I was wondering if anyone had any thoughts on how long it takes for passive vocabulary/sentence structures that you fully understand when listening/reading to become actively available and retrievable to use in a conversation when you need. And also what have you found the best and most consistent way to grow your active vocabulary. The usual advice is just to speak more but I find with this i can too easy fall into that trap of using the same words and structures that i am comfortable with over and over thus never really feeling my spoken fluency getting better.
I am sure it varies person to person but I am curious as to others experiences.
It seems to me (and I am just spitballing here) that my passive vocabulary seems to always be roughly around 4 times larger than my active vocabulary, that being words i know and can retrieve mid conversation, i reached this number by comparing my stats on LingQ with the amount of words i know on Lingolooper (its like an AI chat game that keeps count of how many words you have used during conversations) this ratio is pretty consistent across all languages I am learning. I’m sure this is true also for my native language.
So i wonder is the way to grow your active vocabulary simply to just keep growing you passive vocabulary and by in turn your active vocab will grow a steady albeit slower rate. (of course with conversation practice being a prerequisite to lock things in)
For a while i tried NL>TL flashcards for new words and difficult sentence structures thinking that it was the best way to really lock things in and make them easier to retrieve during a conversation. And while it was effective, it quickly became overwhelming and too mentally taxing to keep up with the SRS every day especially across multiple languages.
Anyway just spitballing here curious to read other users perspective on this.
For activating vocabulary from a passive vocabulary perspective in a speaking sense usually requires some sort of conversion process. Generally the act of attempting to think or translate from your best language to the target language requires mental energy and creates neurons to prepare you to speak more and more.
For example, when I spoke mandarin for the first time after 1 year and 6 months, used google translate whenever a random thought came and whenever the brain requires validation for certain words. After a few months, the words are already ready to be used when attempting to speak for the first time.
I would say create sentences and think in the language as much as you can or do active recall to start creating the neurons.
Yes, to make that transitions, you have to use them from scratch.
If I know that I’m going to want to know a word for speaking or writing, then I may make an Anki card with a picture or text on the front and type-in on the back.
It helps a LOT to do self-talk and to write stories or instructions.
It’s not entirely clear what you are doing to help activate vocabulary? You mention flashcards…but are these just single word cards? If so, that might be problematic as there may be more than one word in the target language that could be used for the native word. I suppose that even goes for a “sentence” card. In any event, perhaps use sentence cards. Like how would you use that new word if you were going to activate it. Use a sentence that you can envision using that word. Or maybe it’s part of a few sentence “speech” that would use that word that maybe helps to memorize it. i.e. don’t use some random sentence that you wouldn’t bother saying anyway to learn the word.
Also…If there’s an easier word to use or remember, then maybe don’t bother trying to activate this other word. What good will it do to activate the word. Doing this maybe you can filter out some of the words you are trying to activate to worry about just the ones you really may need.
Other than that…I think it just comes down to repetitions…spread out repetitions and revisiting.
To increase your passive vocabulary, you have to use the language passively. To increase your active vocabulary, you have to use it actively. At least that would be my assumption.
What I do is that I try to actively produce the language, usually by using ChatGPT letting it create tasks for me or giving me sentences in my mother tongue for translation into the target language. The usual advice is writing a diary, but I couldn’t even do so in my mother tongue, as I am not good in spontanous writing.
Note that there is a gap between active and passive vocabulary in ones mother tongue, too. Native speakers don’t use all the words they can understand, either. It’s a bit like good writing. Most people who read regularly can differentiate between well and badly writting books - and may even be able to explain why it is good or bad. But that doesn’t mean that one can write a good book.
That’s exactly how I feel. I loathe trying to write a diary or make up stories. Of course, I can converse excellently in English, but doing that in Spanish is a different matter. LOL
I’m going to try working with Gemini on conversations in my interests.
The books are available in Swedish (the language that I’m learning and that started the project), English, Italian, German, Spanish.
Those are the language of “my friends”, guys like me that are living abroad and are trying to learn or improve the local language.
I plan to expand it to Danish (new friends over there) and other languages based on people requests and also the funds that I manage to gather (it cost money to produce the books, not an immense amount, but still).
If you try it, please please please post a comment with your experience and help me spread the word.
You could consider language islands. I’m still tweaking my approach , but I’ve been pretty happy with the results. If I do another language I would start much earlier.
I pick a topic I want to be able to speak about with fluency, a story I want to tell, a grammar pattern I’ve struggled with, etc. I then line up all my activities to support it:
Focused input
Articles for vocab (wikipedia is great!) + natural speech dialogues (podcasts, YT)
Have AI translate my own L1 monologue to a L2 monologue / dialogue I can use for input
Focused production loop
Written conversations with AI
Identify gaps and discuss those with AI
Focused flashcards L1-> L2 for key collocations
No long term SRS, I just focus on the short term and reinforce with conversation
Talk about the topic with tutors and friends
Repeat
I pick a topic to do for a week or two, and move on. My ability to converse on each topic improves rapidly and significantly within those timeframes. There is some positive crossover effect, too. I pick up topics that I am likely to want or need to talk about, so they do get some reinforcement in conversation over time. While it doesn’t all stick, a lot of it does, and I can always return later to level up.
Thanks for sharing your idea about creating a language island. I’ll probably try it out this weekend when I have more time.
Just a quick question: what do you do with the AI-corrected versions of your writing? Do you just import them into LingQ, read them, and move on? Or do you do any sentence mining?
I feel like you’d need some way to really lock those corrections into your long-term memory so they don’t just disappear after a few days.
I import them into LingQ, and LingQ the key vocab, preferably in sentences (or phrases within LingQs 9 word limit), and train for active recall using L1-> L2 Flashcards in lingQ. I think attempting to use these phrases in conversation as much as possible shortly after reading/lingQing/flashcards really helps consolidate, as well.
I don’t maintain a long term SRS deck, though I think evidence agrees with your idea. I just find that for me SRS decks easily become unwieldy. So I’ve just made peace with the idea that some will stick, and some will not. I prefer to just revisit later if I later feel I cannot express what I want to when I try to discuss the topic.
That said, I’m still trying to figure this out. I felt like my output plateaued with my heavy CI emphasis, and it has taken me a while to get started with Language islands, but it seems like this approach has helped. Let me know if you find this useful or any other useful techniques you might have found.
I’ve been setting up language islands up for myself over the past year for German and Spanish. Sadly, I find reading and input so much fun I don’t spend nearly enough time on these exercises, but I do plan to change.
Not sure if any of this will give you ideas, but what I’ve been doing is creating tabs in a google sheet for each language island. One column with the English, one with the Target language. I’ve used AI where it makes sense to help generate sentences and questions and answers for certain things. In other cases I know there are some things I want to say and ask it to give me how it would be said colloquially.
For review purposes I put these in Quizlet. I’m not a huge fan of SRS decks either as they tend to get unwieldy. I like the nature of Quizlet which is more just pure flashcards. I have a “deck” for each language island. I can pick it up and go through it whenever. I can star the items that give me trouble and only go through those. I’m not on any schedule. No few hundred or thousand reviews to get through because Anki or Lingq says I need to review that now. Also, I stick these sentences in Natural Reader app (could use Lingq too) and listen and shadow/repeat.
BTW, I have been doing this for Norwegian which I decided to just start from the beginning more focused on speaking from the start and specifically on the things that matter to me. So more 80% focused in this direction and 20% fun reading. Even for the latter I’m keeping it more conversation focused. I take a new article or something of interest, translate it and simplify it to my level. I also prefer to have AI change it to make a dialogue based on the nature of the article between two people. This makes it a little more interesting and may tend to be more conversation oriented as compared to a news article (especially for German where Konjunktiv and simple past are used mostly).
In any event, for those who may just be starting, (or someone just starting to focus on output), I’ve been starting with something I found on Tony Marsh’s youtube channel. His 20 OPI questions cover a lot of ground for basic conversation and leave a lot of openness to what you can say or ask within those 20 questions. They also focus on the tenses you may use in conversation. I’m starting here, but will branch out into various themes like hiptothehop is doing. Focused initially on things that are important to me or my interests at first.
This was, and is, 100% my problem, too! Language islands take some effort and initiative, and aren’t always as fun, even if they are effective. I had really gotten into the groove with input, and is has been a challenge to overcome that inertia.
It looks like we’re doing some similar things, even if the tools are different. I also think that I would introduce more focus on probably conversation topics and Tony’s OPI questions earlier if I do another language.
For my languages I play with different things.
I keep a pocked sized “output notebook” with me at all times for both of my languages. When I monologue to myself and can’t think of a word or phrase I’ll write it in English to look up later in the notebook. I only do this when I reach an input stage. Then I casually read over the words phrases and tally how many times I’ve read over a page. I don’t do too much of this as it’s used just to fill in the holes of my knowledge of the language when outputting.
I don’t like writing so I talk to the mic in chatgpt and have it transcribe what I’ve monologued and correct it.
Luckily there are meetup groups in my region for my languages and I’ve found speaking with other learners and natives, I pick up on words, phrases, grammar structures they have acquired that I don’t think to use automatically, which further helps fill in the holes in my knowledge.
Massive input and LingQ study does help upgrade my output but it’s more of a background and foundational thing and takes forever.
You can also choose a topic and monologue to yourself as if you’re speaking to someone about it and write down everything you can’t remember or know. That way you learn that domain of that topic and many new words or phrases may arise.
I started using general AI apps (Gemini, ChatGPT, etc) to run writing/review sessions.
I personally find writing exceptionally useful in hardening my Swedish. And it’s less frustrating than live conversations. Mostly because I’m still at A1-A2 level and I would be silent most of the time.
I prompt something like:
you are a Swedish tutor that helps me reviewing my writing
You are to manage a conversation about TOPIC
Ask me direct questions and review my answers aiming to fix my grammar and to carry the conversation forward
If I use English or Italian words in my answers is because I don’t know it in Swedish - translate and give me examples how to use the Swedish words
Of course, you can adapt and tweak this prompt to your liking.
I use graded books as source for those conversations. I can give some titles and links if the moderators allow it.
Another thing I’ve done in the past is actually use LingQ but going through the mini-stories in English and translating to the target language. I go sentence by sentence and try to translate that sentence into the target language in whatever fashion I can. I would then mark words that I know the word for in my target language and anything else I don’t know in yellow…and with the target language word/phrase (you can set the dictionaries to all come back in the target language).
It’s a pretty fun exercise to do. You could use the mini-stories, other articles, or other sentences, phrases and words you want to say. You could also obviously do this outside of LingQ.
