🔥 Learn languages like I do with LingQ: https://bit.ly/3GquTXy
CC subtitles available in: English, Italian, Portuguese, Vietnamese and Spanish.
I'd like to thank the volunteers who created this video's translations:
Sara
Jackson
Fernando Arancibia Instagram: @fegggno
PhoL Huỳnh https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCyZtbsU1wvxgiOHiVXyb6Jg
https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100073324195996
___
Language learning is about acquiring words. The number of words we know, if they are acquired through lots of listening and reading, is a good measure of our familiarity with the language.
0:00 What is the simplest evaluation of where we are in a language?
1:36 Some books I have read on learning languages.
2:58 It's all about learning vocabulary naturally.
3:56 How many words I know in the languages I can speak.
7:51 The way I recommend you use flashcards to learn vocabulary.
___
Study a language on LingQ: https://bit.ly/3GquTXy
Study this video as a lesson on LingQ: https://bit.ly/34TFk8d
My Podcast:
Soundcloud: https://bit.ly/3iZsbic
Apple: https://apple.co/3z1F1lD
Google: https://bit.ly/2W3DYmK
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/4TbcX8ilVmVTi6jdQVHuwK
Get my 10 Secrets of Language Learning: https://www.thelinguist.com
FREE grammar guides: https://www.lingq.com/en/grammar-resource/
Join the LingQ Discord server: https://discord.gg/ShPTjyhwTN
My language learning blog on The Linguist: https://bit.ly/2MW83Ab
My Instagram page: https://www.instagram.com/lingosteve_/
My TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@lingosteve
The LingQ language learning blog: https://bit.ly/35yvaqK
#learnvocabulary #vocabulary #languages
This number of words you know
is sort of, uh, an indication of your potential in the language. Hi there, Steve Kaufmann here
today, and today, I'm going to talk about something very important in
language learning, maybe in some ways the most important thing: words. How Do we learn them? Why are they important? How do we use them? Remember if you enjoy these
videos, please subscribe, click on the bell for notifications. And if you follow me on a podcast
service, please leave a review. I do apprec
iate it. So when I started with my son Mark into
LingQ and I was doing a lot of thinking about language learning, in fact, I did a
lot of research, uh, read books in English and Swedish and German in French on this
whole subject of language learning, I came to the conclusion that the single
most, I called it, the Gordian knot.... The single simplest sort of
evaluation of where we are in a language is how many words we know. All right. Get a lot of criticism, people say, no,
you can be fluent wit
h a few words, but in fact, you can't and I'll explain why. And so before I get going, though,
I want to show you that I don't just sort of rely on my own experience. Although obviously, anybody talking
about say language learning is going to refer to their own experience. But I also did a lot of
research and I had a look... you'll see behind me I
have all these books. I have CDs that I've listened to, but
I went and looked at my bookshelf here. So here's one of the books Learning
Vocabulary in
Another Language ISP Nation. All right. I have lots of books on... second language acquisition. Rod Ellis, he does talk
about vocabulary acquisition. Second Language Vocabulary Acquisition. Norbert Schmitt, Vocabulary
in Language Teaching. And what have we got here? Again Norbert Schmitt. Uh, this is from Cambridge
Description, Acquisition and Pedagogy. So it's not as if I haven't looked. I found that most of these books
were unnecessarily complicated. Again, I, I tend to look
for the Occam's ra
z... Occam's razor. In other words, the simplest explanation
of a phenomenon, the Gordian knot. And to me, words are the key sort
of measure of where we are in our language and how we acquire
them actually is quite simple. Um, there's a lot of talk about, you
know, you must read content that only has a small percentage of new words
in it, or that you have to meet a word so many times before you'll learn it. And all of that is almost irrelevant. To me learning words again, you'll not
be surprised
to hear me say this is all about acquiring them naturally. It's not because you say, I want
to learn 5,000 words that you're going to learn 5,000 words. It's not because you deliberately
sit there with a stash of, of, uh, cards flashcards, or because you
read the dictionary that you're going to acquire all those words. It may be something you enjoyed doing. It is a form of exposure to those
words, but ultimately it's going to be the amount that you are exposed
to the language in a meaningful en
vironment that is pleasant to you. That is conducive to the brain
gradually acquiring these words. That's going to do it. It's a bit like if you go up to a girl
or if you're a girl, you go up to a guy or whatever you go and say I want to
be your girlfriend or your boyfriend. That's not going to do it. You actually have to, it's
more indirect than that. You can't just say, I want
to acquire all these words. What happens is you're acquiring
them in the background. All right. And that's why when we
created
LingQ, we wanted to have a measure of the words you're learning. And I will show you a snapshot of all
the different languages that I have learned on LingQ and how many words
I know in each of those languages. And that is a statistic
that's quite encouraging, but it's not an absolute number. Um, I may know words in language, more
words in a certain language and in another language, but because I'm working on, uh,
Persian right now, I can speak it better than Czech erhaps, although I kno
w far
more words in Czech than I do in Persian. Uh, if I were to go back to
Czech, I would quickly recover it. So that this number of words, you
know, is sort of, uh, an indication of your potential in the language. It's also relative. So in some languages like the
Slavic languages, there are many forms of essentially the same word. That means that the word count the way
we count them at LingQ where we count each form of the word as a different
word, that word count is going to be a bit bloated
compared to other
languages where that's not the case. So it's not an absolute
number, but it's an indication. It's an indication that
you're making progress. You know, say six months
ago I knew 5,000 words. Now I know 20,000 words. So those moments when I feel I'm
not progressing in the language, the plateau, the doldrums. It reminds me that in fact, you
have acquired a lot of words. Now, some people say, what
does it mean to know a word? All right. Uh, you can't claim to know word
unless you c
an use it say some people. I don't agree with that. I am very much a proponent of
acquiring a large passive vocabulary. And if you understand a word in at
least one context, you know that word, at least for that context. If you come across it again, and it
doesn't make sense in that context and you look it up again and you
find that there's another scope of meaning for that word, fine. But passive vocabulary is what
it's all about because passive vocabulary is the door to reading in
the language
, understanding movies in the language, having meaningful
conversations in the language. All of which opens you up to
meaningful, compelling input. Without the passive vocabulary,
you can't do those things. So I have always been against the
idea of trying to make sure that you can use every word you learn, go to
conversation class, try to use it. If I have an opportunity to use
whatever little I've learned in the language, I will do so. And typically, even at a relatively low
vocabulary level, I
may start having sessions once or twice a week with a tutor
because it kind of helps me a little bit. It tends to make my input activities more
interesting for me, but fundamentally I rely on increasing my word count my
passive vocabulary because that's what's going to enable me to learn the language. And if we acquire these words in what
I would call an honest way, which means through massive listening and reading, we
are not only acquiring the words we are acquiring familiarity with the langu
age. Because again, it's a bit like the I've
often referred to sort of a dog races where the dogs chase a mechanical rabbit. If we are trying to increase
our vocabulary, that drags us through all this content. And as we are listening and reading
our brain is becoming more and more familiar with the language,
increasing our comprehension level, increasing our passive vocabulary so
that we can then do more things in the language, including engage with
people in meaningful conversa... conversation.
That's not to say that I
don't occasionally, you know, uh, do the flashcards. Predominantly phrases, by the way. I very much recommend doing flashcards
for phrases rather than individual words. I will sometimes pick up interesting
dictionaries, for example, you know, I like this, uh, you know... so I can see German and Russian
side-by-side, it's just fun to do that. I don't know what it's doing
for me, but it's fun to do that. Similarly. I have one here for Portuguese. So I can see Portuguese a
nd German
side by side, which is fun and expands my sense of the language. Similar to here we have a... so I can see Russian
and Czech side by side. These are fun things to do. There's nothing wrong with doing
them, but fundamentally the words are acquired through input. And, uh, as we acquire these words,
we are acquiring the language. And so if your word count at LingQ
is now up to 10,000, 20,000, 30,000, it's not necessarily something that
you can brag to other people about, but it is an indi
cation that you
are progressing in the language. Now I did make some notes here,
but I'm not going to worry about. Uh, I had a few other things that I
wanted to say, but I can't remember them, but I just want to leave you
with that thought that work on your vocabulary, work on words and phrases. Uh, if you have more opportunity to
speak and if you speak more, you'll speak better, more fluently, but
you have to have that basis in the language, which comes from having a
large passive vocabulary be
cause the native speakers that you will encounter,
uh, either face-to-face individually or with a group or in movies or books
or podcasts, they all have in almost every case, a larger passive vocabulary
in your target language than you do. And to understand them and
interact with them and, and benefit from interacting with them. You need that large passive vocabulary. So there you have it, words. How we acquire words. It still comes back to
that basic massive input. Good luck. And I will leave y
ou a couple
of videos that I have done previously on the same subject. Hopefully I don't contradict myself. Bye for now.
Comments
How do you go about increasing your vocabulary? 10 Secrets of Language Learning ⇢ https://www.thelinguist.com LingQ Grammar Guides ⇢ https://www.lingq.com/en/grammar-resource/ My blog ⇢ https://blog.thelinguist.com/ The LingQ blog ⇢ https://www.lingq.com/blog/ My Podcast ⇢ https://soundcloud.com/lingostevehttps://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/learn-languages-with-steve-kaufmann/id1437851870 --- Social Media Instagram ⇢ https://www.instagram.com/lingosteve_/ TikTok ⇢ https://www.tiktok.com/@lingosteve Facebook ⇢ https://www.facebook.com/lingosteve Twitter ⇢ https://twitter.com/lingosteve LingQ Discord ⇢ https://discord.gg/ShPTjyhwTN
My memory is really bad, so I really can't memorize vocabulary by writing them down in a notebook and trying to memorize them. Rather, I memorize whole sentences in contexes and situations. My body can remember so much more than my brain. Weird, but true.
wow almost hitting the 500k mark, thanks a lot for all these videos Steve! we much appreciate it!
I can definitely get behind this! I'm relearning Japanese after not speaking it for about 10 years. I remember a lot more about the grammar than I do actual vocabulary... which leaves me in an awkward position when trying to have a discussion 😅. I'm doing my best to relearn as much vocab as possible so that I can actually start speaking it again, lol.
The idea that passive vocabulary is your main indicator of how far you“ve progressed in a language is very appealing to me. I think though it depends on your communicative (or for that matter non-communicative goals) you are trying to achieve in a certain language. If your aim is to be able to understand reading and listening material passively, it would help you a great deal. Once you want to communicate or write something in a language, you“d eventually have to turn your acquired passive vocabulary into an active one. Thus, being aware of the contexts (syntactical,lexical and pragmatical) in which you can actively use certain words is quite essential, I think. I would love to see comments on that.Being a linguist and polyglotte myself, I“ ve always enjoyed learning vocabulary, even out of a dictionary:)
Just found this channel and loved it at first sight!!!!Big thanks!!! Greetings from Germany from a fan of linguistics:)
I'm really grateful that I know you. every time you upload a video I learn something new. thank you for your time.
2:08 this is why you're a gem, somebody who has been through all of this, and is now sharing is knowledge in simple 10 minute videos is truly a treasure to be found. Thanks!
I will be forever thankful and grateful for you Steve for sharing your invaluable wisdom and experience, I actually totally agree with your statements but I never were able to summarize it for my self and output it elegantly and clearly as you just did, Thank you so much.
As a language teacher, I independently came to Steve's conclusions myself. This Man has it bang on!
Very Interesting video! There are a lot vocabularies that I've learned long time ago and i never use them,I don't forget them,but thanks to them I can understand more complex ideas.
My favorite sub-topic in the genre! Great assessment 👏🏾
I completely agree with you, and I also see language imput as a form of review because everything we consume in the language is only going to have repetitive words so you dont have to worry about ever seeing it again plus it'll still give you context (90% of the time) compared to if you only stuck with language programs.
It is impressive how we can learn any language by just doing simple things like reading books, listening to podcasts, and writing things in that language. When I first started to learn English, I didn't take it very seriously because I thought that if I went to school and studied English there, I would learn English as time went by, but then I realized that if I really want to learn and speak English fluently, I will have to study English everyday and make English learning a habit.
Well done, Steve. An excellent summary of this topic.
Claramente um sábio profissional, nota-se o domínio que você tem do que está falando, parabéns pelo trabalho
I love this guy! He makes learning interesting and accessible. Yay!
Thank you for sharing this amazing knowledge with us, your channel is wonderful!
Stunning! As usual! Thanks Steve.
Parfait comme toujours. J'ai 40 ans et bientôt 41 et moi qui ne suis jamais aller à l'école ( vie très particulière suite à différentes circonstances) ait commencé l'anglais il y a quelques mois ( je ne me l'étais jamais autorisée auparavant). J'avançais très lentement puis il y a environ un mois et demi je vous ai découvert ainsi que toutes vos précieuses méthodes et depuis je suis bien plus confiant. En faite, je suis en train de lire votre livre actuellement et bien qu'il existe en français je l'ai acheté en Anglais et je suis en train de le lire en Anglais ... À ma grande surprise je m'aperçois que je comprends à plus de 90% ... Parler, surtout en circonstances réel est bien plus délicat... Mais je sais que ça viendra en continuant à prendre du plaisir. Merci 🙏