How to learn words fast without relying on rote memorization?

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22

I wouldn’t say listening is more important. You need enough vocabulary too:

  1. If you don’t have enough vocabulary, you won’t understand, even if you know exactly the word they said.

  2. If you have a large vocabulary, but you haven’t done any listening practice, you may not know what they words they are saying…i.e. if you had a transcript, you’d be able to read it and understand.

So both are important if you wish to converse with someone on something more exciting then talking about the weather then you’re going to need a decent sized vocab. You also have to understand when they speak which may involve them abbreviating words, connecting them and pronouncing them in ways you might not expect compared to if they just said the individual words. They may drop syllables, vowels, etc. Start, stop, hesitate, repeat part of a phrase, etc.

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23

At the beginning not so much imho. I spend most of the time reading. If you don’t know the word you will hardly understand it if spoken anyways. I watch a lot of series in my target language with subtitles in my mothertongue, though. And I noticed that even by doing so I become better and better at understanding what’s been spoken. It started with words first, then small sentences and it get’s better and better, even without me specifically practising listening.

Spending more time on listening practise might speed up the process of beeing able to understand spoken words, but it also means less time to actually read. So it is a give and take. I would say focus on reading first to build up vocabulary. Listening can take a successively bigger part the more you progress. It also depends on what you are learning the language for, too.

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24

if I don’t understand a language when it’s spoken, what’s the best way to make me understand? What should I do to improve my listening?
Should I reread the content once in a while? Will it help much compared with reading new content?

25

I’ve been spending more than 1 year with LingQ. The materials I used were classic literature and YouTube videos. When I read books, I always use audiobooks and of course, it is the same in the YouTube case. It helped me improve my reading and listening both. I recommend using this approach.

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Hello, if you want to understand what you are listening to, you have no choice but to listen a lot. I listen for 30 minutes a day. But I think it should be less and at least an hour. But in addition to that, I do something like this and it really helped me. In order to get to know what I am listening to faster, I listen to the same 20-minute recording 5 times a day for a week. When the week is over, I switch to a new recording. I think saying I don’t have time is an excuse, I wake up half an hour early in the morning and listen. I listen again on my way to work. Again during my lunch break. Again when I return home in the evening and finally at home. In addition to listening for 30 minutes, this tactic was very effective for me. There is nothing you can do but listen more. There is a Turkish YouTuber on YouTube. He applies Stephen Krashen’s method and works for 7-8 hours a day. He is developing incredibly fast. The more you listen and read, the more you get in return.

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27

I’d like to disagree here. My own experience and something I’ve heard from others who have learned foreign languages in self-study before is that you will improve your listening comprehension even if you mainly read. If you have a rough idea of how a word should sound that you are reading you’ll have a good chance to recognize it when you hear it, even if the true sound doesn’t perfectly match your imagination.

It definetely helps to listen to the language to build up an understanding of what sounds it consists of. But how useful will it be doing so excessively if you have no clue where one word ends and another one starts, what the grammar works like and what grammatical structures and expressions are commonly used?

Only focusing on reading without ever dealing with the phonetics of the language isn’t useful either, of course. But excessive listening without any foundation for you brain to interpret the data doesn’t seem the best way to go, too, at least for languages that are using phonetical alphabets.

You have to find your sweet spot when splitting your learning time between reading and listening input. And you are probably going to readjust it the more you progress in the language. It’s not set in stone.

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28

I do not know what you have tried listening to, but here are some ideas:

The Duolingo Spanish Podcast and the “Un Día en Español” podcast both have interspersed English supplements.

In the “Mini Stories to Learn Spanish” podcast by Joel Zarate each story is read once by him slowly, and then again by a Spanish woman slightly more quickly.

The “Dreaming Spanish” youtube channel has playlists for different levels, from “SuperBeginner” on up.

29

If I don’t understand a language when it’s spoken, what’s the best way to make me understand?

Apologies if I am suggesting something obvious that you have already tried, but, have you tried listening while reading a transcript, and then listening again without looking at the transcript?

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30

I’m with ObstTorte on this.

So read texts, study them, understand them, then listen to them read out. As you get better, try listening to texts first, then listen and read, then read and study. With time you will get better.

Some languages are fairly easy to understand, or rather it is fairly easy to hear the words. With other languages hearing individual words is a struggle. But there is no point listening if the content is beyond you.

I find with German that I can hear a lot of the words, and get an idea of the content if I know enough words. With French however, words merge together into one long stream of sounds thanks to enchaînement i.e. the running together of words, so that the consonant (vowel) at the end of one word combines with the vowel (consonant) at the start of the next word, to form a syllable. It took me several years before I could make sense of normal French, even when I had no problem reading the text. Even today it might take me a second or two to realise what was meant. As an example, Il recoit l’appel sounds just like il recoit la pelle, and il adore le manteau élégant sounds just like il adore le manteau et les gants.

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This is also the case in Spanish as well as to some extent in Korean. I guess that this might has something to do with the length of the words. Those languages are quite agglutanive causing words to be quiet long. So this might just speed up the speaking process. But this is really just an assumption.

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32

What I mean here is just understanding what you hear. I am not talking about understanding grammatically. A beginner does not know grammar anyway. First, get used to what is being listened to, then you can gradually learn the language with reading and listening, and a little grammar. If a beginner does not recognize the sounds, what else can he do other than listening?

33

I agree with Leif and Obsttorte. That you can’t just “listen more”. If you don’t know the meanings of the words and phrases you are hearing, listening more isn’t going to get you anywhere. So ideally going over a transcript before or after (and re-listening) would be helpful.

If you look at the transcript and you basically know all or most of the words, but the listening part sounds like all gobblygook…THEN that’s where you really need more listening and probably listening and reading here would be helpful to make the eye/ear connection.

In other words, listening more is (probably) most helpful when you know most of the underlying words.

However, I do think there is something to trying to listen to things a bit above your level to try and pick out as many details as you can. This is mentally taxing, so you can’t really do it for super long before your brain starts wandering.

I think reading and listening, with even difficult material is probably very beneficial practice, even when you don’t know the words. It does help you to tune into what the sounds you hear “look” like.

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34

How do you expect to make sense of what you are hearing if you have no concept of how information is encoded. This includes not only phonetics, but also syntax and grammar (besides vocabulary, of course). At least if one interprets “understanding what you hear” in a sense that allows to recognize single words or phrases (meaning), not just the syllables beeing used (sound). The latter can be achieved rather quickly by listening to the language on a regular base. But that alone won’t make you understand. And I’d argue that as a beginner this might not be the biggest hurdle, but that you have to link the sounds to words, phrases and sentences to actually get something meaningful and not just a stream of sounds.

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I think you don’t understand what I’m saying. A beginner doesn’t need to make sense of the sounds he hears. He can’t anyway because he’s just started learning. The sound he hears already sounds like noise. In other words, he needs to recognize the sound he hears first. I’m not talking about putting words together grammatically and making a correct and meaningful sentence. You’re talking about understanding the sentences and words you hear, and I’m talking about recognizing them. You’re saying something different. I’m saying something different. Also, what you’re claiming is not true. A person can learn a language without knowing grammar. My neighbor across the street is a Georgian woman and she doesn’t know anything about grammar or phonetics, but she speaks Turkish almost perfectly just by listening. Similarly, I’m in much better shape than I was 3 months ago. When I watch a series on TV, I can now clearly understand 40% of the sounds that were previously just noise.

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I understood what you were saying. It just doesn’t seem to be what was meant by @moonlight. He explicitely stated he doesn’t understand the language when spoken and additionally asked whether listening is the most important part in language learning. Getting used to the phonetics never was the matter, as I understood it.

It seems you didn’t understood what I was saying, though. I never neglected that you should expose yourself to the spoken language to get used to the phonetics. I never said that you need to nail the grammar first or that you even need to know it first, but that it helps to know such things in order to be able to understand spoken language. And that having acquiered a fundamental set of words and phrases helps, too. Of course you can prioritize other things first, but I am not convinced this to be the most efficient approach.

How do you know? Are you sure she never invested some time trying to actually learn the language? That would be odd, to be honest. Even native speakers learn the grammar of their mothertongue in school. And even they get it wrong often enough. So unless she is a genius or the turkish grammar is extremely simple this would be pretty surprising.

And it is a different matter if you are actually living in the country were the language you are learning is spoken. In that case you get tons of exposure to the spoken language for free, so to speak. And whether you want it or not :wink: However, this isn’t the case for everyone here.

What do you mean by that? Do you understand the words beeing said, or just the individual syllables?

37

Reading can help with listening comprehension, but there are some nuances to how much it actually helps. In some cases, it does an alright amount, but in other cases, it’s very minor. Factors would include: how phonetic the language is (think knife in English), which exact variant of the language you want to be able to understand (a strong Northern Irish accent would be further away from the phonetics than some other variants), how familiar you are with the alphabet, how much of a foundation of the phonetics you actually have (a beginner would have very little), etc.

All in all, I’d say that reading does something, sure (especially if you read on LingQ with TTS turned on because then you also get listening time), but if you want to get better at listening comprehension, you should actually do some listening. Reading while listening, listening to content which you’ve already read first (where you looked up unknown words), and re-listening to content are several techniques.

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38

Ok bro you are right. Have a nice day

39

:hushed: Why so offended.
@nfera Of course, as pointed out, I don’t say don’t listen at all. I think there is some misunderstanding here. The statement I was mainly referring to was that listening is the most important part in language learning. I don’t think this is the case throughout the whole process.

In the beginning I am not sure how much one can really gain from listening besides familiarizing with the phonetics of the language, which is important, of course. But I think that listening is something that becomes more worthwhile once you have reached a certain level in the language and that in the beginning there are other means were ones time is invested better.

I listen to a fair amount of japanese music. And yes, meanwhile I became pretty good at recognizing the syllables. But I don’t know whether those syllables are the beginning or the end of a word, or something in between. I can’t even say for sure where I am in the sentence. But if it is a word that I know (there aren’t many, though), I recognize it.

And that’s how I understood the content of the discussion. Beeing able to actually hear words, not just syllables without any meaning. And yes, if you want to be able to understand a certain dialect for example listening to it a lot is important. But that is probably not the main goal for a beginner, or am I wrong?

Here I’d oppose. I would say that it is easier if the language uses its own alphabet.

The problem is that if the target language uses an alphabet you already know, that is maybe even used by your native language, like the latin alphabet for most of us, you already have sounds strongly tied to the individual letters and syllables. I mean, almost all Germans are exposed to a great amount of English. Nevertheless it is hard to find german politicians for example that don’t have a strong accent, even if they speak the language at a decent level. When I speak English, I get easely recognized as German, and Germans can even tell which federal state I am from :rofl: I would assume this to be the case for many other people, too, not just Germans. It would be interesting to see whether the effect is similarly strong if people speak a language that uses a different writing system or alphabet.

EDIT: It seems that studies suggest the exact opposite. It seems to be that learners of a foreign language have less of an accent if the language uses an alphabet their are already familiar with. That is surprising. Other studies however suggest, that using the IPA when teaching English for example improves pronounciation a lot. (There is a strong correlation between listening comprehension and accent)
However, most studies seem to use very low sets of people (usually between 10-50), so I would take that with a grain of salt.

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40

If you read 117k words in 1.5 years then you’re reading a lot less than 1k words per day (117k/500 days = 234 words per day which isn’t much). It’s better to read lots of words per day rather than space it out because the brain is more efficient when you keep feeding it the same
language often.

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41

I agree. A good target should be 3k/day.