I’m reading Paul Nation & Stuart Webb’s book, “How Vocabulary is Learned”. Unfortunately, it’s aimed at teachers of English as L2, and is a bit academic, but the tips work for all languages. I’ll mention a few in this thread.
A big one for me is one that some of you already know, and that is to learn word families.
I’m learning Spanish, so I’ll use that to demonstrate. I already learned “los celos” (the jealousy), “celoso” (jealous) together a week ago.
Today I ran into “con recelo” (with mistrust or suspiciously) and didn’t really connect it with celoso until I asked Gemini to gloss (breakdown) the verb “recelar”. Part of glossing is to provide the word family, including adj. adv. nouns, roots, etc. Glossing was recommended by the book.
“recelar” (to suspect) comes from “celar” (watch closely) re- (again) + celar = recelar (re-watch closely i.e. suspiciously) If you’re jealous, you’re going to watch closely, eh?
So now, I can connect “celar, el celo, los celos, celoso, celador (sec. guard), recelar, el recelo, con recelo, receloso, and reselosamente” - all at the same time!
It doesn’t work all the time of course. Some words are orphans without a family, but it is a very useful technique.
When I make my Anki card, if it’s the first run-through to learn the English translation for the entry, I look snip a photo/drawing or two from Google images and add it to the Note box on the back of the card. That way, when I’m ready to flip it around to make the “passive” entry active and learn the L2, I have a photo ready to go for the front of the card to help me link the L2 to the thing or activity it’s talking about.
Here’s my card for RECELAR - it’s a simple type-in with note that gives me the option of typing in the back entry to help reinforce it. Until I learn the English translation, I often make it so I type in both the English and the Spanish.
Most of you probably already know that etymology is another useful tool for vocabulary acquisition. My go-to resource is Wiktionary, which covers all languages.
When you dig into the origin of a word, sometimes you can come across a link to another word that you already know or even an L1 descendant, and they can be leveraged to learn the new one.
LLMs are also excellent at snooping out etymology or words that have a similar sound or meaning to make connections. Connections are the key. That’s why the larger your vocabulary, the easier it is to add a new word - it’s much easier to make connections.
Makes sense. I found German hard, as I was bombarded with words seemingly unconnected to English, or any other German words I’d seen. However, any good course can introduce words in a sensible order.
I’ll give an example. der Mut means the courage, and following your logic, we can learn mutig meaning courageous. Then we have ermutigen. The en ending suggests it might be a verb and the er prefix very loosely translates as makes or becomes. So it might mean make courageous, and it actually means to encourage. Similarly the ent prefix often suggests removal, so we might guess that entmutigen means to discourage.
Another example is die Schuld meaning the guilt or debt. Thus beschuldigen means to accuse, and entschuldign means to excuse. It’s then easy to learn sich entschuldigen which means to apologise.
This incidentally is an argument in favour of a good course, and against pure Comprehensible Input. A well structured course can make sure that the learner comes across the root words before meeting the more complex words that are based on the root forms. Thus the learner’s path can be eased, with words learnt more quickly and easily. As an example, I learnt Ich entschuldige mich long before der Mut because I was consuming input at random. It was such a long complex and difficult phrase to learn.
As regards flash cards, I agree, I usually store a phrase and not a word, so that I see the word in context, and know how to use it. I don’t like storing a verb e.g. passer in French, because the meaning is completely context dependent, and verbs often have many possible meanings.
I found that learning a story of the word actually works because it plays out as additional association. And the story is better then just image or sentence, a good story keeps in memory better. On the other hand trying to link several related words has less output, it works like an amplifier of your own interest rather than affect language itself.
I agree that context is good. It’s just that, for me, seeing a verb with one context mixed in with all the dozens of other cards that I’m studying, does not encourage me to focus enough. It’s super easy to just glance at the sentence, see that I know what it means and move on. The verb ends up 6 months out and I haven’t really focused on it enough. By having the primary gist of just the verb and then see the word family and other contexts on the back of the card helps me concentrate more.
Many verbs may have multiple meanings, but there is usually one or two main ideas that hold everything together so that when you see it in a different context, you can get the gist from that main idea.
I’ve been in two classroom adult-learning Spanish courses. None of them taught word families and barely touched on prefixes and suffixes. They preferred describing in L2 the parts of the grammatical structure. Perhaps there is one out there somewhere, but I suspect that we just need to do it ourselves.
It sounds like we have different preferences when it comes to learning verbs, though we do agree that simple word based flash cards are less effective.
Yes it is a shame that courses often miss out helpful information. Word families is one example, basic pronunciation rules is another. I suspect part of the reason is that the exam requirements focus on knowing grammar, so the course creators focus on verb endings and such like. It would be interesting to know if children make significant use of word families when learning their L1 or an L2.
A few months ago, I took a 60-hour conversational English course at a community college here in Dallas. The instructor was a British guy who worked as a full-time professor. He taught several subjects, including languages, math, and economics.
He was born in London to a French father and an Italian mother. He taught himself both Spanish and German. During the course, I asked him how he had learned grammar and vocabulary in Spanish.
He told me that he started by attending a traditional language school, where he learned grammar in class. For vocabulary, he focused on specific topics and learned words in groups rather than individually. Since he was a big soccer fan, he regularly read soccer news in both English and Spanish. He also learned vocabulary related to everyday topics like clothing, shopping, and other common situations.
Another interesting thing was that he had sung in church for many years, so singing came naturally to him. Because of that, he often spent weekends singing along to Spanish songs as part of his language practice.
There were also students from Peru and Mexico in the class. I asked them how they would rate his Spanish accent. Every one of them said that he sounded natural and that they couldn’t hear an English accent when he spoke Spanish.
After hearing about his vocabulary-learning method, I decided to try something similar with German. I wanted to better understand videos about the conflict involving Iran, the United States, and Israel. So I asked ChatGPT to create a list of the 500 most common German words related to modern warfare and to generate discussions and lessons using those words.
After studying those lessons on LingQ and then watching videos on the topic, I was surprised by how much easier they were to understand. Because I had already learned most of the key vocabulary, I could follow a large portion of what was being said in the videos without much difficulty.
I have found that just because I can identify the meaning of a word on sight, or in context, that does NOT mean that I can produce it in writing or verbally.
*IF* I know that I’m going to want to produce a word that I’ve been memorizing to understand on sight, I’ll either create a separate card or I’ll wait until I’ve learned the word and then I’ll flip the L1 and L2 around to produce the word.
Cloze sentences are a good way to learn words for production. It provides context and you have to type in the word that matches. Cloze means you either leave a blank for the L2 word to go and you identify it solely from context or you place the L1 word in the spot.
This is extra challenging when there are synonyms that could be put there, so pick your go-to meaning for that particular concept or allow alternates in the notes, so you know that you got one of them correct.
This is a tip that applies to German, and perhaps to other languages.
Generally a verb has a concrete or literal meaning, and usually several figurative meanings. For example, in English I close the box has the concrete meaning of close whereas I close the meeting uses a figurative meaning, as we do not literally close a meeting. Similarly for He has a closed mind.
Unfortunately translations usually give the figurative meanings for German verbs. I find it helpful to discover the concrete meaning. For example, schließen means literally to close or shut. I struggled to remember anschließen, aufschließen, abschließen and beschließen. Once you know the literal meaning of schließen, the meanings of the phrasal verbs is much easier to remember. For example Ich schließe main Handy an Mein Auto an means I connect [close on] my phone to my car.
This might seem far fetched or clumsy to some of you, but it helps me a lot.
Exactly. That’s what Nation & Webb pointed out in their book. With verbs that have multiple uses, there is often a key thread through them, and if you remember that, it helps with all the different contexts. You may not know the exact dictionary meaning, but you have enough to get the idea in the context.
One of the strategies in Nation & Webb’s book is to learn affixes (prefixes & suffixes) and stems. The stem is the core of the word. They use “danger” as an example stem with -ous, -ously, -s, as suffixes and the prefix en- with more suffixes, -ed, -ing, -ment, and -ments.
There are a couple of ways to deal with this. One is to notice frequent affixes or suffixes and notice how they’re used. Another would be to find a book that deals with it.
Those learning Spanish are lucky because there is a great book called, “Madrigal’s Magic Key to Spanish” that contains lists of many that make it easy to learn lots of words. (Buy the paperback, not the ebook because the ebook has many OCR errors in it.)
For example, words that end in -dad most of the time are nearly identical to English words ending in -ty like university/universidad, etc.
You can ask an LLM to give you key affixes and their meaning with example words. If you notice a pattern, like -oso in Spanish, you can ask an LLM to tell you what it means and it should give you common examples. -oso means “full of”, “having the quality of” or “characterized by”. Examples are “amor-> amoroso”, “ruido-> ruidoso”, and “peligro-> peligroso”. There are many more.
I have ordered a copy of that book. Yes I know there is a free PDF.
People, and I have done this, tend to look for a one to one translation for prefixes and prepositions. What we really want is to understand the underlying concept. Thus German bei loosely translates to in the presence of or alongside. English in represents containment or enclosure, although The flowers are in the vase stretches that concept. The meaning of German prefixes isn’t easy to figure out although we can get a feel for them through exposure to the language. I haven’t found good explanations.
I love this book. Kind of funny because when I was first getting back into Spanish after a long hiatus I perused the beginning of the book and kind of thought meh. A few years later after many endorsements by others I went ahead and bought it. It is magical!
For German learners there is a very interesting book, albeit old-fashioned and originally published with a manuscript derived from using a manual typewriter, by Karl A. Schmidt: “Easy Ways to enlarge your German vocabulary”, It was published by Dover Publications in 1974 and bears all the hallmarks of language class notes and exercises compiled by a very competent language teacher. At that time Karl Schmidt was an Associate Professor of German at the University of San Francisco, serving from 1959 until his retirement in 1978. Originally Austrian, Professor Schmidt earned an undergraduate degree in 1933 at the Salzburg Teachers College and then seems to have been swallowed up in the war years until he emerged to obtain a Master’s degree from the University of Vienna in 1955. He then emigrated to the USA.
If you can get past the initial shock of the format you will find an excellent focus on prefixes and suffixes in the German language. It is a book specifically geared for an English speaker investigating the linguistic relationship between the two languages and seeking out patterns of word formation. There are plenty of exercises to work through, if you are not averse to some systematic study. Although clearly not a book for beginners, as it is pitched for “intermediate learners”, it makes a lot of sense to view all those cognates and recognise systematic “word building” in German. Highly recommended.
