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Today I'm going to talk about vocabulary. How do we best acquire vocabulary? Words. I've always felt that words are the key measure of where we are in a language of our potential in the language. How many words do we know? But the bigger thing is how do we acquire the words? If we have very few words, we cannot do much with the language. If we have a wide vocabulary, we may need a lot of practice in speaking in order to become fluent speakers. But we have a base. We have the potential to become fluent speakers of the language. So words are essential. Now, of course, much has been written about learning words, teaching words. When I started up link 20 years ago, I bought all these books on how languages are taught, how vocabulary is acquired.
Lots of good theory, which I will get into. Here's another one. of course, lists of phrases and phrasal verbs and all kinds of things that are very difficult to learn from if you don't see them in enough context. And even when we talk about vocabulary, how should we count words? If the word is simply a form of the word like a plural of the verb, should that be counted? Should it be counted separately when it is a different part of speech? Uh there's this concept of verb families. You know, audacious audacity quickly comes to mind. Is that the same family or is it significantly different? So these are difficult lines to define. That's why at link I always say your word count is
mostly an indication of how active you've been. And activity is the key to success in language learning. It's not something that you can claim that you have these words. In fact, words that we acquire are basically connections to meaning. And according to British Canadian AI luminary professor Hinton, when we learn a word, it's not like something we have in a filing cabinet somewhere. Every time we encounter that word, we are basically reconstituting a range of connections. We are regenerating meaning within our brains so that it's not isolating a word, but rather waiting different aspects of the language based on that encounter with the word. In fact, it reminds me a bit of the uh parable of the fish trap that
I use in my book. Here's the Chinese version of the linguist on language. And you know, drunga said fish trap is used to catch fish. Just like words are used to capture meaning, once we have the meaning, we no longer need the words. And that's essentially how we learn. In fact, what often happens is we're not aware of a word. We start to notice the word. Now we notice the word everywhere. But once that word is known then we no longer notice it because it's known as Drangza said we have the meaning now we no longer need the word we may notice it again when it appears in some other context or in a different meaning or connected with different collocations which is a fancy word for describing the
phenomenon that certain words are used more often with other words. So as we acquire more and more words and of course we acquire that predominantly through massive exposure to the language then the brain has this ability as with large language models to predict the next word. In other words we are acquiring an overall familiarity with the language of which vocabulary acquisition is a part. And of course, in these books on how to teach vocabulary, the point is often made that we should engage with comprehensible input, hopefully compelling or interesting, but it's not necessarily that way when we're at the beginning. And the suggestion is we should engage with content that is just n plus one. In other words, has a
few unknown words in it, which is a great idea in theory, but in practice very difficult because that way we would be forever uh you know having enough exposure through reading and listening that we would encounter all the vocabulary we need because another issue in vocabulary acquisition is the problem with frequency. It's easy to acquire the high frequency vocabulary. It takes a long time to acquire the less frequent vocabulary. However, the less frequent vocabulary is often key to any particular context. And that again brings us to the next subject which is specialized vocabulary. People think that you have to specifically try to learn business English or scientific English or academic English. Whereas in
fact, if you use content of that kind, listening and reading, then that is naturally the kind of vocabulary that you will acquire. And even within different domains, the frequency which declines very quickly will decline very quickly in each domain. So you have to familiarize yourself with the that domain that's important to you. Now teachers like to get into, you know, strategies for acquiring vocabulary, strategies for inferring meaning, pre-ereading exercises, critical thinking exercises. I happen to believe that all of those things are a waste of time. Another strategy is space repetition systems which again I don't consider that useful because they treat the word as an isolated item in a filing
cabinet so to speak rather than an opportunity to regenerate within our brain a sense of familiarity and understanding of the language different waiting of different components of the language structure words and so forth and so on. So to me that is not the way to go. However I have to admit I do review vocabulary. So, how do I review vocabulary? How do I combine it with the major activity which is a compelling input, listening and reading or speaking? First of all, a variety of ways to review is good. Variety is good. So, I tend to vary what I do. Sometimes a list, sometimes flashcards, but I only do flash cards when there are a few of them and when they are closely connected
to the text that I've been studying. Typically, that will be in sentence view. And I just go over them quickly. I don't scratch my rain. I don't try to force myself to retrieve anything. It's just a form of exposure. And particularly after having struggled through the text, listening and reading and trying to understand it, particularly when I'm in sentence mode, then a quick review of the vocabulary helps me to focus on those new vocabulary items, but very close to the context. Typically in sentence mode, in fact, what I do is if I'm in sentence mode, I will do the flash cards. If I'm reviewing a lesson, I will only deal with a list so I can go through the list very quickly. I do believe that it's useful to be nudged to do different
activities including vocabulary review and in that context I have enjoyed the language cup that we have at link. Right now I am in the team Arabic and the way it's structured a link every day different activities are weighted differently and so depending on the waiting that day I will spend more time on that activity. So for example when uh there were more points for more coins as we say more points for listening then I made sure that I did a lot of listening and I made sure that I listened in link not away from link in a podcast when creating links was prioritized was given three times the value of other activities then I went and did a lot of creating of links on the other hand on a
day when known words has a bigger uh waiting then I'll go back into my yellow words and try to see if I can convert some of them either in a list form or in context into words that I already know. No matter what the activity is that's weighted, if it's reading, then I want to make sure I do more reading. So, in a way, what I'm pointing out here is that it's useful to be nudged. It's useful to have goals that may seem a little artificial which force you to become more active but ultimately in all of your activity you have to go back circle back and pick up the pieces. Circle back go over the same text maybe again listen again review your vocabulary again in
whatever form you prefer. And in a way the best the easiest form of review is to simply listen. And if you have invested enough time in reading and possibly review that more and more of the words in what you are listening to are known to you, you will notice them. Or words that maybe are similar to words that you know, you'll suddenly notice them or a new context, a new phrase, you'll notice. So all of the listening activity is also a form of review. And from that point of view, speaking is the most rewarding form of review. You have to try to retrieve the words that you need.
You have to try to formulate your ideas. You're dealing with meaning. You're trying to output and of course you're going to make mistakes and you're not going to be able to retrieve even words that you know that tip of the tongue phenomenon which I experience more and more as an older person. Everything I've read indicates that it's making mistakes in language learning is a good thing. Forgetting things is a good thing. Being unable to retrieve words is a good thing. And you have to maintain that sort of commitment to staying active in whatever form of learning activity appeals to you at a given moment or that
you were nudged to do or you were driven by your interest. All of that stuff is going to make all of those activities will ensure that you gradually acquire more and more words. And of course, if you're on link, we keep track of the number of words that you know. But of course again the number of words that you know is going to vary from language to language based on how many different forms of words there are in that language. Mostly an indication of your level of activity. But if you have a high known words total, chances are you have a high potential level in that language. Thanks for listening. Bye for now.
