How to Learn Vocabulary

This number of words you know is sort of, uh, an indication of your potential in the language. Hi there, Steve Kaufmann here today, and today, I'm going to talk about something very important in language learning, maybe in some ways the most important thing: words. How Do we learn them?

Why are they important? How do we use them? Remember if you enjoy these videos, please subscribe, click on the bell for notifications.

And if you follow me on a podcast service, please leave a review. I do appreciate it. So when I started with my son Mark into LingQ and I was doing a lot of thinking about language learning, in fact, I did a lot of research, uh, read books in English and Swedish and German in French on this whole subject of language learning, I came to the conclusion that the single most, I called it, the Gordian knot.

. . .

The single simplest sort of evaluation of where we are in a language is how many words we know. All right. Get a lot of criticism, people say, no, you can be fluent with a few words, but in fact, you can't and I'll explain why.

And so before I get going, though, I want to show you that I don't just sort of rely on my own experience. Although obviously, anybody talking about say language learning is going to refer to their own experience. But I also did a lot of research and I had a look.

. . you'll see behind me I have all these books.

I have CDs that I've listened to, but I went and looked at my bookshelf here. So here's one of the books Learning Vocabulary in Another Language ISP Nation. All right.

I have lots of books on. . .

second language acquisition. Rod Ellis, he does talk about vocabulary acquisition. Second Language Vocabulary Acquisition.

Norbert Schmitt, Vocabulary in Language Teaching. And what have we got here? Again Norbert Schmitt.

Uh, this is from Cambridge Description, Acquisition and Pedagogy. So it's not as if I haven't looked. I found that most of these books were unnecessarily complicated.

Again, I, I tend to look for the Occam's raz. . .

Occam's razor. In other words, the simplest explanation of a phenomenon, the Gordian knot. And to me, words are the key sort of measure of where we are in our language and how we acquire them actually is quite simple.

Um, there's a lot of talk about, you know, you must read content that only has a small percentage of new words in it, or that you have to meet a word so many times before you'll learn it. And all of that is almost irrelevant. To me learning words again, you'll not be surprised to hear me say this is all about acquiring them naturally.

It's not because you say, I want to learn 5,000 words that you're going to learn 5,000 words. It's not because you deliberately sit there with a stash of, of, uh, cards flashcards, or because you read the dictionary that you're going to acquire all those words. It may be something you enjoyed doing.

It is a form of exposure to those words, but ultimately it's going to be the amount that you are exposed to the language in a meaningful environment that is pleasant to you. That is conducive to the brain gradually acquiring these words. That's going to do it.

It's a bit like if you go up to a girl or if you're a girl, you go up to a guy or whatever you go and say I want to be your girlfriend or your boyfriend. That's not going to do it. You actually have to, it's more indirect than that.

You can't just say, I want to acquire all these words. What happens is you're acquiring them in the background. All right.

And that's why when we created LingQ, we wanted to have a measure of the words you're learning. And I will show you a snapshot of all the different languages that I have learned on LingQ and how many words I know in each of those languages. And that is a statistic that's quite encouraging, but it's not an absolute number.

Um, I may know words in language, more words in a certain language and in another language, but because I'm working on, uh, Persian right now, I can speak it better than Czech erhaps, although I know far more words in Czech than I do in Persian. Uh, if I were to go back to Czech, I would quickly recover it. So that this number of words, you know, is sort of, uh, an indication of your potential in the language.

It's also relative. So in some languages like the Slavic languages, there are many forms of essentially the same word. That means that the word count the way we count them at LingQ where we count each form of the word as a different word, that word count is going to be a bit bloated compared to other languages where that's not the case.

So it's not an absolute number, but it's an indication. It's an indication that you're making progress. You know, say six months ago I knew 5,000 words.

Now I know 20,000 words. So those moments when I feel I'm not progressing in the language, the plateau, the doldrums. It reminds me that in fact, you have acquired a lot of words.

Now, some people say, what does it mean to know a word? All right. Uh, you can't claim to know word unless you can use it say some people.

I don't agree with that. I am very much a proponent of acquiring a large passive vocabulary. And if you understand a word in at least one context, you know that word, at least for that context.

If you come across it again, and it doesn't make sense in that context and you look it up again and you find that there's another scope of meaning for that word, fine. But passive vocabulary is what it's all about because passive vocabulary is the door to reading in the language, understanding movies in the language, having meaningful conversations in the language. All of which opens you up to meaningful, compelling input.

Without the passive vocabulary, you can't do those things. So I have always been against the idea of trying to make sure that you can use every word you learn, go to conversation class, try to use it. If I have an opportunity to use whatever little I've learned in the language, I will do so.

And typically, even at a relatively low vocabulary level, I may start having sessions once or twice a week with a tutor because it kind of helps me a little bit. It tends to make my input activities more interesting for me, but fundamentally I rely on increasing my word count my passive vocabulary because that's what's going to enable me to learn the language. And if we acquire these words in what I would call an honest way, which means through massive listening and reading, we are not only acquiring the words we are acquiring familiarity with the language.

Because again, it's a bit like the I've often referred to sort of a dog races where the dogs chase a mechanical rabbit. If we are trying to increase our vocabulary, that drags us through all this content. And as we are listening and reading our brain is becoming more and more familiar with the language, increasing our comprehension level, increasing our passive vocabulary so that we can then do more things in the language, including engage with people in meaningful conversa.

. . conversation.

That's not to say that I don't occasionally, you know, uh, do the flashcards. Predominantly phrases, by the way. I very much recommend doing flashcards for phrases rather than individual words.

I will sometimes pick up interesting dictionaries, for example, you know, I like this, uh, you know. . .

so I can see German and Russian side-by-side, it's just fun to do that. I don't know what it's doing for me, but it's fun to do that. Similarly.

I have one here for Portuguese. So I can see Portuguese and German side by side, which is fun and expands my sense of the language. Similar to here we have a.

. . so I can see Russian and Czech side by side.

These are fun things to do. There's nothing wrong with doing them, but fundamentally the words are acquired through input. And, uh, as we acquire these words, we are acquiring the language.

And so if your word count at LingQ is now up to 10,000, 20,000, 30,000, it's not necessarily something that you can brag to other people about, but it is an indication that you are progressing in the language. Now I did make some notes here, but I'm not going to worry about. Uh, I had a few other things that I wanted to say, but I can't remember them, but I just want to leave you with that thought that work on your vocabulary, work on words and phrases.

Uh, if you have more opportunity to speak and if you speak more, you'll speak better, more fluently, but you have to have that basis in the language, which comes from having a large passive vocabulary because the native speakers that you will encounter, uh, either face-to-face individually or with a group or in movies or books or podcasts, they all have in almost every case, a larger passive vocabulary in your target language than you do. And to understand them and interact with them and, and benefit from interacting with them. You need that large passive vocabulary.

So there you have it, words. How we acquire words. It still comes back to that basic massive input.

Good luck. And I will leave you a couple of videos that I have done previously on the same subject. Hopefully I don't contradict myself.

Bye for now.