To Learn Vocabulary We Must Forget Vocabulary

Forgetting ... forgetting is a good thing.

Hi there, Steve Kaufmann, and today I wanna talk about vocabulary

and the importance of forgetting.

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I really do appreciate it.

So when I wrote I should...

yeah, when I wrote my book, here is of course the English version.

Here's...

I just happen to have the Chinese version nearby.

A Personal Guide to Language Learning.

The linguist, I called it.

Linguist means someone who, you know, speaks many languages.

That's the original meaning of the word linguist.

Whenever I say that, I get attacked by people who study linguistics.

But if you open up a dictionary that in fact is the number one

meaning of the word linguist.

Most English speakers are not familiar with the word polyglot.

Anyway, when I wrote that book, I said the most important, sort of,

measure of how well we know a language is the number of words we know.

Vocabulary is key.

Words and phrases, but phrases consist of words, so you have to have words.

And to be fluent, you actually need a lot of words because the

native speaker has a lot of words.

So if you're exposing yourself to a native speaker, speakers in conversation

or watching a movie or listening to a podcast, all of which are tremendous ways

of improving in the language, you need a lot of words, and while I sometimes

hear people say, Well, I can be fluent with 500 words, because 500 words

accounts for 60% of most content, but in fact that's not true because the low

frequency words and frequency declines very quickly, as I've said before.

They're key to, you know, the gist of what any content is about.

The high frequency words are not a problem.

They repeat often and very quickly get to know them, but you need these other words.

You need a high sort of vocabulary level.

So, how do we achieve that?

I think one of the things that can help us is if we accept the

fact that we're gonna forget.

Not only accept the fact that we're gonna forget, but realize that forgetting is

a key part of the strategy of learning.

And, and there are a number of references and I did a bit of Googling, so.

You know, I, I, I Googled Proust, Marcel Proust, the, the

French, uh, you know, novelist.

And he has this term ... the creative effect of forgetting.

And sometimes those things that we don't deliberately try to

remember, they kind of stay there.

That was his intuition.

Now if you wanna see a more scientific, sort of, explanation of that concept,

I uh, uh, recommend that you Google for Robert Bjork uh, B J O R K and

the word forgetting, and you'll see a number of of videos that he has done,

which explains why forgetting is such an important part of learning that

in our memory we have the ability to retrieve something, but we also have

this issue of what we have in storage.

Okay.

And to some extent, if we try to train the ability to retrieve a limited set

of information, words, for example, we aren't building up that storage, larger

storage of material that we may not be able to retrieve right now, but it's there

potentially available for us to retrieve.

And he explains very clearly that once we forget something and we retrieve

it again and maybe we re-forget it again and we retrieve it again, we're

expanding that sort of reserve of things that we can uh, uh, retrieve.

We are developing a large vocabulary and to do well in languages,

we need a large vocabulary.

Even if our large passive vocabulary is not available to us to use or

gradually becomes available for us to use it is enabling us to understand,

to understand, you know, interesting conversations or interesting sources

of, of information in the language.

So I think sometimes in schools we are trained to not wanna forget.

We're trained, you know, the teacher teaches something and

we've now gotta try to remember it.

Or we have tests on what was said in the story and we're very much

oriented towards trying to get it right, trying to retrieve it.

And I sometimes think we would be better advised to accept that we're gonna forget.

And accept that the process of forgetting is, is building up this reserve

that our ability to retrieve that information is, is going to improve.

But in the meantime, we also have to build up that reserve of

words that we will eventually be able to access better and better.

Robert Bjork also, uh, has videos on interleaving.

Pointing out again how important it is to to learn things in different

environments and at different times and in different ways.

Read about the same subject matter in different books.

I've called this grazing in the past.

Not worrying too much about what we retain, but making sure

that we expose ourselves to this information in different ways.

He says, for example, people are sometimes advised to always learn

something in the same place.

So if you study, study in your library or study in your, I don't know, kitchen

or whatever, and if you study there and there is research to show that if people,

you know, having studied something, if they go back to the place where they

studied it, they'll remember it better.

However, you're better off to not do that, to study it here and then

somewhere else and somewhere else.

So your ability, ability to retrieve the information if you go to a

different setting may be less.

However, by studying that same material in different environments, even you are

building up your reserve of information.

And that will eventually give you more information.

Even though in the short run your ability to retrieve the information is reduced.

A good example of learning things in different environments, learning and

forgetting, building up our reserve is the way I use LingQ on my iPad.

Could be on your iPhone or Android as well, or on the web.

So if I look at our mini stories, for example, lesson 59, I can read it in

the full lesson mode or I can go, you know, uh, so here, for example, here's

page, the next page, but I can also look at it one sentence at a time.

So that's a different experience, varying the experience.

The way we do things is a good thing to do here.

For example, I have a number of words that I am trying to learn.

I, I don't spend a lot of time deliberately trying to remember

these words, but I can still go through some of the, you know,

exercises here right after the page.

So I might ... is accessible I hope.

... okay ... and I don't try too hard to remember these things.

I just kind of go through them.

... in other words, being no, being as seeing how...

so I get it wrong.

It doesn't matter if I get it wrong.

Continue, and then in what you will soon be seeing is the opportunity then

to, to reassemble this into a sentence.

I do it not for all the text, but I do it to some extent.

But the key thing is I don't worry about what I don't understand.

I don't worry about what I forget.

I vary how I do things.

Sometimes I do it in full text mode.

Sometimes I do, you know, a sentence at a time.

Sometimes I do easy content, such as the mini stories.

Sometimes I do more difficult content.

I never worry about what I forget because I know that

forgetting is the key to learning.

So I just wanted to mention that because a lot of people seem to get

frustrated when they forget things.

Forgetting is not a bad thing.

Forgetting ... forgetting is a good thing.

You wanna forget and relearn and hear it in another context

and read it in another context.

Trust the fact that eventually the vocabulary will stick, but expose yourself

to a variety of contexts and don't just try to learn one, sort of, limited group

of vocabulary items in one specific way, but rather build up your vocabulary

reserve becasue you're gonna need it.

So increase your vocabulary by forgetting.

Thank you for listening.

Bye for now.