(7) Active & Passive Vocabulary: When Do We Know a Word? - YouTube

Vocabulary, active vocabulary, passive vocabulary.

When do we know a word?

This comes up all the time.

You know, I've often said that the most important task in language

journey is acquiring words.

Of course phrases are always, are also important, but phrases consist of words,

and I use the word acquire in the sense of developing a passive vocabulary.

So I, for example, saw a comment on, on my YouTube channel here from one of my

listeners who said, The most important thing is your active vocabulary.

And, and often people say, you know, if you don't use it,

you have to use it right away.

If you don't use it right away, you, you won't learn it, you'll lose it.

And I have always resisted that for a simple reason, and that is that

if you are taught something today, and you're tested on it today or

tomorrow, you may in fact remember it.

That doesn't mean that you have acquired that vocabulary item, doesn't mean that

you will remember it a few months later.

I've, uh, stressed always that the process of acquisition is

much le much fuzzier than that.

We're kind of putting words into our brain.

Some of which activate sooner, some activate later.

I don't make much of a distinction between active and passive vocabulary.

If anything, I believe in accumulating as much passive vocabulary as possible

because that is the first step and the key step to eventually being able to use them.

And if you don't have this passive vocabulary, if you don't have

comprehension, it's very difficult to have conversations with

people because most people, if...

especially you're speaking to native speakers, they will have a much larger

vocabulary than you have and even in your own language, you have a much larger

passive vocabulary than active vocabulary.

So the passive vocabulary is, is an important part of, you know,

where you are in the language.

And we shouldn't just focus on what we are able to use today,

may not be able to use tomorrow.

Uh, it's far more important just to continue filling your brain with

words that will eventually activate.

Also when it comes to like, when can I claim that I have this passive,

even the passive vocabulary?

Uh, I was talking to someone the other day who said, maybe, you know, at LingQ you

should, uh, you know, have some kind of an indicator of when we have learned, for

example, uh, the names of family members, which in some languages is quite complex.

Or the names of the colors.

Well, even leaving aside the fact that those things are very difficult to learn

and not all that useful out of context, you'll only acquire them gradually.

But even if you...

how do you know that?

Just because I saw, you know, if I'm on LingQ and I saw this, uh,

word which represented, you know, my mother-in-law and my, you know, somebody

else's side of the family or whatever.

Some of these languages have very complicated words for cousins and

brothers and older and nephews.

But even if I remember on one occasion, it doesn't mean that I'll

remember them on another occasion.

Far more important is to keep track of, and this is what we do at LingQ, the

fact that people are continuing to expose themselves to the language, are continuing

to, you know, pile words and phrases into their brain increasingly creating

these sort of neural connections, which at some point will a, create therefore

an active bit of vocabulary that you just naturally recognize you, not because

you're tested on it, but because you naturally start to recognize it in your.

Reading and listening, uh, often that'll mean at LingQ that it's a white word now

it's no longer highlighted in yellow.

You just naturally know what it means.

You don't even think about it.

Or at least you know it insofar as a certain context is concerned.

You may not be aware of the full range of meaning of that word, but you at

least are aware of it in that context.

Eventually, as you see that word in different contexts, you'll become

aware of the sort of broader scope of meaning of that word, but testing you

on, you know, what does this mean?

Now to me is not a, um, a meaningful, uh, sort of measure of where you

are, but it is a sort of reflection of, of how languages are taught at

school or constantly being tested so that the teacher can show the parents

and the school administrators that the kids are learning something.

And after 10 years of that kind of language instruction, very often the

kids still can't speak the language.

Far better to just load it all in there, load it all in

there, let it sort itself out.

When the opportunity arises, when the need arises, lo and behold things

start to activate both the active vocabulary, which was hiding there

somewhere, and the passive vocabulary.

So just a bit of a, sort of a, it's, it's very much a theme that I've, uh,

you know, referenced in the past and that is, let's not be too concerned

about like, do you really know the word?

Do you know the full scope of meaning of the word?

Are you able to use the word?

Don't worry about that.

Just keep on shoveling it into your brain, and eventually you will find that you'll

be able to understand these words and some of them, but always a smaller subset you

will be able to use when the need arises.

Thanks for listening.

Bye for now.