Vocabulary You Forget is Still Part of Your Memory

Actually, I was kind of stirring up my reserve.

Hi there, Steve Kaufmann here, and today I wanna continue talking

about the importance of forgetting in learning vocabulary and the

importance of building up a reserve.

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I do appreciate it.

So I did a video about the importance of forgetting.

Not only should we not be frustrated because we forget things because

we're going to forget things, we need to recognize that the, the act of

forgetting is helping us build a reserve.

And I'm reminded of that because I'm giving a talk on Monday

to a group of lawyers in Kiev, Ukraine about language learning.

I was contacted through, uh, LinkedIn probably as a result of the videos

that I did, uh, telling people that, um, Ukrainians have free access

to LingQ, whether they're refugees in other countries or in Ukraine.

By the way, the same offer is available to other refugees.

They could be Afghans, Ethiopians, you name it.

Through that, so I was contacted by this person.

I'm gonna give a talk and I'm gonna talk a bit about my experience

in learning languages, obviously.

And it just so happened that in order to prepare for my talk to

these Ukrainians where I'm gonna speak in both Ukrainian and English,

I decided to refresh my Ukrainian.

And what struck me was that as I was going through my mini stories in

Ukrainian, you know, learning some of the basic, you know, high frequency

verbs and the patterns of Ukrainian triggered the memory of other bits

of Ukrainian, other expressions.

So by working my mini stories, which I have done many, many times, actually,

I was kind of stirring up my reserve.

And so I think it's very important that when we learn a language, and

this is what I said in that previous video, we shouldn't sort of be too

narrowly focused on trying to make sure that we can retrieve things, that

we can remember things that, and, and therefore we get upset if we don't

remember or we can't find the word.

That may not matter that much, at least in the short run or even in the medium term.

What we wanna do is build up our reserve.

And so then I thought about how I use LingQ, and I realized that really

the LingQs that I create, which are my yellow words, is my reserve.

These are words that I have met.

I know I've met them before because they're yellow.

They're no longer blue but they aren't yet white.

A white word is one which I feel I know, at least in a given context.

It doesn't mean that I know all possible, you know, interpretations or uses of that

word, nor which other words that word is used together with, but in a given

context it doesn't give me any trouble.

I understand that word in that context.

I get meaning out of that sentence or that paragraph.

That means it's known.

So that's white.

But the yellow words are words that, I see them and I still don't know them.

So they're the words that I have perhaps certainly have seen, but I've forgotten.

Maybe at one point I knew them and I've moved them back to yellow.

These are words in my reserve.

These are my forgotten words.

The creative forgetting l'oubli créateur as Proust said, and it's

important to have a lot of these words.

So the known words, the white words, the known words, are ones that I

can retrieve at least passively in terms of reading and understanding.

So if I look at my statistics in a language like Ukrainian, where

I benefit from having learned Russian and Czech and so forth.

So I have a lot of known words, almost 60,000 known words.

Not so many yellow words, and many of those yellow words are in fact words that

I know that I haven't yet moved to known.

So there the reserve and the words that I can retrieve are

kind of similar in number.

Uh, if I were to go in French, for example, and if I were to study French

at LingQ, I would find that I would have very, you know, a far smaller number

in the sort of unretrievable reserve.

In other words, yellow words that are still yellow that haven't become white.

On the other hand, if I go to Arabic and Persian, I see a different story.

I see that in Arabic going from memory.

Here I have 60,000 saved LingQs.

My reserve is enormous, but I only know 20,000 of those.

And if I, having left Arabic, maybe that number is even

smaller because the reserve, the forgotten words is even greater.

But eventually I will activate those.

Uh, the words that are in my reserve in Persian, the ratio is also three to one.

I have 30,000 saving LingQs, but only 12,000 or so known words.

Bearing in mind that these, the status here can change.

You can have something that's known that then goes back to

unknown and goes back to known.

But the idea is that when you are at the stage where I am in Arabic and

Persian I have the, my reserve is three times larger than the words that I can

at least understand and that's fine.

And I think the big message that I wanna sort of put across here

is don't worry about forgetting, considering consider forgetting to

be an important part of learning.

You are building up your reserve.

You need a large reserve so that eventually you can activate these words

and have a, a functioning, you know, a large functioning vocabulary so that

you can understand movies, you can have intelligent conversations with people,

you can move in the direction of fluency.

So forgetting and building up your reserve is an important

part of moving towards fluency.

And I'll leave you with a couple of videos that I've done in the past

about memory and remembering and how that effects uh, language learning.

So thank you very much for listening.

Bye for now.