February 6, 2012
When memorizing vocabulary, some of the new words you learn will stick out in your mind more prominently than others. During actual use, some of those words will quickly come to you like you’ve known them all your life, while others will require you to squint your eyes and pause mid-sentence while trying to recover them from whichever area of your brain they’ve been buried in.
Such is the nature of vocabulary building in any language. Those words that you can recall when needed are now part of your vocabulary. The others remain passive, requiring a little more stewing, repetition and practice.
Most of the time, we’ll have no control which vocabulary items sticks out prominently. So just wing it. Don’t let the fact that you can’t remember certain items discourage you. It’s par for the course — you’ll remember some, you’ll forget some. The more you study, practice and apply the words, though, the more readily they will be available for next time.
Something I’ve been doing a lot of lately is just ignoring the passive items in my vocabulary. If I happen to chance upon them in my latter wordlists (I do related groups of words), then I’ll include them for memorizing. Otherwise, I just let them stew in the backburner of my mind and, sometimes, they magically just float up on their own right when I need them.
January 22, 2012
There are many strategies people can use to memorize ten or more new words in a target language per day. My suggestion here is just something I do myself. Try it and see if it’s something that works for you.
- Create a 10-item list of new words in the target language. Make them related. For example, you list ten parts of a car, ten names for kitchen appliances or ten evening salutations. The more closely-related your list is, the easier you can make the connections with each other. Hence, if you remember one word, there’s a good chance you can recall the rest.
- Read through them, memorizing each word and their corresponding translations in your language. Make pictures in your head, use mnemonics or whatever technique you use for memorization.
- Once you feel confident, write a new 10-item list with the translation of each word in your language. As you read through each item, recall what the equivalent in the target language is. Don’t stop until you can name each one consistently.
- As a last step, create another list to test your recall. This time, you list both the word in the foreign language and the translation in English on the same line.
January 16, 2012
Learning a language is much more than memorizing vocabulary. While having a robust stock of words will help, memorizing the entries in a foreign dictionary isn’t what language learning is about.
Even if you memorize the pronunciation and meaning of 1,000 words, that doesn’t mean you’ll know how to use all of them. Heck, you’ll probably struggle recalling them when you hear the words used by somebody else.
A better idea is to memorize words in context. That way, you don’t just commit individual vocabulary items to memory — you learn them in the exact way that they are used in actual interactions. Coupled with using the vocabulary items in actual sentences, you’re looking at an effective way to build up your second language skills. Chances are, you can carry on a rough, but tolerable, interaction with just 100 words learned in this manner.
Contrast this to memorizing a random list of words that carry no significance. Even if you manage to rattle them off one after another, you’re not likely to find them of much use, unless you’re taking a test where you match a word with its definition. While the amount of items in your vocabulary does matter, more isn’t necessarily better. Getting to know each item intimately and learning how to use them should serve you better.
November 26, 2011
I’ve never given a single presentation that required Powerpoint since graduating college. As such, it remains one of the unused programs in my Microsoft Office Suite. Until, that is, I discovered how well it could serve as a language study aid.
Don’t worry, there’s nothing that requires an unusually deep knowledge of Powerpoint here. Simply put, I use the slides and the presentation system to create my own vocabulary tests similar to flash cards.
Powerpoint slides actually work better than flash cards, at least for me. Why? Because I don’t have to put answers to the card on the back. I can just have it on the next slide or keep it hidden in the same slide until I hit a key to reveal the answer. Plus, with the ability to insert graphics, clip art, animations, sounds and other multimedia elements, you can come up with some downright creative slides.
If you’re looking for Powerpoint games to base what you’re going to do from, you can try searching for some online. A lot of websites actually offer educational Powerpoint games for download, especially for vocabulary learning. While there’s the usual flash card sets, I’ve also come across more creative ones like Jeopardy, Hollywood Square and Bingo, all tweaked for vocabulary learning. Most of what you’ll see will likely be for English words, so just copy the slides and replace them with vocabulary items for your target language.
January 3, 2011
Reading a lot, along with your foreign language software lessons, can help you build up your vocabulary. This is true whether you’re attempting to grow your stock of phrases in English, Spanish or any other foreign language.
With a trip to the library, you can read books and other publications (such as newspapers and magazines) in the foreign language. The more you read, the more new words you’ll naturally end up coming across. If you go about it actively (e.g. looking up the meaning of new terms you encounter and jotting them down), you can build a hefty stock of vocabulary over time.
The internet, of course, is a rich source for reading materials in any language. Even better, there are many browser plugins you can use, that will enhance the experience for learning. One plugin you can install in Firefox, for instance, lets you automatically see the meaning of a word on a page by simply pointing the cursor over it. The one I used before worked for English, Spanish and Portuguese; there’s a good chance a similar tool is available for other languages.
As with many activities you can use for second language vocabulary building, this may be more applicable to some languages over others. If you’re an English speaker, for instance, reading Chinese will probably be a lot further down the line in your own language development. In case you’re studying a language system that uses the Roman alphabet, however, then it should be more feasible.
December 21, 2010
Looking for memory techniques to commit new words and phrases to memory? Try the Town Language Mnemonic, which associates words to places for easier recall.
Do note that this only one possible approach to this technique. You can devise your own, based on what jives best with you.
- Assign nouns to your town. For every noun in the language, link it to a familiar object or place in your city where the word has some relevance. For example, I’ll link the target noun for computer to a local internet café and the corresponding word for restaurant to my brother’s eatery down the block.
- Assign verbs to a local gym or a sports center. Verbs, being action words, lend themselves naturally to associations with equipment and activities in such places. You can also use a local theater, a busy market or any other location where “action” takes place.
- Assign adjectives to a park or other picturesque locations. Places with plenty of greenery and scenery lend themselves well to adjectives. “Cold” could be the water in the fountain, while “bright” could be the sun shining over the park in the afternoon.
You catch the drift? You could the same thing to other word groups in your target language, associating them with places in your locale (or favorite city) in a way that makes sense to you. Doing this, coupled with regular lessons from your language software, should prove a good way to expand your vocabulary.
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