How to Learn Vocabulary Without Even Trying

Hi there, Steve Kaufmann here, and today I want to talk about learning words.

Uh, why?

Well, one reason is that I started up Polish about 10 days ago, and I was notified by LingQ that I now know 36,000 words in Polish.

Uh, I didn't do 30... didn't learn 36,000 words in 10 days.

Uh, back in 2015, I spent...

I can't remember if it was three months or six months, but certainly I was very active during a three month period, uh, with Polish and doing a lot of Polish history, starting of course with our mini stories and, and simpler content, and then building up to, to the history, uh, of Poland, which was of great interest to me.

But this reminded me, wow, 36 thousand words.

I don't necessarily speak that well, but I understand a lot.

I have a base in the language, and it reminded me that, um, I've always felt that the simplest measure of our level in the language doesn't necessarily mean our ability to speak, but our level in that language, our potential in that language is the number of words that we know.

And so, that's what I want to talk about today: How do we learn these words? What does it mean to know words? And so forth.

I remember when I wrote my book back in 2003, uh, “The Linguist on Language: A Language Learning Odyssey,” I remember saying two things there that at that time I felt very strongly about.

This was before I had ever heard of Stephen Krashen and the input hypothesis, before I had heard of the three keys: your attitude, the time you spend with the language and the ability to notice.

I didn't know any of those things, but I felt that two things were at least part of my success in learning Chinese, which I learned in less than a year, up to a level of, let's say 4 thousand characters reading newspapers, translating from Chinese to English, from English to Chinese, uh, you know, newspaper editorials and things like that.

That one was intensity, and the other was the number of words I had to learn.

The sort of Gordian Knot measurement of where you stand in the languages,

the number of words, you know, and that's why when we built LingQ, we

built into it this measurement of words.

Words that you save, which is the number of LingQs created, and words that you

know, which means words that the system has decided that you already know.

Now, sometimes when I say this I get criticism because, you know,

what does it mean to know a word?

Uh, you don't know the full scope of the word.

Uh, you can't use the word.

All of this is true, but those things are also difficult to measure.

What we can measure at LingQ is whether you looked up the word in a given text.

If you didn't look it up, the assumption is, you know it.

And so the process for me of learning words is not sort of pouring over lists,

studying, uh, vocabulary, feeling that sort of urgency to learn this vocabulary.

Those activities are largely self-defeating.

The more you review your, um, at least in my own experience, flashcards,

the more you review lists, the less is sticking in your brain.

The more you just expose yourself to content reading and listening and just

throwing these words into your brain, eventually those words will start

to initially become known and then eventually you'll be able to use them.

So how does it work?

So at LingQ, all the words are blue.

At first, you look up the words you don't know, and I see it as

kind of taking those blue words and throwing them into my brain.

And the minute they're into my brain, they're now yellow.

In other words, I've clicked on them.

They have become LingQs.

Uh, in time these yellow LingQs in my brain and also in my database

at LingQ will convert themselves into known words, because in time I

will read, say other contexts where that yellow word appears again.

Or I will save words that are very similar, and because these similar

words are kind of side by side, all of a sudden I start to know them.

In fact, increasingly, words that I have never seen before

that are similar to words that I know, I throw them in my brain.

Or they automatically get into my brain.

I don't even have to save them.

And so that my vocabulary grows, it grows because I do a lot of

listening and reading and so it's kind of a mutual relationship.

The, uh, more you read and the more you listen, the more words you know.

Therefore, this measurement of how many words you know, or have looked up is a

measurement of your level of activity.

It typically means that you have read a large number of words.

You have listened to a lot of, uh, the language, because I

always listen to what I'm reading.

And again, you can see this from my statistics at LingQ.

Unfortunately, um, initially when I, I start into a language, I use

content in our LingQ library, but increasingly I import content from

elsewhere and therefore I have the text in LingQ and that enables link

to measure my activity in LingQ.

But typically the audiobook, the audio for that is somewhere else.

So I'm doing that in iTunes or I'm doing it in, uh, maybe the audiobook

app and therefore, I'm not measuring it automatically at LingQ, but typically

knowing a lot of words means that you have thrown a lot of words into this

database, into this memory reserve.

Even if you can't retrieve them, slowly those words are going to

become, even initially you're gonna forget that you ever saw the word,

but it's already in your database.

It's already in your reserve, and over time it become a white

word, which means you kind of understand it in most contexts.

And in time some of those words will become, you know, words that you can use.

So to me, this is sort of the fundamental task is, is gathering all these

words, coming across them in different contexts, throwing them into your

brain, letting them gradually evolve naturally into words that you understand.

And eventually, and I should say, you understand and you gradually get a,

a better sense of the, the scope of meaning of those words, you get a better

sense of which words are used with the words that you've put into your brain.

So just heave them in there and don't worry about them.

Don't worry about forgetting them.

Just throw them into your brain.

Uh, and that to me is the process.

Now, some people may say, uh, what's the point of knowing so

many words if you can't speak?

Uh, and obviously whatever we do in language learning

is a function of our goals.

So if I have a limited sort of demand of, you know, what I need to be

able to do in a certain language, uh, I wanna focus in on being

able to have simple conversations, then I can limit my vocabulary

to, um, you know, a limited range.

It'll work in a lot of situations.

Unfortunately, the native speaker may use words that are outside the range

of words that you have tried to focus on, and where you have developed an

ability to converse in that limited range, but it certainly serves a purpose.

But that is not typically what I aspire to do.

I aspire to acquire a lot of words because typically what I'm going to be able to do with the language that I'm learning is listen and read.

Read about history as I'm doing now.

I'm, it's, it's just fascinating.

I'm reading and listening to a book about the history of Poland, starting

basically at the time of the partition of Poland through to modern times.

It's very interesting.

I did the same with Danish, so that's a big part of my enjoyment

of the language when I go to Poland.

I wanna speak and of course, the more I speak the better I will speak.

Uh, I will leave you a video of me, uh, speaking in Polish

when I was active in 2015.

Can I do as well now?

I don't know.

I just had a person contact me through, through, uh, Twitter and Skype, and we had

a brief conversation in halting Polish.

I think, you know, I've been at Polish now for 10 days.

Uh, it'll be two months of working with Polish before I get to Poland.

I think I'll be able to do quite well and I will certainly, uh, make a video

when I'm in Poland, but I'm realistic, you know, I will have a week in Poland.

My polish will improve while I'm there.

And then when I come home and I no longer speak Polish regularly, my

Polish ability to speak will decline, but I will still have the vocabulary

that I acquired and I can always go back as I'm doing now, go back to what

I studied, uh, in 2015, or explore new material where a lot of the words that

I saved, that I threw into my brain that became yellow and possibly white.

A lot of these words will naturally reappear in the new

content that I'm learning from.

And so all of the words that I've saved and put into my reserve,

I have those, those are mine.

My ability to converse will fluctuate.

And so therefore, to me, the my measurement, the simplest

measurement of where I am in a language is how many words I know.

Uh, how many words I put into my reserve, my ability to speak, particularly in, in

those languages where I haven't spoken a lot it's gonna fluctuate 'cause I've

said many times to be very good on the language you have to speak a lot.

And those languages that I speak the best where I lose, you know,

less of my ability to converse.

Those are the languages that I've spoken a lot.

And so Poland, it's not because of one week in Poland gonna

fall into the category of languages that I've spoken a lot.

But I think by focusing in on words, listening and reading, I'm

learning a lot about the country.

It's gonna make my visit there much more rewarding.

I'm going to be able to converse with people in Polish.

Uh, my ability to speak will improve while I'm there, and then it'll start to

decline again unless I decide to spend a lot of time, uh, working on Polish

and neglecting Persian and Arabic in the other languages that I'm working on.

So there you have it.

Learning words shouldn't be stressful.

It shouldn't be a deliberate activity.

It should be a part of your gradual immersion into the language, the

culture, the history, and all those things that make every language

so, thank you for listening.

Bye for now.