The Most Effective Way to Increase Your Vocabulary (1)

Hi there, Steve Kaufmann here, and today I wanna talk about reading, how to use

reading to increase your vocabulary.

Um, you know, I, I always stress the importance of varying our

activities in language learning.

I talked a bit about Atomic Habits and developing good, sort of, learning

habits that keep you going, uh, without necessarily always worrying

about the end of the road, you know, fluency, whatever that might.

So we have to have good habits.

We have to vary the kind of activity we do and different activities help

us in different ways, obviously.

So if you're in a conversation group, you're practicing using

the words that you already know.

Probably you're practicing using a small subset of the words that

you understand, because our active vocabulary is always gonna be

smaller than our passive vocabulary.

But at least if you have good listening comprehension, you understand

what other people are saying.

When we are listening here, again, we can only understand the words that we know.

So listening is a way of reinforcing your passive vocabulary, improving

your comprehension, all of which is very good, good things to do.

In fact, I spend more time listening than any other activity, 'cause

it's the easiest thing to do.

I can do it anytime, anywhere, but reading is where we can acquire new vocabulary.

And I'm gonna talk a bit about extensive reading versus intensive reading and

how it helps us acquire new words.

So in a way, the ultimate experience in extensive reading

is to read a book, a paper book.

You have no distractions.

You can't go anywhere.

You're there with the book, words you don't know.

You just let them go by you and you're experiencing reading the language,

your're experiencing, converting, you know, various characters on

a piece of paper into meaning.

Very valuable.

I've always, you know, when I reach the stage where I can read a

novel in a language I'm learning, I have reached a major milestone.

And I very often hear people say, well, you know, uh, I can read well, but

uh, you know, I can't, uh, understand when I hear people speaking or I

have trouble using the language.

And then I say to those people, do...

have you read a novel in the language you're learning?

And very often the answer is no.

I mean, you have to get to the point where you can read novels and read widely.

Not just newspaper articles, but you know, a book, uh, doesn't

have to be a novel, by the way.

It can be a non-fiction for that matter.

So that's extensive reading on paper.

However, again, we have to get to that stage because if there's too

many words that you don't know, then reading in a, you know, away from the

computer is not a pleasant experience.

So that's where reading online with an online dictionary, and in particular

the way we do things at LingQ, can help you acquire the vocabulary,

pass the vocabulary so that you can eventually achieve the ultimate

experience in reading, which is to grab a book and just read that book.

So I consider reading online, uh, looking words up, saving words.

That sort of call it LingQ reading experience is like mining the

language, mining for gold, mining for minerals, mining for vocabulary,

bringing that vocabulary in.

Initially it's in there somewhere.

You can't retrieve it.

You see that word again in a different context or many different contexts.

Slowly, it becomes part of your passive vocabulary, and eventually over time,

some of that vocabulary will become active vocabulary that you can use.

So extensive reading, which is by the way, something that Stephen

Krashen constantly promotes.

There's all kinds of experience which shows, even if an, if

we're not consciously looking up words, if we are reading widely,

extensively, we're getting more and more familiarity with the language.

Eventually some of that vocabulary is naturally going to become known to us as

passive vocabulary be simply because we've seen it in so many different contexts

that we get a, a, a sense of the meaning.

I prefer to look things up because I can have a, an erroneous idea

of what the word means and stay with that for a long, long time.

If I look it up, I may forget it, but eventually I'll probably get to

a, a correct understanding of the scope of meaning of that word sooner

if I have at least some opportunity to see, you know, uh, a translation

of that word into English or into another language that I know very well.

But even in terms of reading content, for example, my, uh, Persian tutor

sent me an e-book and I can import that e-book, you know, essentially

with one click, uh, into LingQ.

So I've got the whole e-book socked into LingQ.

Now, unfortunately, I don't have enough audio for that e-book.

That would be even better because then I could be reinforcing my

mining activity with, you know, listening while doing other chores.

I don't have that.

However, This book that I got, this e-book, it's still

sort of difficult for me.

So, uh, I can go at it again within my extensive reading of this book, I can

go at it intensively or extensively.

If I go at it sort of extensively, then I'm on sort of page mode and I just read

through looking up words and so forth.

But I'll show you here how I can go through this material

intensively in sentence mode and doing the sentence review.

Now, this is more intensive activity.

It's working with, uh, nuts and bolts.

It's reconstituting the sentence, it's coming, you know, focusing in on the

vocabulary a bit more, putting the sentence back together again, which

forces me to think of the structure of the language, the word order in the language.

And however, this is gonna slow down my mining activity.

I'm coming across fewer and fewer...

fewer, not fewer and fewer, but fewer new words because I'm working intensively, so

I always like to combine some intensive work with some extensive work where I'm

just reading, not worrying about the words, not trying to focus in on them,

not trying to focus in on the structure.

I'm just reading, and yet at other times I'm working

intensively, as I will demonstrate.

We have a lot of material in our library.

For example, we see here, I think that probably has audio in it as well.

But let's say we wanna bring something in so we can go.

For example, if you Google, uh, ... for example, uh, you'll get the gutenberg.org

in many cases, and you have a variety of, um, formats that you can download.

I've already done that.

I tried different formats.

And then if you go to LingQ, and I'm uh, in French here, so you know, you

can either go up here where the plus sign is and you'll see import e-book.

You can import lesson as well.

You can also install the LingQ browser extension, so you can

import things with one click.

But in this case, what we wanna do is we want to import an e-book.

We can also do it here where it says import.

So we go to import e-book, and then we click on it.

And here we can simply drag, uh, an epub version of this book.

It supports a variety of, um, formats, pdf, uh, text or whatever mobi.

So you just drag it in there, drop it in there, and um, we're ready to go.

and I happen to be in sentence mode right now, but, uh, and I'll go, you

know, uh, I can go in the page view now.

There's a lot of, um, English there at the beginning, and typically

when I import something, I do it online for a variety of reasons.

Using the web version, it's easier to do, but I'm gonna work on it on my iPad.

But one of the advantages of doing it online on the web version is the, and.

That, uh, I can use keystrokes to get rid of stuff that I don't

want, like non-target language.

I just go X, X, X, X, X, and it moves through it very, very quickly.

I've already done that, and so I'm now going to show you how I would

study a book like this on my iPad.

So, but for those of you wanting to first of all, find e-books to bring in,

it doesn't have to be from gutenburg.

Uh, you can find, um, via an e-book and, and bring it in.

Some of them are protected, but you have to find one that's not protected

and you can import the e-book very, very quickly as I have shown here.

So we're gonna show you, first of all, this is the, uh, Persian e-book that,

uh, I was sent by my tutor from Iran.

It's a history of the Second World War in Persian.

I'm working my way through it, but that's not what I'm gonna show you.

Not many people are doing Persian, so I have to get to the language here

and change this to French so that I can check up on what I just imported.

So if I go into French now, uh, I can see ...and whereas some of these show, you

know, minutes of audio, there's obviously no audio available here, but I can open it

and I get through all this original stuff in English, which doesn't interest me.

Eh, I got a one day streak going.

All right, so now I'm now into the text.

We'll just move a little further along where there are some blue words.

There's not, those are not necessarily words that I don't know, but

because I don't do French online, but we can go into sentence view.

So ...okay, so ...okay, work.

Okay, work.

And we might decide you want that word as well.

... so what happens in sentence mode now is that whatever words I have

saved here, and I, it could be a blue word that I now make yellow, it

could be a word that I want to add.

I can now study that.

So, and I get these matching pairs, which include words

that are not in that sentence.

So ... of course is work, but if I get wrong, it goes pink.

So start again.

Work Okay.

Correct.

Now I have to reconstitute this sentence, so ... I have to find, oh, it's

... correct.

Okay.

If I want to, I can actually, you know, say the sentence

and it tells me that I was 90% correct.

I don't know how useful that is, but it's kind of the thing that's available.

So then I go to the next sentence.

So I could do the same thing again.

So by going through sentence by sentence and, you know, appear, you

know ... that's good to know ... okay.

... event.

Okay.

We choose event.

So I can now go through this and do the same thing again.

So by going through it sentence by sentence, I'm actually doing

this, you know, intensively.

However, I might get tired of doing that.

I just go back to the page view where it's more of an extensive reading

and I can still look up words, uh, you know, as I, as I do it.

And personally, I tend to vary the intensive with the extensive.

So I hope that's helpful and I look forward to questions, but I just wanna

stress again that reading is a phenomenal way to increase your vocabulary.

If you aren't yet at a stage where you can read a book, a paper book, then using

something like LingQ can be quite helpful.