Apr 18 2009
Vocabulary learning
Vocabulary learning can be tedious. Let’s not beat around the bush. But it is the key to unlocking your language ability. With grammar you can often get away with an unconjugated verb and you’ll still be understood, if you don’t know the word for a specific thing, unless you’re very good at charades, you’re going to have a problem. If someone says to you “Please have room” you’ll understand they probably mean “Do you have a room available” but if they say “Do you have an umm” you’ll be biting the end of your tongue wanting to know what it is they have or don’t have.
When I first started learning French vocabulary I set myself the goal of learning 5 words a day, a goal that I regularly failed to achieve. When I was learning Spanish vocabulary I managed to regularly learn 50 words in a day. Why? Its not due to some inherent difference in the two languages, its due to the methods that I used. These methods fall into two categories: motivational, and memorizational.
To start let’s look at why I was failing to learn my 5 words of French. Where was I going wrong? What would I do? I had a vocabulary book, and I’d write 5 new words down in it, and just before going to sleep I’d lie in bed and try and rote memorize my 5 words. I’d run into two problems. Firstly, motivational, the fact that I was lying in bed gave me a very easy way out of an unpleasant task, and that easy way out was to just go to sleep. The little lazy devil that sits on our shoulder and tells us that we can do something tomorrow had his task made easy. Secondly, my memorization methodology was wrong. As the human brain is capable of keeping about 7 items of information in its short term memory I would rote memorize the items but only using my short term memory. I could recall them perfectly at the time but the next day they were gone, washed away with my dreams. Even if I did remember the words the next day, as I had no system for reviewing them, after a few weeks they would have escaped from my memory. All in all I wasted a lot of time remembering vocabulary that I then would just forget, a fruitless task. A radical new approach was needed. I’ll detail the concepts of this new approach in my up and coming blog entries.
In the mean time feel free to leave comments, questions or feedback below. Thanks for reading.
I took a latin and greek roots course in college which greatly improved my vocabulary. By learning the roots of words I was (and still am) able to disect most words found in the English language and figure out their meaning. The course was outstanding… they should give one in HS before kids take their SAT exams. I will stop by again to see your method. Stop in and see me some time too. Cheryl funforkids.today.com
You’re spot on. I studied Latin at school and it gives you the perfect base to learn other languages (and not just the latinate ones). As well as giving you a base for lots of vocabulary it also helps you with many of the grammatical constructs found in different languages, different syntaxes, noun cases and verb endings. And of course the great thing is that once you’ve learnt one language its so much easier to learn the next one. Something that I’ll discuss in a future post.