perhaps the biggest part of learning a foreign language is learning vocabulary you have to learn thousands of new words in my opinion you have to learn maybe 30,000 words or more to be considered at a very high level or a fluence level or a level where you can read books and be able to understand uh most if not all of the words so this past month I counted up how many new words I learned and I came out to about 1,500 words in the last month it's probably a been more than that but I just
looked at the languages that I'm focusing more on so I I found that I studied 1,222 words in Arabic 251 words in Spanish and 107 words in Sanskrit now the interesting thing about this is I actually study eight languages each and every day and those are Spanish German Japanese Mandarin tuu which is a Chinese language Korean Sanskrit and Arabic so as you can see I spend more time on some of the languages than others for example at the moment Korean and tuu don't get a lot of study time just because I don't have a very
strong motivation to learn those languag is at this time uh I'm spending a lot of time in Arabic because I want to improve my Arabic because I'm in the Arabic class at Professor AR's Language Academy and I want to be able to read material and stories which are at a higher level right now we're learning uh we're reading Alibaba and the 40 thieves but it's a children's version so it's simpler and I want be able to go through these children's stories and eventually make it up to real literature in Arabic I mean that is real
literature but I mean literature for adults so I also continue my studies I learned some Spanish Sanskrit as well I'm taking a class at The Language Academy but it's not as uh the pace is not as fast so I don't learn as many words per week so how do I learn this may words in a month so there are three maybe four sites or services that I use they are link migaku Chachi and vocab tracker and I use Link right now for Arabic link is a site created by Steve Kaufman and basically what it is
is you can put a text into it and then you can click on the words it'll tell you you the definition but it'll also record the words that you click on that you don't know so that later you can export them and then I like to put the export into chat GPT and chat GPT creates a file for me that I can then import into Ani so that I can study the words in Ani and Anki will keep track of the reviews and show me the flash cards at the right intervals to review them properly
I used to use vocab tracker vocab tracker.com for Arabic but the problem with vocab tracker is that although it's free although it's free the dictionaries they use are not very good and I found that I had to use chat GPT to look up the words and then copy and paste the definition or the translation of the word into vocab tracker and that kind of annoyed me because I'm not into administrative tasks I want to spend all my time or as much time as possible learning the language and going through foreign language material I don't want
to spend as much time doing administrative tasks like copying and pasting or uh looking up words and that kind of thing so although vocab tracker the benefit is that allows you to use closed deletion flashcards in ankey I did switch over the link just because uh the definitions or the translations are right there they use good dictionaries and it's very clean it's very quick that way for Spanish I used to use vocab tracker as well but now I use migaku migaku is great because it creates beautiful ankey flashcards uh it can creates audio in the
flashcards as well as color code the words so that in the case of Spanish uh masculine words are colorcoded I think in blue and feminine words are in red with other languages like German they also have neuter in Gray and Japanese they have it colorcoded by the pitch accent Mandarin Chinese they have it colorcoded by the tones so that's very useful and I like that a lot um for Sanskrit though I just use straight Chachi P because link doesn't have Arabic migaku doesn't have um Arabic by the way which is why another reason why I
use Link Link has Arabic I should say migaku uh has Spanish but not Arabic and then Chachi PT I use for Sanskrit because none of these not even vocab tracker has [Music] Sanskrit so that's the reason why I use Link now I highly recommend it because it has a lot of languages it probably has the language you're studying but if you don't see your language in link or migaku then you can always use Chachi P PT to uh create a file which you can export and then import into Ani so the important thing to say
here is that even though I learned 1,500 plus words in the last month uh learning is just the first step probably the bulk of the effort comes in reviewing the words after you've learned them for the first time so what that involves for me at least is use saying Anki because Anki is a spaced repetition system with an algorithm that shows you the material that you have the most trouble with more often than the material that you already know very easily and that's a real benefit over just reviewing by reading a book or going over
your notes because if you just read a book you are just uh reviewing the material almost at random and it's not optimized to show you the material that you need the most help with more often so that's why I like to use eny plus eny just keeps everything in order and keeps track of everything and you don't have to figure out where your notes are which material you want to review you just open eny and it's there plus eny also has an app for the phone so I'm able to review words even when I'm out
and about if I have a really busy day I can review words even when I'm waiting for dinner or I'm in a line or something something like this so there are many ways to learn a word uh but for me the most important thing is that you have a hook a hook that you can attach the word onto which will help you remember it and people do this in various ways some people study the emology of the words so they see uh uh maybe they look at similar words um like in English we might have
politician but we also have politics we also have policy so you kind of group the words together see how they're similar the similar meanings you can also study where the words came from what the original words were my personal favorite way of creating a hook to learn the word is to use visual neonics which is something I've talked about in my other videos but I'm just going to give one example today because the other videos really give a better uh sample of them so go watch those videos if you want to know more but I
decided to pull a word from my Arabic deck this is a real word that I'm studying and I put it through chat GPT and I asked chat GPT to create the visual pneumonic just to show you that you don't even need an imagination anymore to come up with a nemonic you can just have ai do it for you so the Arabic word is ashat ashat and this means shown like the past tense of shine I think the phrase that disappeared in was as which means the shown the sun the sun shown um but we're going
to just try to remember ashat which means shown and the ponic that Chachi BT came up with was visualize an ash covered rock so that's where we get ashra uh and so you want to really picture Ash on a rock to get Ash and you want to imagine it suddenly shining or suddenly shown brightly when the sun came up with the sunrise so the sunrise will help you remember that the meaning is shown because the sun shines and then you want to remember Ash covered rock for ashrock now the last part the full word is
ashat but the at at the end is just the feminine singular third person ending for a verb so that you can just remember for because you have to use it for every verb uh I guess the masculine version would be Ash without the T at the ends but this we have ashat because Shi the sun in Arabic is a feminine noun so it came up as ashat but the important thing is you just have to remember Ash ashra to remember shown because the grammatical part the at at the end you'll just remember when you learn
Arabic because you have to do this for every verb to get the singular third person feminine ending so that's how I remember or how I would remember that the word for shown in Arabic is ashat I just imagine an ash covered rock with maybe uh like light shining beneath the Ash and that the ash covered rocks suddenly shown brightly with the sunrise so that's basically how I do it I will say I don't do pneumonics for every word that I learn some words you just get like that you just know them right away so you
don't need to use visual pneumonics also so my theory is that the more that you study a foreign language the more used to or more accustomed you get to the sounds and the configuration of the Sounds in the language and that makes it much more easy makes it easier to remember the words just because there are certain patterns to The Sounds in the foreign language that you only get a real um instinctive memory or sense for as you remember more and more and more words in the foreign language so for that reason I don't need
to use visual neonics for every word that I come across some I just know right away some I just get a sense of because I've sted so many words before however if it's a new language or if it's a word that I really have difficulty remembering uh then I use the visual neonics and either I'll use my imagination to come up with it or if that fails me just go to chat gbt and I ask chat gbt to make a visual nemonic for me and that works pretty well so that's how I do it that's
how I learn 1,500 plus words in the last month and I think I've been learning around 1,000 new words every month uh you can check out another video I made where I said I learned I think 21, 56 words in 2 years and that goes over some material you can check out but that's how I do it uh by the way if you also want to use Link or migaku or vocab tracker even or chat GPT uh I'm going to put links in the description below so you can go check out those services and maybe
you'll find them useful I will say link is more geared towards a reading whereas migaku is more geared I think they're trying to make it more for videos like watching YouTube videos videos and then finding the words from uh the Clos captions of the V YouTube videos but they do have a version for reading you just have to use the Legacy version of migaku to get to the Reading part but I do highly recommend it because they make great flashcards for an so if you're interested look for the links in the description below and by
the way if you haven't noticed I have this new mic that my friend Mike gave me and so I'm hoping that the audio was better on this video we'll see but thank you Mike for being so kind as to get this mic for me I really appreciate that anyway if you're not subscribed already consider subscribing because hey it's free and you might learn something that gets you to fluency faster thank you so much and we'll talk again soon
