Vocabulary - Learn Hundreds of Words a Day

hi there Steve Kaufman here again today I'm going to talk about learning vocabulary now I did say in my previous video that I would be amenable to doing some videos in different languages we've had some requests so uh but today I'm gonna speak in English but I'm going to aim for the next one maybe in Portuguese because that was the largest number of requests followed by a Japanese French I think there was some Italian and Spanish Mandarin so we'll try and sneak all of those in but I won't do them one after another I'll intersperse it with English videos because most people only understand English um now vocabulary we have a very interesting thread going over at our one of our forums at link someone started a thread on how many words can you learn in a day and I'm going to post a link to this thread in my on my blog the linguist on language at which I leave a link to here in the explanations or information box underneath the video so how many words can you learn in a day we've seen a number of sort of extreme positions I tend to take the extreme position that you can learn a lot of words hundreds in a day a hundred anyway one person on our forum thinks the number is one three five depending on the language so let's first of all define our terms what do we mean by learning a word well to me learning a word means being able to recognize a word in a specific context in a context when you are reading or listening my focus is on comprehension some people feel that you only know a word when you can actually use it and produce it so that's point number one and I'll get back to that the second thing is what do we mean by a word add link at our website at our learning community we count every form of the word as a different word and we do this for a specific reason because in those languages like Russian or Slavic languages which have a lot of declensions or Korean which has a lot of different endings to words I find it useful to treat each word as a different phenomenon see how it performs in a phrase or sentence try to understand how that word functions depending on its form so but I mean it doesn't matter I think if we if you only want to count word families it becomes a little more difficult to define you know in English for example is I don't know active activity reactive act are they the same word different words it's a little difficult to define however I know that Paul nation who is a leading expert on English vocabulary acquisition feels that the ratio between words and word families or rather word families to words is 121.6 in English is probably 1.3 and some languages maybe in Russia is 1.5 I don't know I don't know the way I count them every form of a word is a different word and of course I if I can recognize a word I consider that word known a lot of people don't like that um it also depends on how similar the new language is to allowing what you already know for example in Romanian I went in there and 70% of the vocabulary is at least recognizable based on my knowledge of Romance languages so I mean my numbers for Romanian in two months my link statistics tell me that I know over twenty thousand words and that I have also saved in other words linked on our site another 10,000 words in this two-month period now many of the links that I created were phrases and of course I don't know all of those words because those are words that I'm trying to learn but I think I know about half of them so so like 24 25 thousand words in two months that's over 400 words a day based on being able to recognize ah in Czech over one more maybe 15 month period I have some 50,000 known words and I created I think some 44,000 links because I have to do more linking more saving of words and phrases because there were less freebie words and checked than in in Romanian so that's one extreme and I'll get back to that extreme and of course another person on the thread says no to me learning a word means learning it and slowly making sure I know what it means and I work many people work on flashcards and so they deliberately learn these words make sure they can use them and only then can they say the noble and on that basis the number is five words a day in French and maybe three words and or even one word in Chinese and so forth okay granted there's lots of variables here but but some of my basic principles are that if you are focused on being able to use the word and if you try to deliberately learn that word so that you can recognize it out of context in flashcards and so that you can use it I think you are doing yourself a great disservice I think that is counterproductive when it comes to language learning and when it comes to language acquisition because the time that you spend say on flashcards scratching your brain trying to remember what the word means to my mind is is wasted time you're far better off - or for that matter if you are struggling to use the few words that you know and you're having this very limited conversation with someone but trying to nail down the ten words that you learned yesterday to me that is also counterproductive I feel that you're much better off to be constantly exposing yourself to more word rich content through reading and listening the bulk of the words that I learn i acquire them incidentally and so the more words that I can recognize the more interesting and word rich material I can I can read and listen to and for harvest all of these free words because as my statistics and learning Romanian and check point out and it's the same in other languages most of my so-called known words are words that showed up in our lessons that I didn't save and so the system recognizes that these are words that you didn't need to save therefore you know them and most of those therefore the biggest growth in my vocabulary was from words that I picked up incidentally and so the more words that I can recognize the sooner I can move into interesting content whether it be history in my case or literature or or for other people it might be sports or whatever it is so trying to limit yourself to sort of nailing down you know bits of vocabulary that you struggle to study off lists and in flashcards and Anki and and you want to make sure you can use them and stuff like that to me is is on that basis you will learn very few words and when it comes to this whole passive vocabulary active vocabulary dichotomy in my view when you have an opportunity to speak more or you have the need to speak more then a lot of this passive vocabulary will become active sometimes you'll remember this word and the next time you won't but they're all sitting there in your brain and as you struggle to speak in meaningful situations then you will find yourself reaching back therefore these words especially if again as we do on link if when you are reading you are noticing words like when I read Nazi a handy phrase that I want to be able to use I save it that means it'll be shown up it'll show up again highlighted in yellow anytime that word or phrase appears in any future lesson that I either find on the link library or bring in from the Internet and so I'm training myself to notice and as I train myself to notice these words and I see them again and again slowly they become a part of my active vocabulary but I don't focus on trying to develop my active vocabulary and I think that that is a better strategy for people who live or who study and live in places where the language is spoken it's far easier to expose yourself to this rich content rather than trying to deliberately nail down words now a couple of comments here it's important that I fit in my opinion it's important that what you're listening to and reading is interesting has a sort of resonance with you you like it and that's true in all language learning one of the comments or a couple of the comments to my previous video where I said one of the problems people have in language learning is they haven't done it before and once they've done it once or twice they feel confident a number EAGL said well I learned English and German but I'm having real trouble with French and then I went back to that person and it turns out that this person feels less attraction to French culture then he felt towards English or German culture well certainly if you don't feel an attraction to the language to the content you're studying all of this makes the learning less effective so it is important to use material that has resonance with you so on the subject of how many words you can learn and how to go about learning it and so forth and so on yes it depends on how similar the languages are obviously Romanian was very easy for me and I there I was for another words a day it would be the count check was more difficult so it's 200 words a day check has a lot of declensions and things so that if you try to equate that to English maybe it's only I don't know 70 words a day I don't know it's a large number if you do it in my opinion the way I do like on link I link furiously I create as I say in Romanian and two months over 10,000 links that's over 10,000 words that I have deliberately saved and that appear highlighted in yellow every time I read and by exposing myself to a lot of content listening and reading I've been sort of washing all these words over me and a lot of them are retained without me having to make any special effort and so I can simply engage in this enjoyable activity of reading and listening to things that interest me and the words just accumulate which is kind of the way kids learn kids don't do flashcards so enough now I see I've kind of spoken quite a bit on this I know this is a bit of a controversial issue let me see on my notes if I forgot anything blah blah No all right um yeah look forward your comments and I'm gonna see if I can't sneak a Portuguese video in towards the end of the week thank you very much bye for now

Channel: Steve Kaufmann - lingosteve

Views: 309,417

Keywords: language learning, learn words, vocabulary, lingq, languages

Id: gU4iCF9yDeY

Length: 11min 30sec (690 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 09 2013