Challenging myself to learn 100 WORDS EVERY DAY

Today I want to talk about the importance of words, the importance of known words.

I made a video a little earlier about how my goal in Turkish, because I'm going to

Turkey, is to get at least 20, 000 known words and maybe up to 30, 000 known words.

Some of you may think this is a large number.

I want to explain to you how I do that, why I do that, and how it varies

depending on the language you're learning.

So first of all, to me, pushing myself with a known words is part of

pushing myself to meet the specific objectives that we can set at LingQ.

I set myself a goal.

I want to get over a hundred known words a day, push some

days to 200 known words a day.

When I started a few weeks ago, I was at 9, 000 known words in Turkish.

I wanted to get to 20, 000.

I said.

I am now almost at 13, 000 and I believe I'll get to 30, 000.

So why do I do this?

Why is it important?

First of all, those days when I feel a bit sluggish and I'm not that motivated

by the content and I'm kind of not that interested, I say, I still have to meet

my minimum of a hundred known words.

If I'm going to be going off to play golf that day, I try to get in 50 or 60 known

words in the morning and then finish off with another 50 or 60 in the evening.

Those days when I have lots of time, I'll push it up over 200 known words.

And I will show you how I do that.

So here I am, you'll see that I've loaded up into Turkish, a bunch of

lessons that I've sort of played with.

I have my mini stories that I regularly review or easier texts

from Baja stories, Restoranda, Sparish Vermek ve Garsonla Konuşmak.

However, I have this fabulous tutor and he gave me some magnificent resources.

So lots of stuff to work with.

First thing, of course, is we want to start harvesting some words.

So obviously if there's zero new words, you're not going to harvest any new words.

You have to start by collecting new words that will become the yellow words.

So if I go to my, uh, this guy here, for example, I can use keystrokes.

So that's one thing I want to show.

So if you're starting up here, I can just move from one, this is the yellow word.

To Debbie so I can look at all the yellow words if I saw those look much

friendship, whatever I could try and claim that as known but I'm not gonna

do that this time Those look ask you then there so your keystrokes can

move you through here pretty quickly Then you get sure sure sure syrup.

Okay.

I don't know what that is.

I go Take it.

Yes, I am.

Yes, I am.

We'll write.

Let's see what they tell me.

I will write.

Yes, I am.

I can say known.

Hit it k.

So I have the opportunity with my keystrokes to either take it or Hit

return, K, known, or X, I don't want it.

So that's insofar as collecting and we go to the next page.

So we are collecting yellow words.

Remember, we're going to harvest our known words from the yellow words.

Now, what can I do with the yellow words?

So if I go now to the bottom right hand corner, we'll have a number of options.

I can do flashcards.

I can do different things, but I'm not a big flashcard fan.

So I go to manage links.

These are the words.

That, uh, are in this lesson, but what I have to do, first of all, go

to the filters and it comes from this Radio Teatro Su, but I don't want my

known words in there and I don't want the loan words in there, so I apply

that first of all, because I want to be reviewing the yellow words.

I want to be harvesting yellow words.

You know, if you click on this or if I click on there,

all of them are highlighted.

Now I have more options.

I can move the status of them.

I can remark them as known.

I can export them to an Anki file.

There's a lot of things I can do, but I'm not going to do those things.

So I'm going to untick here and I'm going to go through and

see which words here I know.

Acharis, we open, kind of, but not, not really.

No, I don't know that word.

I didn't say something.

No, I've pardoned.

I don't know.

Ah, ah, I know.

Ah, so I clicked that one.

Ah, babam, ailejek, as a family, maybe, akla, akla, akla is yeah.

Let's take that one just to show the example.

I'm not going through them all, but the point is you can go and select

those that you think, you know, And remember, we don't need to be so tough on

ourselves because if we don't know them later on, we can always move them back.

And so then I just go more actions in here and make no, bingo.

So it's a rather fast way of going through a list of words, yellow words.

Uh, many of which might be status three.

In other words, you're close to knowing them.

You can mark them as known.

You move them to known.

Now you could say that I could push myself with, with creating links, with,

uh, hours of listening, with words, reading, and, and all of these things

are true and they're part of our coins number at LingQ, which is kind of.

Amalgamates all these different activities and they're all important and

we can push ourselves however we want.

But to me, the known words is the final result.

Creating links as an activity creates the links, the yellow words

that I can then go on and harvest.

So it's extremely important to be getting into new content where you can find new

words that you can add to your activity.

potential.

And what we do when we create links is that we take words that we come across

in our listening and reading, and we just throw them into our brain somewhere.

It's in our memory reserve.

We can't use them right away.

We've just seen them once, but they will show up again.

And as they show up again and again, Just by exposing ourselves to the

content, listening and reading, we are starting to increase the number

of these words that we can access.

When we go to speak, we need to have words in our memory reserve

that we can eventually pull out and start to try to use.

Very important to build up the memory reserve.

Now, the yellow words in the case of my Turkish, because I did some Turkish

five, six years ago, there are about 30, 000 links that I have created.

Words that I came across, I don't know this word, I look it up,

it goes into my memory reserve.

And now as I go back and forth.

Back to Turkish.

Of course, I'm going over a lot of content that I have looked at before,

which is full of yellow words.

So I'm trying now to move some of these yellow words to known.

So actually, since starting back into Turkish, I haven't been doing so much

reading of new content and Creating new links as I've been trying to

increase the number of known words.

So if my known words total is now 13, 000, my saved links total is 30, 000.

So there are still a lot of words that I have encountered that I put

into my memory reserve that I can start to activate now, having all

these words in your memory reserve, eventually some of them are going to.

Click because they're similar to other words that you've met or you

see them for the third or fourth time.

I remember when I was a child we collected hockey cards and we used

to play against each other and there were two Key games one was

knockers and the other was kissers.

Kissers was one where you just stood there and dropped your Card

and it fluttered to the ground.

Initially, there are no cards on the ground.

And as you and the person you were competing with draw some more and

more cards, eventually one card is going to land on top of another.

And when it lands on top of another, you collect all the cards and

that's how we would win the game.

Cards.

And I, at one point had a great stack of hockey cards, which

unfortunately my mother threw away.

Anyway, the point is that the more words you throw into your memory reserve,

eventually they start to click for you.

So very important to fill your memory reserve.

Uh, with new words, but the yellow words, the links that are already

there, we have to try to convert some of them to known because your

vocabulary is key to comprehension.

And so we talk so much about comprehensible input for the

input to be comprehensible.

You need words.

And in order to access and use more and more interesting and compelling

input, you actually need a lot of words.

I went back at some of the content that I had done previously, and

it's a little difficult, but it's not totally beginner stuff either.

And I'm able to sort of use that because I have enough words that

I can fight my way through it.

And as I go through it now, I'm trying to see if there are any words there

that I can now move on to known.

Now, some people say you make a big deal out of the number of words, you

know, but in a language like Turkish, there are so many forms of the word.

True.

However, by treating each form of the word differently.

As different, I can see each grammatical form separately, forms of

the verb, and some of those forms are easier to get used to than others.

So I actually like seeing these separate forms of these words

isolated when I review these words.

So again, converting your yellow saved links to known words is an indicator

of how much you're interested.

Increasing your level of comprehension, your ability to access more and

more difficult, compelling input.

Alright, now let's look at ramping up these statistics so that I

get a feeling of achievement and so on, which I like to do.

So one thing that I mentioned was that I deliberately try to increase this

number either in the morning or in the evening to make sure I meet my goal.

Now there are two ways of doing this.

I can simply read through some content.

That has a lot of yellow words in it, content that I have perhaps

read before or listened to.

And if I see words in the text there that I now understand, I can move them to no.

And that's a fair number.

However, if I've been through a lesson before, including lessons that I did five,

six years ago, lots of yellow words there.

I now find that, uh, I can go to the vocabulary and go to a list

of the yellow words in the lesson that I just read or listened to.

And I'll go through that list, and they're arranged in alphabetical order.

And because they're in alphabetical order, I will see The three or four or

five forms of this Turkish word, if it's a verb particularly, and I may find that

I know some of these so I can tick off.

I know this word now.

Okay.

One, two, three, four.

I picked up four known words and I'll go through my list.

I'll even sometimes go through the list because again, this is material

that I looked at before, long ago.

So I'll go through the list beforehand, go and read the text again.

And while reading it, seeing it in context, I might find

that I understand the meaning of other words that I can save.

Don't be too fussy.

In other words, if you're not totally a hundred percent sure, you know the word

or you know it only in this context.

Take it out, claim it as a known word.

You can always, you know, link it again later on.

It doesn't matter.

But, uh, you know, I'm sort of motivated to get a high known word count.

I find it motivating to do that, but I will often find that words

that I gave myself credit for that are now white, I don't know

them, I'll make them yellow again.

Another thing to remember is.

That part of your known words total is coming from words that

you didn't even need to look up.

If you're reading new material that has some blue words in it, but you

already know the meaning of that word because it's related to some

other word, you don't look it up.

You get credit for it as a known word.

Uh, you can, by the way, change your settings so that turning

the page can either move them to known or not move them to known.

These are things that you can change in the reader setting in the settings area.

One other thing to mention is, you know, when I was doing Czech,

I was getting 400 words a day.

And so, you know, you will do better on some languages than others.

So if you know a Romance language and you're going into say from Spanish to

Portuguese, or if you're going from, uh, Russian to Czech, you've already

done some, uh, Slavic languages.

You're going to find a lot of words that, you know, I found that in those

situations, I could go straight to the vocabulary section and, uh, go to

the status three words, words that I'm saying, maybe a little more familiar

with, and I could go and harvest lots of known words straight from the vocabulary

section because the vocabulary is so similar to other languages in Turkish.

I can't do that.

I tried it, but I don't have any cognates from other languages or very few.

The cognates are mostly from Arabic and Persian.

And so I try to stay close to the context, the lesson that I'm using.

So I can do it, say for the whole lesson, I use that vocabulary list, or

when I get into more difficult content, as I will in Turkish, then I'll do

it sentence by sentence and do the sentence review exercises that are there.

And pick up a few known words that way.

At any rate, what I wanted to point out is that words are key.

When I first started out learning languages, I felt words were

the most important measure of your potential in a language.

And I used to spend all my time when I was doing German scouring, second hand

bookstores here in Vancouver, or in Hong Kong for Chinese books, or in Japan for

Japanese books, that had word lists.

Of course, nowadays we don't need word lists.

Because we have online dictionaries, we have LingQ, we have other

ways of accumulating vocabulary.

And the vocabulary you accumulate, you will eventually get better

and better at recognizing it.

It's just a natural process as you see words again and again

in different situations, whether in a list or in a context.

And eventually some of these will be activated, as I did today

when I spoke to a Turkish tutor for the first time in six years.

And I was able to retrieve quite a bit from this memory reserve.

So Just a suggestion that use the, uh, word count at LingQ, the known

words count as a motivator, and as an indication of your activity level

as an important factor in making sure you progress in the language.

Thank you for listening.

Bye for now.