The legendary Hungarian polyglot Kato Lomb is known for her „reading method” of learning foreign languages. An amazing linguist in many languages and probably the first simultaneous translator she recommends reading and essentially de-coding an interesting novel in the target language, at first with „extensive reading“ to get the gist but then with ferocious „intensive reading“ to extract vocabulary and grammar.
But she also advocates reading dictionaries…!! When I read that advice I certainly blanched at the thought. English has pillaged so many languages that it possibly has the most discrete words of any language, but the thought of reading through the 20 volumes of the Oxford English Dictionary seems rather daunting. And of course new words and new usages of old words are added all the time.
Can that task be simplified? Professor Paul Nation in 1990 showed that the approximately 5,000 most frequent words account for up to 95% of a written text in English and the 1,000 most frequent words account for 85% of spoken English. Indeed, some „pidgin“ English often seems to work well at lesser levels of vocabulary acquisition and even despite rudimentary accompanying, and mangled, grammar. Professor Nation’s theoretical analysis seems also to work for many other languages.
Lists of words and their frequencies have been around for some time but the incredible power of computer technology to derive frequency data from a range of contemporary sources is extremely helpful for language learners. This provides a tool from „everyday life language“ as opposed to some slightly bizarre „textbook language“ which can easily become dated.
Of course you can just keep on listening and reading „compelling“ material and the frequent words will keep surfacing, which is the basic Krashen/Kaufmann/Lomb method. But the ancillary advice to „plough through a dictionary“ is not so overwhelming a task if it is a „frequency dictionary“ of, say, 5,000 words with a sample sentence for each. The Routledge series of frequency dictionaries giving „core vocabulary for learners“ may be very useful for consolidation of your language skills if taken in „bite size chunks“ and as a support for your other methods of language acquisition.
I find it very hard to learn words in isolation, it is much easier to learn them when they are in context. Of course that is just my case,
How does reading a frequency dictionary differ from reading everyday material. If I want to learn the most common let’s say 5000 words, I would assume that by consuming podcasts, series, movies, novels and newspapers I pretty much consume material that consists out of mostly those words, all tied together in a context that is interesting and therefore associated with positive emotions which may help memorizing the vocabulary and idioms instead of some artificially made up sentences that have no meaning to me. Not to speak that by varying the type of content I can see words in many different contexts, helping me to understand the several facets of a word that can hardly be communicated with only one or two example sentences.
Btw.: Intentionally or not your post reads like an advertisement.
No shares held in either Oxford English Dictionaries or Routledge - and there are plenty of other frequency lists and dictionaries to choose from, so apologies if you think I am advertising anything!
But the words in such frequency dictionaries are invariably accompanied by a sentence or collocation putting the word in context, so it is all useful reinforcement. And you certainly do „notice“ things which can assist clarifications in both vocabulary and grammar…
And my original post was really a comment on the extraordinary methodology of Kató Lomb, arguably one of the most successful polyglots of all time, and therefore a pathway worth considering. She definitely appreciated the ordered structure of reading dictionaries.
But of course „each to their own“.
Regarding my advert comment, it was a joke.
I don’t know a lot about frequency dictionaries to be able to make a final judgement on their value, it’s just that that their are a few points that aren’t clear to me.
- How does the words in those dictionaries differ from the words you come across in everday material (like what an ordenary person would read in their mother tongue on a regular basis, like newspapers or novels)?
- How many sentences per word are they using in order to make sure you get different nuances of the word (depending on the nuances a word has, of course) and are those sentences somewhat tied together in order to avoid the reader becoming bored pretty quickly by a series of completely unrelated (and therefore somewhat pointless) sentences?
- Is there any study that shows a significant advantage compared to other methods? Don’t get me wrong, but stating that one person I’ve never met and on whose language skills I can’t judge on was successful doesn’t mean her methodology is good. It just means she probably managed to reach a certain level.
I used Anki cards that contain sentences a while ago, mainly to practise grammar, though, and I am not sure on how much impact they really had both in regards to vocabulary and grammar. It’s just lacking the emotional aspect for me. When I translate a podcast for example, I am not only learning vocabulary and grammar, but I am also learning something about a different country’s culture, recent events in that country or just something about the views of some stranger living at the other side of the world. Or if I translate a National Geographic article I can learn something about whatever the article is about, science, history, ethnology, technic …
Maybe Kató Lomb was just a fan of reading dictionaries - my grandpa liked that, too - and therefore for her it was a way to connect two things she liked? You are right that there is no reason not to try it out. But I for one would be more motivated to do so if I would get an idea on why it could be beneficial over other approaches.
Replying to Obsttorte:
- “ How does the words in those dictionaries differ from the words you come across in everday material”
Not much, but it all depends on the data input. The size of the “lexical corpus” of recent frequency lists in the computer systems is in excess of 20 million words, but then winnowed down to the 5,000 frequently used words from spoken language, literature, newspapers and academic writing.
Necessarily the range of material can be important; earlier frequency lists for English included Jane Austen’s “Pride and Prejudice” and Daniel Defoe’s “Robinson Crusoe”, so the modern language has clearly changed from that period of literature. Register is vital too: are the newspapers included in the survey broadsheets or tabloids, or both? is your chosen literature Mills & Boon romantic fiction, or maybe J K Rowling’s “Harry Potter” series, or perhaps the work of a Nobel Prize in Literature winner? Kató Lomb’s choice of a key novel to learn English from scratch was John Galsworthy’s “The Forsyte Saga”, which won the Nobel Prize in 1932, and which many native English speakers would consider quite tough going.
Illustrative of language learning from a book in an earlier historical period was a story often told by Metropolitan Anthony Bloom of the Russian Orthodox Church. Arriving in Britain in 1948, expelled by the Soviets, he had found the only book on board the ship which was in English was the King James version of the Bible, so he set to work on learning the language. Arriving at Tilbury Docks with his flowing beard and bishop’s robes he approached construction workers on a building site to ask directions in the language of 1611. Their response to this apparition was to down tools and escort him personally to the train station for his onward journey to London.
- The sample sentences in frequency dictionaries are necessarily brief and of course they only cover a modest range of nuances. To take an example from one of your target languages of German on a frequent topic of spoken conversation, number 1881 of the 5,000 words is “das Wetter”, where the contextual sample sentence is “Heute ist schönes Wetter, die Sonne scheint” (which fortunately is accurate today in Berlin, where I am currently located). Inevitably you will want to develop rather more sophisticated meteorological terminology in your own language arsenal, but at least that sentence is a start!
An article in The Times (of London) newspaper “Eloquent Scots have 421 words for snow” (23 September 2015) notes that, according to academics at Glasgow University compiling a Thesaurus, Scottish English has more words for this form of precipitation than even the fabled Inuit language. Start any language and it is truly an “endless journey”?
- “Any study…”? Rather too numerous to mention! Vocabulary profiles were of course developed for many languages to provide data for the various levels of the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR) which has become a standard yardstick - although it is not of course an ultimate analysis of language ability. With any frequency dictionary you are most certainly in the hands of the author, and in the case of the Routledge German frequency dictionary that is the editorship of Professor Dr Erwin Tschirner of the University of Leipzig. Like any good academic (!) he then quotes himself: “Studies show high correlation between vocabulary knowledge measured with frequency-based vocabulary level tests and reading (and even listening) proficiency” (Tschirner et al, 2018).
As I think we all accept there is no ONE method for language acquisition. As they say in many languages “À chacun ses goûts”… I would certainly agree with you that Anki cards, even with whole sentences, can be dispiriting. But some people seem to thrive on Anki? I would place reading through dictionaries, and even frequency dictionaries, in a similar category of “hard work” and certainly only a supplementary tool to support the main input tools of listening and reading, preferably of “compelling, comprehensible input”.
But I would also argue, as you do elsewhere, that there is sometimes a place for “traditional methods” and, yes, even for “brute learning”, which just by itself can be very ineffective. I learned German prepositions by rote (and quite a bit of English poetry) and both have stood me in good stead. A primary school teacher, knowing the interests of the age group, once memorably told me that the spelling of “diarrhoea” in British English was “dashing in a rush running hard or else accident”. And a secondary school teacher later told me a straightforward way to distinguish “there” and “their” in the English language which I was struggling to master, by suggesting “delete the T”, so that I would know a distinction between “here and there” as opposed to “heir” in the sense of “belonging to something or someone”. Good teachers, and good methods, can certainly help!
Taken in small doses I do think Dr Lomb’s adjunct dictionary method does seem useful, although initially I was startled at the prospect, because the task seemed so overwhelming. But having tried out frequency dictionaries they are of a rather more manageable size, so I can commend this as “one more tool in the toolbox”. Note that even Professor Krashen and Steve Kaufmann confess to the occasional reading of grammar books!
@bembe You can simply type an @ and a list of people engaged in the conversation will appear. The person will get notified you are responding to him.
Any additional supplement to ones learning activities is probably a good thing, as it helps avoiding monotony, and frequency dictionaries, if well made, are surely among those. It’s just that your first post made it seem you are specifically advertising this method that made me sceptical at first.
Btw.: German is non of my target languages, it’s my mother tongue. And “Wetter” is probably not a good example for what I’ve meant, as its meaning is pretty straight-forward. I was more refering to words that have very different meanings depending on the context used in or words used in combination with. For example “stehen” (a rather elementary word one would assume)
- Er steht hier. (He stands here)
- Ich stehe dazu. (I stand by it)
- Du stehst auf. (You get up)
- Bleib stehen! (stop)
- Er steht auf sie. (he likes her)
So lot’s of different meanings for what is probably an A1 vocabulary word. One could probably say “Stand still!” instead of “Stop!”, but “He stood on her” definetely doesn’t make sense. And in languages that differ stronger you easely have to use a different word in each of these cases, making it hard to understand why all these things should relate to “stehen”. And to be honest, I don’t know either.
ANKI is a nice tool when it comes to practicing very specific tasks. I’ve used it to learn Hiragana and Katakana, as it allows using audio files so I could practice the alphabets phonetically. It’s also nice as you can squeeze it in at anytime. You have 5 minutes of downtime at work? Start up ANKI and practice a bit. I personally don’t like starting to read something (an article, a short story or the chapter of a book) if I am not sure that I can finish it before I have to do something else. Practising flash cards can be interupted at any time. So it generates some additional practice in times that you would otherwise not use for anything meaningful anyways. But it’s really only considered supplementary, I guess.
Kato Lomb (1909 - 2003) did all of her language learning before the internet existed. Probably most of it was before 1960.
There is no reason to imagine that she would use the same study method if she started in 2023 instead of 1923.
Good point.
So what systems and methods do you use for language acquisition, and which would you recommend?
The most important learning source is reading as much as possible as varied as possible. For me this ranges from transcripts of podcasts over newspapers to short stories, although the latter alter heavely in quality, so I don’t use them very often these days (although there were some beginner texts I found to be very well written). I don’t read novels yet as my language skills aren’t good enough (I am somewhere between TOPIK level 2 and 3, which corresponds to A2 to B1). When reading through transcripts of podcasts, I usually read on chunk of it and than listen to that part or watch it and try to hear as much as possible of what’s beeing said. (hear in the sense of really hearing the words).
These days I experiment a lot with ai. I reread simpler texts I’ve read a while ago, which I can now comprehend, after that I write a summary out of my mind which I than translate to the target language. I give that to ChatGPT to get a corrected version and than go through every correction it made and discuss it with the ai (asking for what the error was, why it is done like this and suggesting other formulations to see whether they would work, too, and to make sure I understood the grammar). If I find what the ai tells me to be odd, I google it. The latter is important as the ai sometimes makes mistakes, like every human teacher would, too.
I also ask it to create lists with words that contain specific syllables originating from Hanja (so syllables that have their source in the Chinese language) and then create texts using those words. I just now did so with the syllable 서 (書) which corresponds to book or script. In the end I got a text containing 15 words with that syllable on the topic of books and reading in general, which I than imported into LingQ. Some of those words are translated identical into my language, so in addition I ask for the differences between those words.
I do grammar studies from time to time. That’s probably a matter of personal interest and the choosen target language, but I found it to be interesting. Especially when writing texts I personally hate it to use the same syntax and grammatical structures over and over again. I don’t do this in my native language and try to avoid it when using English. So for me it is really important to learn how to express something in different ways. Furthermore in my target language grammar is used for more then just expression of logical relationship between different fragments of a sentence. And often similar relationships are expressed using different grammars, so it is much more nuanced then in european languages. More then once I encountered the situation where a person in a podcast said the same sentence twice semantical-wise, but using a different grammar in both sentences. I get the meaning of those sentences even if I can’t nail the grammar, but the nuances or the purpose of the repetition? No chance.
My main approach is to vary what I do and to which extent from time to time, and also the overall intensity of my studies. Who knows, maybe one day I’ll try out one of those frequency dictionaries if the current methods become boring and I want something fresh and clean 
I’m not sure “reading” dictionaries is quite what she meant (at least if I go by her book–which you can find the pdf somewhere on the internet…interesting read). From my quick skim of every mention of dictionary she mostly referred to it as a good source of getting an example sentence with the word (one that would help illustrate the meaning). She would jot down words in her “notebook” along with the example sentences. Although I imagine she did do some “reading” too.
She did mention of a couple of chaps who did “the dictionary method” (literally reading the whole thing I imagine) and that it was effective.
In other spots she mentions to leaf through it, but don’t live in it. Put it away, etc. Also don’t be too quick to look up words in the dictionary. i.e. Don’t look up every word. Don’t look up a word until you’ve seen it 3 times and still can’t figure the meaning from context. Also, if searching for a word (in your target language), if you have an idea of the first couple of letters, rather than look up the word via your native language to target language, look it up in a target language dictionary with the first few letters you know. etc.
Interestingly, a few days before your thread, I had started to “read” a dictionary that I got for German…Langenscheidt’s Deutsch als Fremdsprache. It’s actually quite nice. Many example sentences and phrases, words/phrases typically connected with the given words. Usage in spoken German vs. written, etc. Anyway, I have gotten to the point where looking up things in a German dictionary I figure will help further progress as I know enough now to truly mostly “read” it and judge the meanings as explained in German or via the example sentences. I’m not reading from page 1, but looking up certain words here and there or just randomly poking around. I used to read encyclopedias while listening to music lol…so this is kinda similar.
edit: I did find a Stephen Krashen article that was based off the book and a discussion he had with her where she did mention “reading” dictionaries. Doesn’t sound like a main source of her methodology, but more a poke around here and there sort of thing, but who knows.
I think that (in any language) the spoken language and written language are different. If you want to learn both (spoken and written), you need to study both.
In general, speech is more difficult. In addition to a sequence of words (like writing has) it has voice intonation and non-verbal cues that add information. There is also the simple task of hearing a stream of sound and (in your mind) turning it into a sequence of TL phonemes (not English phonemes), then turning that phoneme sequence into words. That is often difficult. But in writing, there is a space between words. You know what the words are, even if you can’t pronounce them.
For writing, I find written content at my level. The search is different for each level and each language. Right now I use immmersivechinese.com and lingQ.com, but I’m sure there are plenty of other good websites. If you are advanced enough to read a book, that is challenging but very rewarding.
For speech, I try to find content where I can see the speaker, so I can also see non-verbal things like facial expressions and gestures. I find podcasts at my level. At an intermediate level I watch native content (movies, TV episodes) with NL subtitles to make it comprehensible. My goal is figuring out how each idea is expressed in the TL. To do that I might use TL subtitles, pause the video after each sentence, look up words I don’t know, re-play a sentence trying to “hear” the sounds, and so on. I use Chrome’s LR (Language Reactor) for this.
Well, some languages are highly agglutanive and at least for Japanese I know there aren’t any spaces at all, so this is only partially true.
You are right that our brain has to take the sounds our ears hear and turn them into something meaningful, but it’s similar with written text, only that in that case our brain needs to process visual clues. And intonation and non-verbal aspects of communication can actually be pretty useful, as the speaker can weight the importance of different pieces of a sentence, making it easier to know what to focus on (as you wrote yourself, non-verbal things are useful). In return, written texts are usually more complex in terms of vocabulary and grammar used and using longer sentences. The immediacy of the spoken language usually let’s us tend to keep things simple.
I guess that, especially when learning a language on our own, we tend to use a lot of written content at the beginning. So maybe the impression could have its source in a stronger focus on the written language. However, just for fun I made an old language test in my target language on my own and even though I mainly focus on practising the written language, I performed better at the listening part for whatever reason - I was honestly surprised.
I made the personal observation, that I find it much easier to understand someone if I can actually see them speaking. Not only due to facial expression or gestures (some people don’t do this extensively) but seeing the lips move. So it is definetely helpful to use content where the speaker can be seen, although on the long run it should obviously work without that, too.
@ericb100 Which book did you mean? How I learn languages or With languages in mind? Or a different one?
If you look at a spectral representation of speech, it’s impossible to see where one word ends and another starts. It takes hundreds of hours to train the brain to pick out words from this audio mush. Obviously a news broadcast by a national broadcaster will have clearly enunciated words, but in casual speech words are slurred together. I’ve spent close to 1,000 hours listening to French, and I still struggle with French films.
It’s common in Britain for school students to understand written French, but not spoken language.
I’m not neglecting that. But it also takes a lot of time to be able to understand the written language. In regards to French learned by a English speaker, you may not underestimate the fact that you already know the letters and most of the syllables, so there is already quiet a lot to begin with. If you learn a language that doesn’t use the Latin or a similar alphabet and that has almost no common vocabulary, and therefore almost nothing in common when it comes to the syllables used, you will notice that reaching the point where you get an idea of how the words work, so to speak, does take you a lot of time, too.
And in addition to what I’ve written before, even if a language uses spaces to denote where one word ends and another one starts or punctuation, children have to learn that, too. (I don’t know if you ever spent time watching a first grader trying to read. Spaces and punctuation have no meaning to them.)
I was referring to languages that use the latin alphabet. I suspect the Cyrillic is easy to learn but that’s a guess. Obviously learning to read a Chinese language would be a nightmare.
I am also of the view that in general understanding the spoken word is harder, in part because students often project their own phonology on the writing.
Yes, definitely an emphasis by Kató Lomb on “poking” around in a dictionary:
Number Two of Ten Suggestions for Successful Language Learning:
“If your enthusiasm for studying flags too quickly, don’t force the issue but don’t stop altogether either. Move to some other form of studying, e.g. instead of reading, listen to the radio; instead of writing a composition, poke about in the dictionary, etc.” (p. 159).
In her own words on the mystifying success of the “seemingly absurd” efficiency of the dictionary method:
“The other method - which is, interestingly, quite widespread - is the dictionary method. It was applied by the Orientalist Ármin Vánbéry and the poet Attila Jósef. They both waded through complete dictionaries and that was how they got hold of the necessary vocabulary to learn languages. A modern dictionary provides words in context. That may be why the dictionary method proves fairly successful in practice, even though it runs counter to most modern language-learning pedagogies. I have long been searching for the reason why this seemingly absurd method is so efficient” (sic). (p. 114)
Her chapter 16 is entitled “Dictionaries: Crutches or Helpful Tools”, and of course Kató Lomb’s principal emphasis is on “extensive reading” at first. In a famous passage she notes that:
“conscientiousness is a nice virtue, but at the beginning of language learning, it is more of a brake than an engine. It is not worth looking up every word in the dictionary. It is much more of a problem if a book becomes flavourless in your hands because of interruptions rather than not knowing whether the inspector watches the murderer from behind a blackthorn or a hawthorn.
If a word is important, it will come up again and its meaning will become apparent from the context. (P. 85)**
“
But in that case you have symbols and syllables you’ve already learned that you can build on. Not taking the time it took you to do so into consideration makes sense if you are only interested in the effort to learn another european language. But then the statement
is simple wrong.
And the Chinese script is probably an extreme example, although I made the experience that when reading Japanese, even though I haven’t invested a huge amount of time there, recognizing the meaning of the Kanji actually works pretty well.
To give a different example, the Korean alphabet is actually extremely easy to learn - it took me a weekend. And it is even a syllable based writing system, so all letters that form one syllable are put together. However, it still takes a lot of reading to start to recognize them and link certain syllables to a specific meaning, either semantical or grammatical. In Spanish, even though the syllables differ, the forms are much more familiar and patterns are easier to recognize as I (1) know the script for decades and (2) have some shared vocabulary to build on.
So in the end the statement could be when learning a language closely related to those you already know, speech is more difficult. But not in general.
P.S.: I am very well aware of the possibility that @gaoli was likely considering other european languages, too. However, I tend to work with what i get and I get triggered by unprecise statements (mathematician’s syndrom, I guess 
)
Why not? Is there any evidence that learning writing “in general” is as difficult as learning speech, or more difficult? If you say it depends on the language, I agree. But I disagree with blanket statements about all languages (computer programmer’s syndrom, I guess).
I was not considering European languages. I haven’t studied one since 1998. I was considering Mandarin, Japanese, Korean, and Turkish. For three of those, I have done some study but not enough to have a valid speech/writing opinion. I have studied Mandarin Chinese every day for several years, and am certain that it is harder to understand speech than writing.
One thing is speed. Fluent speech is fast. I am gradually learning all the word endings used in Turkish, where a single sound changes sentence meaning. In Turkish “not” (reversing the sentence meaning) is add “-m-” in the verb. Is it “biliyorum” or “bilmiyorum”? Those are opposites.
In fluent speech (like in a drama), these phonemes come at me three and four per second. Even if the actors speak precisely (and they never do), it is simply too fast. In writing I can set my own pace and (perhaps more importantly) I can identify every phoneme.
Which is what you did initially and what I was opposing with this statement.
And it is not as if you had brought up any evidence, either. You argumented for your point of view and I brought up counterarguments.
My point is that your statement might be true for languages where the knowledge about the written language causes you to not have to start from zero. This is the case when you are familiar with the alphabet and if the syllables used to compose words are familiar to you, so especially in languages close to the ones you already know. At no point did I state that learning the written language is as difficult as the spoken form in general. Actually, I didn’t make any general statements at all. I explicitely stated, as you acknowledged yourself, that this is language dependent.
So you are playing at reduced difficulty, so to speak. 
In speech you consider learning it to mean that you can understand everything at fast pace. But in written form you are okay if you do it slowly. This isn’t a proper comparision. Learning to read a language imho implies that I can skim read something and understand its content, as I can do it in my native language or in English, too, and not just to be able to understand it if I read it at my own pace, which could be super slow. If you set the bar for reading way lower then for listening, it is not surprising that you consider one thing to be more difficult then the other.