Language Learning: The Truth About Vocabulary Part IV

List Learning
List learning is the method of choice for teachers across the globe because it goes hand in hand with the translation method, so immediately you should be questioning its effectiveness. What list learning is effective at is getting vocabulary into your head fast. This is a highly inefficient method because what you actually end up learning is the list, not what the words actually are.
Think about the alphabet. You can say it from a-z but what if I ask you which letter is the 8th or the 21st? You probably have to count on your fingers starting with ‘a’. Or if I ask you ‘what’s the letter before ‘q’?’ or ‘the letter after ‘g’?’ You probably have to say a ‘chunk’ of the alphabet before you can tell me. This means that when you learn with a list, you’re using other words to find the word you want, making you reliant on the list to help you remember. So the time when list learning is most useful is when you have a lot of information and a short amount of time to learn it - and enough time to unpack the information from the list. Basically, list learning is best for exams. There are numerous ways to learn a list, one of the best is the ‘link method’, a quick google search will help you find out how this works.
Another time you need to put a lot of information into your head fast is at the beginning of your language learning, when you need to start practising as soon as possible. List learning can provide a solid springboard that makes you independent from writing things down/a teacher and it enables you to say your first words, phrases and even have your first conversations. When you’re starting out practise is much more important than accuracy, so it doesn’t matter that when you’re learning a list you’re not learning the words properly.
The best kind of vocabulary to learn through a list are the most common words, because you will encounter them more frequently, making it easier to detach them from the list. Another way to make list learning more useful is to learn words that are already in lists your head – the colours of the rainbow for example, or numbers. Numbers in particular are very easily learned through list learning. You encounter them all the time in real life, you can use them to have countless conversations and their meaning is perhaps the most universal across all languages.

Learning by Association
List learning, collocation and pronunciation all work in a similar way. They help you to associate ‘meaning’ with something else. When that something else is encountered (heard, read, said) the meaning returns and you remember and hopefully understand. Your memory and understanding is reinforced the more you hear, read or say a word.
List learning is by far the most impractical method, partly because it is inevitably used hand in hand with the translation method and partly because in order to access the meaning or remember it, you need to remember the order of the list.
By practising the pronunciation you are working on training your brain to hear new words better, increasing the amount of words you encounter as opposed to things your brain simply overlooks. It also increases your chance of saying words properly and therefore making you better at being able to distinguish different meanings.
Collocation is the most powerful method because meaning is associated with other words, multiplying explicatively the amount of words you use, encounter and remember. Coupled with actually learning how to hear and say the words by practising their pronunciation, this way of learning vocabulary is by far the best.
However associating meaning does not need to be restricted to these things – and it shouldn’t. When you encounter new words, phrases and sounds, associate them with the time, the place and who said them. If you really like lists then don’t write down translations – draw pictures of the meaning, draw someone who would say the word or write down a short phrase that is related to the meaning. By taking this little bit of extra effort at the time of learning, you will be reinforce your memory and gain a much deeper understanding of what the words actually mean and how you should use them.

Language Learning: The Truth About Vocabulary Part III

Continued From Part II

Applying the knowledge – effective learning techniques.
Just because words are neither fixed in their meaning nor in their pronunciation, does not mean that vocabulary learning is now more difficult.
On the contrary, by no longer worrying about individual words, and learning words as things that change, you are now ready to learn two, three, even four words at the same time. Your listening and understanding will improve as you start thinking about words as sounds and not only meaning. And finally you will be amazed at how you can remember things so much more easily than before. What follows are some basic techniques to really improve your vocabulary skills.

Collocating
Since the meaning of a word is not just contained within that word, you should avoid learning one word at a time . Instead learn two or three that go together in a short phrase – at least one of which should be a new word. This can be done to learn set phrases e.g. for letter writing, but it really should be done with all words that you encounter while reading or learning from text.
This is called collocating and it’s a fantastic concept. Collocating means ‘placing with’ and that’s exactly what you do – with new vocabulary. You choose a word that is new and you feel is important. Then attach a few words to it to make a short phrase with as much meaning as possible. Make sure those other words are ones that you are familiar with.
From a text (book, article, poem etc.) just remember the sentence it’s in, if it’s in a longer sentence, remember the qualifiersQualifiers are anything like adjectives or adverbs. If the new word is ‘dress’ in this sentence: ‘she was wearing a red dress that night’ - learn ‘red dress’ as part of your studies, not just ‘dress’. it comes with. Do the same for vocabulary from a conversation/lecture. Obviously don’t write the whole sentence, just the words that go around the one you want to learn, and make sure that the one you want to learn is the only one that you have never encountered.

Practise Pronunciation
I wish I could say ‘this goes without saying’ but it doesn’t. Human beings are very good at spotting things they already know. That’s why there are such things as confirmation bias, and we see faces everywhere including the moon! The same goes for language – we’re very good at ‘hearing’ sounds we know.
Essentially we are trained to hear certain things – and as a result exclude other things. This is why foreign languages are difficult, they contain new sounds which we can’t just pronounce, our minds ignore these sounds because they are unfamiliar, and we sometimes never hear them at all. How do you remember something you haven’t heard? So when you learn a new word, or better, collocation, focus on the pronunciation.
Break the word down into its phonemes (sounds) and say them individually.This is a skill which improves amazingly fast, so at the beginning it’ll be slow but if you practise a lot, it will become very easy. Then slowly start saying them together. Say the word faster and faster. Notice if it’s hard to say fast, slow down at that point and focus on saying it right, not fast. Then get a native speaker to do the same thing. Look at their mouth, and see if it’s in a different position. Look at your mouth and say the word again. Once you’re good at it, say the word in a phrase. Then practise saying it loudly, softly, angrily, like you’re in love!
Then think of other words with similar sounds say them, make a little poem or rhyme. All this practise will reinforce the new vocabulary in your mind because you are learning to hear and then produce the new sounds. You can only remember something when you have learned what it is.

Language Learning: The Truth About Vocabulary Part II

Continued from The Truth about Vocabulary Part 1.

Lost Concepts
The first concept is that the pronunciation of words is not exclusively contained within the word. It actually changes depending on the sounds that come before and after them. The extent of this varies from language to language, but English is a great example.This explains why English is so difficult, because as words join together new sounds are added – these sounds are not written and never included in vocabulary lists
The words in the phrase “go away” are not pronounced “go . away”, its pronounced “gowaway”. Don’t believe me? If you’re a native speaker, say it slowly in front of a mirror and look at your mouth as you say it. Otherwise, get a native speaker to say it slowly to you.
What this means in practical terms, is that if you believe words are unchanging pieces of language, you won’t understand them when they have changed, or when you have to change them. Instead you have to waste your time completely re-learning the same word every time it’s encountered. By focusing only on vocabulary you also overlook the fact that the meaning of words is not fixed to the word itself, but the interaction of the word within the wider context. The meaning of an individual word changes depending on countless factors including speaker, volume, environment, other words etc. etc. If you say “I love my Mum” does ‘love’ mean the same thing when you say “I love cake”?
If you’re only focusing on the word, outside all contexts, you will never understand the often complex situations that words change in. You will be constantly confused about what words mean and don’t mean, and you will speak erroneously and unnaturally, even with the words that denote the simplest concepts.The phrase ‘take medicine’ is almost never said by speakers of Korean or Chinese. They say ‘eat medicine’ because instead of learning the phrase, they just learn to translate the individual word ‘eat’ which in their languages goes with medicine, and assume it’s the same in English.

The Translation Method
The main reason that language is so misunderstood is because the translation method is used almost exclusively in schools across the globe. This method makes the appalling assumption that language is just ‘vocabulary + grammar’ and then makes an even grosser misunderstanding and assumes that all vocabulary and grammar across all languages is the same, it’s just that the pronunciation is different.
This is complete nonsense, and in order for a learner to improve any language skill, the translation method needs to be rejected in its entirety. Translation should never be used to learn a new language, especially not vocabulary. Instead, always remember that individual words change in their pronunciation and meaning – there is no ‘vocabulary’ in a fixed sense and meaning is dependent on many factors, not just words, which are simply one way of dissecting language. If you are able incorporate this knowledge into your vocabulary learning, and use methods that exploit it, you will have tangible improvement in all your language learning, within weeks.

Language Learning: The Truth About Vocabulary Part 1

Vocabulary? No Such thing!
Vocabulary learning is something that a lot of language students and learners focus on and worry about. Traumatic testing experiences at school might well be a major factor in this, but the main reason that vocabulary creates problems is that the division of languages into words is a highly impractical way of understanding – and therefore learning language. Once you understand that ‘vocabulary’ is just one way of understanding and breaking down language, as opposed to actual language, vocabulary learning will become infinitely more rewarding… and fun!

No words in the past
If you look at the most ancient examples of writing that we have, there are never any spaces between different words. Pictograms in scripts like Ancient Chinese or Egyptian Hieroglyphics are separated by image, and for alphabetic scripts like Ancient Greek and Sanskrit, the letters are all spaced equally apart. Through the lens of history, you realise that the concept of vocabulary is actually pretty modern. This is vitally important. When you believe that language is made up of only words (vocabulary) you miss out on two fundamental concepts and as a result can be terminally held back.