Vocabulary Acquisition Techniques

[yohosuff]

Hi! I spend a lot of my time trying to increase my vocabulary, and I thought it would be a good idea to see what other people like myself do to accomplish this.

Please post YOUR vocabulary acquisition techniques for all to see and learn from. Thanks!

My technique.

Find an article/story that isn't so difficult its boring but not so easy its worthless.

Read along until you come across a word you don't know.

Write down 10 - 15 words this way to create a list.

Stop reading for the day and spend time memorizing the list.

Practice reading the word, guessing the word from looking at its meaning in your mother language, writing the word from hearing it pronounced, and using it in a sentence.

Do a list a day, and re-read the story/article many times.

What do you think? Suggestions?

Add your comments, and/or your own techniques!

[Scoobyqueen]

Good suggestion for sharing techniques.

I also identify texts suitable on the basis of the criteria you outline.

I read the text once without looking anything up and without pausing too much at the new words. I then go through the text again and stop at the words I didnt know. Before looking each word up I try to guess its meaning, sometimes looking up my guess in the English section of the dictionary first (it is quite satisfying knowing you were right and this "emotion" can help to retain new vocabuary).

I also make a list of the new words, or underline them in the text (but not systematically for every new text) but do not include obscure ones, ie ones that I know I will probably not come across that often. I try to find an additional context for each new word as this helps retention. I use my own examples and also use dict.cn for that or simply do a search on baidu.

I try to read the text later to ensure I remembered the new words in their origin context. If I have time I consult the list of new words, writing out another examples using that word. AdditionallyI try to make sure I use these words over the next days, sometimes asking Chinese people to give another example.

I find that- for me- the context contributes more to vocabulary retention than the use of cards and lists. I also the find that the frustration of not remembering a word and having to look it up in the dictionary again, contributes to retention (rather than just turning the card), but it is more labourious of course. I also note down how many times i had to look up a word in order to encourage the frustration element and thereby concentrate more on it.

I think it is important to keep the brain on its toes, thinking up own examples, finding other examples and vary the learning. It is bit like a physical work-out. The body improves mostly with a varied programme.

[yohosuff]

Thanks Scoobyqueen! I like your technique of not bothering with words that aren't in common use. My problem is that sometimes I'm not sure which ones are worth writing down, so I just do them all!

More contributions are welcome!

[renzhe]

I use rote memorisation a lot, which is not everyone's cup of tea. I'm trying to get familiar with all the words in the HSK tests. About half an hour each day.

I supplement that by watching TV series, listening to podcasts, and reading. If I see a word that I have learned before, I'll pause and try to remember what it meant. If it's a word I'd never seen before, I ignore it and try to guess.

If find constant lookups in dictionaries while reading to disturb my reading pleasure, get boring very fast, and limit my studying (I like going out to read, in the park or a cafe or something). I find that this way, I make better use of my time.

But it's a controversial topic, many people hate it

[OneEye]

Lately I've been printing out transcriptions of the banter in ChinesePod lessons and highlighting any words I come across that I don't know. Then I look them up in Pleco and add them to my flashcard deck. After a few days of doing flashcard reviews, I know the word. It's pretty much automatic, just due to seeing it a few times over the course of a few days. Once I've got a decent vocab, I'll start going through the newspaper and doing the same thing.

[renzhe]

I've been thinking about starting a discussion about how people learn vocabulary, and this seems as good a thread as any to do it. I'll start by describing my (somewhat complicated -- I'm an engineer LOL) way of doing it.

I separate the vocabulary study into characters and multi-character words. With characters, I keep track of every single character I've ever learned. I put them into my flashcard program, and I also put them into a text file I can open with any editor. The text file only contains the characters (and some line breaks, for easier orientation). For my own orientation, I also sort them according to frequency and group in blocks of 500. It looks roughly like this:

的一是不了在人有我他这个们中来上大为和国

地到以说时要就出会可也你对生能而子那得于

着下自之年过发后作里用道行所然家种事成方

So there is one file which contains every character I've ever learned, in plaintext (the same characters are also in my flashcard program. The advantage of having them all in this format is that I can easily write scripts to do interesting things. For example, I can download a list of the most commonly used 2000 characters, and write a simple program which will tell me which characters from this list I haven't learned yet. Or I can download a list of all characters belonging to a certain HSK level, and see how many (and which ones) I'm missing.

What I do is to try and follow the HSK guidelines and the most common characters to determine what I learn first. I'll automatically extract all the characters from the HSK 1 set I still need to learn, then add those to my list (and my flashcard program), then look how many of the top 500 I'm missing, then learn those, then look at what I'm missing from HSK 2, then top 1000, and so on.

What I will also do is add the characters which come up in the volume of New Practical Chinese Reader that I'm currently using. Before starting a new book, I will go through all the vocabulary in that book, and pick out all the characters I don't know yet. Then I add them to my list and to my flashcard program, and study them.

The result of this is that I get lists of a few hundred characters at regular intervals that I can learn. When I'm finished with those, I add the next batch. The way it's set up, I start with the most important and most common characters, and work my way to the less common ones (HSK 4, characters not in the top 2000, etc.) I also cover the characters used in my textbook.

I use a Spaced Repetition flashcard program which automatically gives you items for review, and spaces them out so the stuff you know well comes up less often. But no program is perfect, so I sometimes to manual review. For example, I will go through the most commonly used 1000 characters (I have them sorted by frequency), one by one, and sort out all the ones where I made a tone mistake, or wasn't sure about the meaning, or was unsure in any way, and put them in a new list. This came out to about 100 characters, so I drilled those every single day for a couple of weeks. After that, I took the next 1000 characters (this was closer to 300 characters where I wasn't completely sure, or made a mistake), then drilled those every day for a couple of weeks. The result is being very sure about the top 2000 characters. This process is very painful, but it brings results. Most importantly, it gives me confidence that I've learned stuff.

When it comes to word study, I also use a flashcard program, but I have no separate list. I only concentrate on the vocabulary which is in the HSK vocabulary lists, they're the only ones I put in my flashcard program. There are other words I might know, from a textbook, or from a book I'm reading, or similar, but I don't enter those. My goal here is to know all the words from the HSK vocabulary, as I feel these are really important. I'm still 4-5000 words short here, so I'm not too keen on throwing loads of other words into the mix either. The other words I remember through traditional means: reviewing lessons, exposure through TV shows, reading them over and over in a book, etc. I know more words than are in my flashcard program, but I don't see tracking every single word you've ever learned to be as productive as tracking characters. For some reason, I feel much safer knowing exactly which characters I've learned.

The words (I'm currently on the HSK 3 set) are mostly useful, as I find them in the books and TV shows I'm reading/watching. So I have some reinforcement through the textbook, the books and listening exercises I do. The goal is to cover the entire HSK vocabulary as quickly as possible, at which point I intend to just learn through reading and listening exposure.

I always make sure that I've learned all the relevant characters before learning the words which use them. This makes learning words far easier than learning characters, in my experience, so I can memorise them more quickly.

Is there anyone else doing anything this convoluted?

EDIT: I can provide the (python) programs I use to process my stuff if anyone is interested (finding duplicate characters, finding missing characters, looking up words automatically in CEDICT, etc.), but it will only be useful to people with some programming experience, it's not very user friendly.

[renzhe]

Perhaps another post on how exactly I go about learning new vocab (I have no idea where to put it in that mess of a post up there).

I will add a set of about 30 new items (characters or words) to my "drilling deck" at a time. I will go through this deck at least 3 times per day. After about 3-7 days, I will know the new items very well (at least most of them), and I'll mark them as learned.

If a character (or a word) keeps giving me trouble after a couple of days, or if I have a tendency to forget it after having learnt it, I will invent the dumbest and most outrageous mnemonic I can think of and memorise that. This usually takes care of the hard nuts.

Once I've cleared most of the drilling deck, I'll fill it with fresh words, and repeat the process.

I aim to have about 50-60 items for review every day (these are the ones I know, but need to keep fresh by going over them from time to time), and about 30-40 items in the drilling deck, for both words and characters. If I'm getting too few items for review, I will drill more new ones, and mark them as learnt in a huge batch sooner. If I'm getting many items for review every day, I'll lay off of new items until the number stabilises around 50-60 items again, as much of my mental effort has to go into keeping old knowledge fresh.

I find that if I get too many items to review per day, my learning ability suffers, so I try to keep it steady at around 50-60. Reviewing 100 items at once is quite annoying.

I also try to time the biggest review sessions for the weekend, so I'll really unload on new characters/words on Thursday and Friday. On the weekend, I have more free time, and I can space many more reviews throughout the day.

[yersi]

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[SkyFitsHeaven]

I think it depends on what your goals are. Are you trying to pass an HSK exam? Then by all means do all the reading of books and newspapers you can to glean words.

BUT if you are focusing on speaking Chinese, I would strongly recommend watching Chinese movies. You'll learn the "real" words that Chinese speakers use. You also won't waste a lot of time learning terms that most likely aren't going to emerge in a conversation. This is one reason why some Chinese people have strange English. They memorize dictionaries and have no idea of how to actually use the words. They insert words into conversations that give you a strange feeling.

I'm a big believer in using film to supplement learning!

[renzhe]

Then you sound like you will really love our (shameless plug) Grand First Episode Project! (/shameless plug)