPhone held at a distance, so I might just try that and see how it works out. Anyway, I know we'll get a lot of sunshine down there while it probably will be raining here in Vancouver. So thank you for listening, bye for now.