Word Lists for Endless Vocabulary Expansion?

[victorhart]

I've been learning languages all my life and dabbling in Mandarin for just 8 months, 30 minutes a day. I'm actually doing an unusual language acquisition experiment using Mandarin.
 
I'm generally not a big fan of word lists. They seem like a great idea at first, but are they really an efficient acquisition strategy long term? Do they get terms deeply ingrained in memory so that one has long-term retention? Or do you need emotionally rich contexts to reach those deeper memory banks?
 
Despite my misgivings, I have been lured once again by the word list concept. I make the list myself while watching videos. After getting started with Mandarin, I have even thought about using word lists to improve my mastery of languages I already speak fluently.
 
I recently wrote two blog posts about word lists. The first describes what I am doing concretely in Mandarin, and the second is a bit of a theoretical daydream about how one could endlessly expand one's vocabulary in several languages.

http://mandarinexperiment.com/2014/08/17/a-word-a-day-keeps-the-textbooks-away-week-30/

http://mandarinexperiment.com/2014/08/31/endless-vocabulary-expansion-week-32/

[Law-West]

If you're using flashcards I would recommend Pleco's flashcard function, since it lets you add words directly from the dictionary with just a click. So while you're watching videos you can look up new words and immediately add them to a deck, which is pretty much what I do besides chatting in Chinese and some reading/listening practice.

[abcdefg]

I'm generally not a big fan of word lists. They seem like a great idea at first, but are they really an efficient acquisition strategy long term? Do they get terms deeply ingrained in memory so that one has long-term retention? Or do you need emotionally rich contexts to reach those deeper memory banks?

 

From what I've seen, most people here would agree with you that word lists are useful to "jump start" understanding of a specific topic or for preparing for an exam, but that other methods work better for long-term vocabulary building.

[imron]

Word lists you make yourself from context and from content you are consuming are completely different from word lists made by other people that may or may not have much relevance to you.

 

Word lists from context are very useful.  Word lists compiled by other people not as much.

[victorhart]

Law-West, thank you for the suggestion. I will check it out, but it's probably not allowed within the self-imposed rules of my experiment, so I will only use them later on. Sounds like you have a very good approach, I'd be curious to here more about your studies and progress.

 

abcdefg and imron, I tend to agree with both of you. Thanks for your comments!