Studying related words in an L2

I really struggle to remember words in German, where I am only B1 as they are often so alien to an English speaker. It has recently started to get much easier because I now know enough that I can often guess the meaning of new words.

As an example, the verb tragen means to carry, amongst other things. There are many words whose meaning can be guessed at from the components:

der Vortrag means the lecture, vor, meaning before or in front of, and trag, relating to carrying.

der Beitrag means the contribution, bei can mean by, and so the meaning can be guessed.

And we have similar words for the verb stellen. to place or put:

die Ausstellung means the exhibition, or the out+putting.
die Vorstellung means the presentation or the putting in front.

Of course this is all old hat for students of German. But it is quite different to French where meanings are often obscure e.g. the verb tourner and nouns le tourneur, le tour, la tour, le tournant, le tournage, la tournure, la tournée, le tourbillon, la tourelle and so on. Most of those French nouns cannot be guessed.

Is anyone aware of any SLA theories that explicitly advocate learning word groups? In other words, lessons are explicitly constructed to teach vocabulary that is closely related, rather than vocabulary that relates to tasks - Task Based Learning and Competency Based Learning - or grammatical structures. Or is this standard practice in traditional teaching?

This does seem to be one weakness in the LingQ approach of jumping in aimlessly, with no real direction other than trying to use input with an appropriate level. Traditional teaching can guide the student in a manner that might make their progress easier.

Based on a quick search it appears that learning words unrelated to each other seems to be more efficient. However, in the papers I’ve looked into both the amount of L2 students tested as well as the overall scale of the experiments were rather limited. So from my perspective there is no definite answer on whether this approach is useful on the long run or not.

My personal experience is that it can be helpful as it helps to understand the logic behind how the words are formed. And one syllable or word stem can have several meanings.

P.S.: IMHO a better translation for bei would be beside, although it can also mean at. But prepositions are generally hard to translate, as there is rarely a one-to-one relation between different languages.

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That agrees with my experience.

Obviously this could be language dependent, and it would be hard to test with studies, I don’t see this as so useful with French, where they delight in having little logic to the endings e.g, -ant, -eau-, -euse, -nure etc.

I do think there is benefit in structuring study in a progressive manner, much as they so in schools. I tend to dive in head first. Perhaps the end result is the same.