Vocabulary - Learn Hundreds of Words a Day

How many words can we learn a day? What does knowing a word mean? Here are some of my views on the subject. I welcome comments.

Timelines:
1:16 You can learn a hundred words a day.
1:39 What do people mean by «learning» a word?
2:07 What do people mean by «a word»?
3:38 400 words a day in Romanian and 200 words in Czech.
4:51 Trying to nail a word down is counterproductive.
6:23 The most words I know I pick up accidentally.
7:39 Passive and Active vocabulary approach.
8:10 The way I train myself to notice words in LingQ.
8:43 Strategy for people living in places where the language is spoken.
9:08 Use the material that has a resonance with you.
9:58 Summary.

[Thelinguist]

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[Thelinguist]

I think that as long as you vary the activities there is no problem in studying seven or eight hours a day. I did so when I studied Mandarin Chinese. I would listen, read, write, work on my Chinese characters, and try to find an opportunity to speak. In fact if you can stand it, the greater the intensity of your learning, and other words the more hours per day in a short period of time, the better you will learn the language. Come to think of it maybe I will do a video on this subject.

[Thelinguist]

I think flash cards are particularly useful in learning kanji or Chinese characters.

[joshwoods]

"The words are sitting in your brain"

I can confirm this. I'm trying out this guy's LingQ program to get back to learning Japanese after a 3-year hiatus, and I was surprised at how many words I remembered, even ones I only briefly studied in Anki several years ago.

[artiesolomon]

I am learning Russian at age 72 and I agree. The noun is one word and the related adjective is another word.I also am intereasted in the literature and history. Thank younfor letting me look at my flash cards with less regularity.

[Thelinguist]

If you focus your efforts on trying to know a few words very throughly, then you won't have the time to expose yourself to the words you have already met. We constantly need to see and hear even the most basic words, that we are always getting to know better and better. This is best achieved through listening and reading (and if I may say so, LingQing.) . There are so many words to learn, I can't imagine "struggling to recall" them all.

[AnthonyLauder]

You mentioned "scratching your brain to try to remember the meaning of a word" ... I.S.P. Nation has quoted many studies that show "struggling to recall" (rather than giving up if you don't know immediately) is one of the most important aspects of getting vocab to stick.

[erezsolomon]

I learned English as a second language "like a kid", immersing myself in the language with content I like, and I have easily become fluent. I completely agree with your points. I often pick up new words that I encounter every day, then check the meaning in translate real quick; if I'm fortunate enough to see the word again in a short amount of time spaced repetition does its thing, and if not, then that's fine. After seeing that word enough times it eventually gets into my head

[ADSJC]

i'm so greatful today to be able reading all comentaries whit out traslating by google translater. I've improved and increased my vocabulary.

[yoseffeigenbaum]

I usually look for the 50 or 100 "most used" words and practice before digging into texts. I'm slowly learn Greek and knowing those basics that have made their way into English really helps.

[lexisthompson]

You are an absolute inspiring genius. I was feeling so discouraged in learning Spanish but knowing you learned all of these gives me lots of hope!

[Thelinguist]

Whatever works for you. I normally don't do translations. I prefer to listen and read, and then speak and write on things of interest to me.

[Thelinguist]

I learned Chinese as well. I wrote my characters daily. I started with 10 a day, and eventually upped it to 30 a day, writing them over and over. I expected to forget about half of what I was learning. I combined this with lots of reading and listening. But I was a full time student of Chinese. I had the whole day to spend on it. I still had lots of time for reading and listening.

[esteemedyams]

I'm currently learning Japanese.
I have a very primitive method for learning over 100 words/day
I sit down with a list of words, usually a list related to the JLPT, like currently I'm on the N3 list
And I just start memorizing the words.
First I read the word in Japanese, and look at the English translation. Then memorize the Japanese word so that I don't have to look at the English translation anymore.
I go through the whole list, 100 words, over and over until I can remember what each and every word means in English.
And then I flip around and read the English translation first and try to remember how to say it in Japanese.
I do this back and forth, up and down the list until I can remember everything.
It also helps a lot if I break them down into groups of 5.

This whole process takes about 2 hours, maybe more if there are a lot of abstract concepts on the list and I have to look up example sentences.

[jonathantiwari]

I find that a lot of polyglots suggest that in order to learn words you should read  plenty and learn words in context. I find it very hard for a beginner to learn in context without first establishing a vocabulary of a maybe 500 - 1000 words common to the target language. Currently I'm learning my first language (other than english) and I finding it  very difficult to read books, magazines and what not because I know very few words (less than 300). I think, in my opinion, flash cards are great when starting off so you build up your vocabulary. After graduating then can you really start learning in context, because only then do you even know what you're reading about. Mind you I'm 16 years old, so maybe learning from flash cards have become like second nature to me.
(I am learning French by the way)

What do you think ?

Also when you start learning a language from scratch, where do you begin ?

[DanceswithCoreans]

My friends are always talking about how this video changed their lives. I'm not sure why exactly but it's a good watch.

[artemius_zabelin]

Мой академический опыт изучения английского, немецкого, древнегреческого, древнееврейского и латыни показал мне, что Ваша методика LingQ позволяет возрождать интерес к языкам. Большое спасибо!

[TwelfthRoot]

I think it is more of a personality trait, but I find that with structured and consistent flashcard practice that I can learn 50-100 new Russian base words everyday. This takes about 30 seconds/word on the first day. So 50 words takes about 25 mins per day. Accounting for the review process over the next few days or weeks it averages out to putting a new word in long-term memory, from start to finish, about 1 min/word. And that's remembering the words from the native language to the target language (active vocabulary). Also, I didn't increase the number of words to 50+ per day until I already hit 1000 words. During the first 1000 I did about 20 words per day and that took me about 45 mins/day. After a few thousand base words this process becomes even easier as you start to pick up on roots/prefixes/suffixes and so on. I don't understand why people bash flashcards so much. I also want to point out that doing flashcards can easily be done while commuting to/from work. So it's making the best use of time that would otherwise have been wasted (unless you use this time listening to your languages). You can't get any more efficient than that.

Edit: coming back to this post from two years ago I've had some slight changes of opinion. I think flashcards can be really good for nouns and some adjectives, but not really for verbs. Verbs are better learned through reading so that you get a "sense" of the verb instead of memorizing a definition because that definition will not help you use the verb correctly when speaking/writing. Also, reading teaches so much about grammar and it's more enjoyable than just flipping through flashcards. I've been using LingQ on and off for 2.5 years now and I've been really impressed with how easy it has been to learning new languages. I never thought I would have not only learned so much Russian, but made really good progress in Spanish, and even started French and Arabic. It's been a great experience.

[Thelinguist]

I think we look for roots in learning vocabulary in all languages. In my view though it is still not the main activity. The main activity is reading and listening.

[Blueberryminty]

This resonates so much with me. Studying a language like we were taught at school doesn't feel good to me. I tried it many times as I fell into the trap of thinking that that is also a good way of learning. Even though I had the experience with learning english just by getting in contact with it on a regular basis and in situations where I really wanted to know what was going on. (my boyfriend watched english movies without subtitles as he already knew english well enough and it was easier to find the movies without the subtitles then to have to go and look for them), In a short amount of time I became fluent in english.
while I have been getting french lessons at school from when I was ten (obligatory in dutch speaking belgium) and at 18 still wasn't able to have any conversation in french.

And still... when I wanted to tackle mandarin, I started with lessons thinking that that was the good way to start. I've finally been able to let go of the structure more and just look for all kinds of interesting material in putonghua and I have been making heaps of progress after dabbling in it for years and not really getting anywhere. I should have known and actually knew that just immersing yourself in a language and just focus on trying to understand it, is so much more effective in the long run (if you keep up with it) then deliberately trying to memorize words and rules. But the whole idea about learning another language and how to do it is so misshapen in this society that it is easy to go along with it without thinking about it.

It's by the way the same for math, which is also a kind of language even though it is very highly structured and logical. I found that it was made that much more easy and felt so much more comfortable after reading lots of proofs. You get a feel for how it is and it becomes much faster to spot logical mistakes or errors in proofs or also how to start or tackle a new problem. Just by reading a lot of different proofs trying to just understand and not directly replicate the proof (as long as you do that with a lot of them), you will be get better at math in a more organic way instead of having to cram in the rules.

Our brains are very good at distilling meaning out of input, our brain is less good at decoding input with rules. Your brain tends to actively use more parts of the brain when it's just trying to understand in a natural way what's going on (with which I mean: when you curiously try to take in something new or something that is happening that you'd want to understand or take part in; as opposed to the unnatural way of sitting at a desk trying to cram in as much information as possible ), then when you deliberately focus on getting a certain thing - often times ripped out of context - into your brain. It's why all the memorization "hacks" work as they often are ways to get to use more parts of your brain into memorizing the thing you want to learn.