Effective ways to learn vast vocabulary and retain it in Longterm Memory

[Apollys]

SRS + Dedication.  Every day.

 

Bonuses:

 - Make sure each word is initially contextualized in some way in your mind (i.e. you saw it in a sentence on a tv show, or you found an example sentence online or from a dictionary)

 - Recognize you're learning a web of information not a list of information.  If there are 5 things in your web connected to one word that can remind you of its meaning/pronunciation, you only have to have a 50% recall rate of each connection to surpass a 95% recall rate of a single memorized fact.  (Practically this means understand radicals, components, individual characters not just words, and look for connections to what you know everytime you encounter something new.)

 - Make sure your mind is focused and present, not wandering while you go through the motions of studying.  Mix up your study routine if it helps. (Maybe some days you write the words on paper. Maybe sometimes you try to invent a sentence and say it aloud for each word. And so on.)

 - Remember SRS is wayyy more effective if you do 30 minutes every day than 2 hours every 4 days.  So don't burn yourself out studying two hours a day for a month then take the next month off completely, because you would have been better off just doing 30 minutes a day the whole time.

[Sreeni]

On 3/23/2021 at 2:02 PM, Apollys said:

 - Recognize you're learning a web of information not a list of information.  If there are 5 things in your web connected to one word that can remind you of its meaning/pronunciation, you only have to have a 50% recall rate of each connection to surpass a 95% recall rate of a single memorized fact.  (Practically this means understand radicals, components, individual characters not just words, and look for connections to what you know everytime you encounter something new.)

the concept of web and list of information is quite useful. Could you please pls elaborate/help how to benefit from web type of information. 

[Apollys]

Sure, let me give a very simple example off the top of my head.

 

Suppose you are trying to recall how to write the character pronounced "chéng" that means honest.  You try to recall it directly but just thinking of the definition and sound is ringing no bells in your mind.

 

But, since you learn Chinese as a web of knowledge, not a list of individual data points, you remember that this character shares a component with the very common character of the same pronunciation, chéng, such as in the word "chéngwéi".  When you hear "chéngwéi" in your head, it triggers the character 成 to appear in your mind.

 

Next you know you need to add a radical to this character, and since honesty has to do with talking, you half-deduce and half-recall (final paragraph elaborates on this idea) that the radical should be the one about talking.  But you don't recall how to write that radical immediately, so you think of some very simple words that might use it.  How about "shuōhuà," the word that just means to talk?  Perhaps even in this moment, you forget how to write one of those characters, but you do remember that shuō is written as 说.  This gives you the radical that you're looking for.

 

Finally, you utilize one last important concept to verify your conclusion: production is always harder than recognition.  So you have used your web of knowledge and some logical deduction to arrive at a candidate answer: 诚.  When you see this character, your mind should now emit a little spark of recognition.  If it's incorrect, you will feel some discomfort or confusion upon looking at the character instead, and this suggests maybe you have an incorrect component or need to rearrange some of the parts.

 

The idea here is that you can forget all sorts of individual pieces of information and still recall the information you need by utilizing the web of knowledge and the meaningful relationships between different pieces of information.  The classic example I like to use for this, which has nothing to do with Chinese, will be included in a spoiler below.

 

 

My personal example, which arose from some reflection on my high school math:

 

Spoiler

Q: What is the derivative of sin(x)?

 

I never memorize this directly.  But I also am 100% sure I could always give you the answer immediately even if you deleted almost whatever information you wanted from my mind.

 

So I start with the idea that since a derivative is the slope of a function, the derivative of sine will have to be another periodic function with very similar properties, and this basically reduces it to cosine or negative cosine (if these don't work out, I can try others after).  So I remember the sine function starts at zero and goes up, so its derivative must be positive.  Cosine starts at 1, so the answer should be cos(x).  I can check that this answer also makes sense at pi/2 (90 degrees) where sine flattens to turn downward and cosine hits zero.

 

But suppose someone deleted the pictures of the sine and cosine graphs from my head.  Well, even without the pictures I would be able to recall some very rudimentary facts like sin(0) = 0 and cos(0) = 1.

 

But furthermore, suppose someone deleted all the numerical information that sin(0) = 0, cos(0)= 1, and so forth, from my brain.  Well I just go back to the unit circle, remembering that sine corresponds to y and cosine corresponds to x, and I can see that sine therefore starts and zero and increases to 1 at 90 degrees, while cosine starts at 1 and decreases to 0 at 90 degrees.

 

But suppose I forgot about how the unit circle works.  Then I would go to my physics knowledge, where we do a lot of computations by breaking forces and velocities into x and y components.  The experience with all these equations and calculations would remind me that x corresponds to cosine and y corresponds to sine (when the angle is measured in the "standard" way).

 

But suppose someone deleted all the physics knowledge from my brain!  Well, I'd still be okay, because I can think back to trigonometry basics in which I learned that given a right triangle, the cosine function is related to the adjacent side, and the sine is related to the opposite side.

 

Okay, let's suppose they deleted that information from my brain.  Suppose even the sheer definitions of what sine and cosine are have vanished.  Surely I must be in trouble now.  Nope!  I remember the law of cosines, which is easy to remember because it's just an extension of the Pythagorean Theorem: c2 = a2 + b2 - 2ab cos(C). For a right triangle, this must reduce to the Pythagorean theorem, therefore cos(90 degrees) = 0, so cosine corresponds to x in the unit circle.  Or, if my unit circle knowledge is gone, that means cosine corresponds to the adjacent side in a right triangle, because one can imagine a right triangle with the angle in question almost 90 degrees, which makes the opposite and hypotenuse side very long, and the adjacent side almost zero.

 

And I could keep going on and on.  Suppose you deleted the Pythagorean theorem and the law of cosines.  Maybe the law of sines too just to be safe.  I'd go to basic trigonometric identities like double angle formulas and sum identities.  Suppose you deleted those, I'd use the fact that tangent equals sine over cosine, but tangent is just slope which is rise over run, or y/x.  And on I go...

 

You'd pretty much have to delete every single piece of information related to trigonometry plus a solid chunk of my physics knowledge, so that I no longer have any clue what a sine even is anymore.  Only when I no longer have even a single hint of what a sine and cosine is left in my knowledge web, will I finally be unable to answer the question.

 

This is an extreme example because math is the paradigm of a knowledge web.  The only "information" that actually exists in mathematics are a few basic axioms and then the definitions for whatever terminology we create.  Everything else is just the web of logical deductions that follow from those axioms.  However extreme this example may be, the concept can be applied whenever learning almost anything in life, and Chinese is fantastically well-suited to this knowledge-web approach.

 

[somethingfunny]

Or in other words, all supposedly “higher-level” thinking such as “problem-solving skills” or “critical thinking”, are ultimately based in knowledge and knowledge recall.  This is why it is wrong to deny school aged children access to knowledge-rich curriculums and fob them off with alternatives like “project-based” or “discovery-based” learning.

 

For more information on this web-of-knowledge idea you can read about schema.  Your mind works by creating links between pieces of information. That’s why people who know more stuff are more creative - they are able to make new and exciting links between the things they know. 

[mungouk]

See also the graphs made by @hskalan Alan Davies at https://hskhsk.com/graphs which show the connections between words that use the same character or component.

 

 

This is based on HSK levels, and once you get to 4 or above the graphs become harder to read, but I think the lower levels are useful and interesting anyway.

 

Also I noticed in another thread recently that @imron mentioned a preference for learning 2-character words rather than single-character words using flashcards. Again, using the power of associative memory. 

 

[Sreeni]

@ApollysThanks for the detailed explanation of web learning. 

 

23 hours ago, Apollys said:

When you hear "chéngwéi" in your head, it triggers the character 成 to appear in your mind.

 

成 is completed. Which variant of chéng is honest?

 

from my Anki

成 chéng completed, finished, fixed, OK

诚 chéng sincere, authentic, really, truly

 

i encountered chéng multiple times, while reading and remember it as “completed”. 诚 = sincere I made connection earlier, but lost..

 

 

21 hours ago, somethingfunny said:

For more information on this web-of-knowledge idea you can read about schema.  Your mind works by creating links between pieces of information. That’s why people who know more stuff are more creative - they are able to make new and exciting links between the things they know. 

 

great incite. Thanks for the link and sharing

 

@mungouk thanks again for sharing the sample network image for web thinking

[Sreeni]

I learnt what this character 扁  means and entered into Anki. forgot it when reviewing Anki.

 

https://youtu.be/Lrt7mzMBO5c

 

watched this video and hope this will help in retaining it. Can you share your exp with some other characters which you forgot and how it worked later to retain it permanently? thanks

[Apollys]

诚 is the character I was referring to (single character definitions can be a little weird in Chinese sometimes).

 

For your next question, I have had that problem often.  Usually it's because as a beginner I didn't know many characters, so each one was relatively unique, but as I learned more, there were more similar characters in my mind which makes it easier to confuse them.  I usually have a few steps to remedy the issue.

 

1) Try to make sense of the character as much as possible.  Perhaps there are now insights available to you that weren't available when you first learned the character.  Example: the character 扰 has given me quite a bit of trouble, especially as I learned many other characters with the 尤 component all pronounced as you: 犹，优，鱿.  So I can try to make sense of it as a hand which causes a disturbance plus a phonetic component.  However, you and rao are a bit too different for me to be fully comfortable with this.

 

2) Try to specifically differentiate the characters you tend to mix up.  This is the method that really resolved the 扰 issue for me.  If I look at the list of characters 犹，扰，优，鱿，I just have to recognize that the character with the hand radical is the one that means to bother, and the rest are "normal" (i.e. pronounced as you).

 

3) Specifically drill the character, practicing it in as many different words as possible.  For me, 贴 is a great example of a character that just couldn't be learned by any method other than raw practice.  It just doesn't make any sense to me how the physical form of the character relates to either its meaning or its pronunciation.  The word 粘贴 helps me recall the right component, at the expense of creating another confusion, how do I distinguish the two.  Drilling other words like 体贴 has helped me to distinguish the two.  But this is a case where I really felt that plain old repetition was the only way.  Notice however that I still looked for variety and utilized this web of knowledge strategy by practicing many different words rather than just writing the isolated character over and over again.

[Sreeni]

1 hour ago, Apollys said:

诚 is the character I was referring to (single character definitions can be a little weird in Chinese sometimes).

 

I learnt this and noted down as sincere, authentic, really, truly..when i was reading might be sincere suited as per context, just noted the 4 meanings. Dictionary mentioned honest also. Sincere and honest are similar. 

1 hour ago, Apollys said:

1) Try to make sense of the character as much as possible. 

 

1 hour ago, Apollys said:

2) Try to specifically differentiate the characters you tend to mix up. 

 

1 hour ago, Apollys said:

3) Specifically drill the character, practicing it in as many different words as possible.

 

Thanks for these 3 great suggestions and explanation.

[Sreeni]

Olle Linga, who had learnt 1000 words per month. good inspiration. he explained his methods and 2 major methods as 

 

1. Integrate what you learn into the web of things you already know

2. Make sure that the associative bonds are very strong

 

The detailed link. can you check whether it motivates you to learn vocabulary faster?  

https://www.hackingchinese.com/how-to-learn-words-really-fast/

[Moshen]

Quote

The detailed link. can you check whether it motivates you to learn vocabulary faster?  

https://www.hackingchinese.com/how-to-learn-words-really-fast/

 

Nope!  The trouble with this method is that it only works for or works best for people who tend to have vivid visual memories.  My most vivid memories are auditory.  I can remember telephone numbers if I make them into a melody.  I remember names best by remembering how someone said it or by a rhyme it has with something.

 

Bottom line, everyone is different, and the effort to come up with a learning method that will work for everyone is doomed.

 

Ditto for trying to persuade others that what works for you will necessarily work for them.

[Sreeni]

2 hours ago, Moshen said:

Ditto for trying to persuade others that what works for you will necessarily work for them.

 

@Moshen it motivates me to try, never mentioned it worked for me. 1000 words per month is 35 words per day. I was asking whether anybody tried. But for some other people (as per the comments) also it worked.

 

for last 3.5 months, i am actively learning and I learned ~700 words and working on issues like retention of those vocabulary. Some words already forgot. Anyway let me try  

[mungouk]

I just came across this blog article about teaching English vocabulary in secondary schools... but there are some interesting starting points for thinking about teaching and learning of vocab in general:

 

https://scottthornbury.wordpress.com/2013/06/02/v-is-for-vocabulary-teaching/

 

1. The Principle of Cognitive Depth: “The more one manipulates, thinks about, and uses mental information, the more likely it is that one will retain that information. In the case of vocabulary, the more one engages with a word (deeper processing), the more likely the word will be remembered for later use.” (Schmitt 2000: 120).

 

2. The Principle of Retrieval: “The act of successfully recalling an item increases the chance that the item will be remembered. It appears that the retrieval route to that item is in some way strengthened by being successfully used.” (Baddeley, 1997: 112)

 

3. The Principle of Associations: “The human lexicon is believed to be a network of associations, a web-like structure of interconnected links. When students are asked to manipulate words, relate them to other words and to their own experiences, and then to justify their choices, these word associations are reinforced.” (Sökmen, 1997: 241-2).

 

4. The Principle of Re-contextualization: “When words are met in reading and listening or used in speaking and writing, the generative of the context will influence learning. That is, if the words occur in new sentence contexts in the reading text, learning will be helped. Similarly, having to use the word to say new things will add to learning.” (Nation 2001: 80).

 

5. The Principle of Multiple Encounters: “Due to the incremental nature of vocabulary acquisition, repeated exposures are necessary to consolidate a new word in the learner’s mind.” (Schmitt & Carter 2000: 4).

 

References, for convenience:

• Baddeley, A. (1997)  Human Memory: Theory and Practice (Revised edition), Hove: Psychology Press.
• Nation, I.S.P. (2001) Learning Vocabulary in Another Language, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Schmitt, N. (2000) Vocabulary in Language Teaching, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Schmitt, N. & Carter; R. (2000) ‘The lexical advantages of narrow reading for second language learners’, TESOL Journal, 9/1, 4-9.
• Sökmen, A.J. (1997) ‘Current trends in teaching second language vocabulary,’ in Schmitt, N. and McCarthy, M. (Eds.) Vocabulary: Description, Acquisition and Pedagogy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

See also:

 

• Thornbury, S. (2017). The new AZ of ELT: A dictionary of terms and concepts. Macmillan.

• Thornbury, S. (2002) How to Teach Vocabulary, Harlow: Pearson.

 

...there's lots of stuff in this second book related to the discussion so far, especially in Chapter 2 "How words are learned" covering how your vocabulary ("lexicon") is constructed as a web, what it actually means to "know" a word, and so on.

[Sreeni]

The Brain Coach, Jim Kwik says the following 8 techniques are important to remember vocabulary. He call this as MOM, Mother Of all Memory techniques.

 

1. Association : Associate with some thing you already new. Like web connection or principal of association.

 

2. Familiarity : It is like every day you do some activity say eat rice, connect the word with rice. you automatically revisiting. for e.g if you regularly use the word, you never forget that.

 

3. Chunking: People remember information in chunks, which make it complete

 

4. Recency : Mind remember recent incidents better. 

 

5. Emotion : Attach an emotion to a particular vocabulary and it will help you to remember 

 

6. Uniqueness : If you want to remember anything for e.g with mnemonic, it must be unique. If not unique you will confuse

 

7. Visualisation: if you see something, the chances are less to forget. If you read one Novel and if you watch a movie of that novel it is easy to remember. Some words you can connect with images. If you connect you will never forget

 

8. Primacy: The Primacy/Recency Effect is the observation that information presented at the beginning (Primacy) and end (Recency) of a learning episode tends to be retained better than information presented in the middle.

 

[mungouk]

6 minutes ago, Sreeni said:

8 techniques

 

Thanks @Sreeni — it would be useful to also have definitions of what these mean. Any links?

 

[NanJingDongLu]

It seems to me like the main area of disagreement in this thread is the definition of what it means to have completed the learning process for something. Here is one way to think about it:

 

Level 1 might be basic familiarity with a word. 日 is rì 月 is yuè 小 is xiǎo. Many beginners might start with pinyin and meaning, but I would guess that for many intermediate and above learners you often recognise a character and know how to say it, but aren't really sure what it means or how to use it.

 

Level 2 might be to simply understand the definition. Sometimes this is easy. 米饭 Mǐfàn means rice. 99% of people instantly understand and need no further explanation. For some words, this is less easy. For example, this week I learned that 领养 lǐngyǎng means adopt (as in adopt a child), 收养 shōuyǎng also means adopt, and while usually interchangeable, 收养 leans more in the direction of adopting someone you already know, or not by choice. For example if you adopt your nephew, or the child of a friend. It could be more considered to be to "take someone in". 领养 leans more towards the meaning of someone who didn't have a child and decided they wanted to adopt, so went out looking for a child to adopt that they previously had no connection to. This also applies to an animal, so if you decide you want a cat and go to a shelter it's 领养, but if you have a stray that keeps coming to your door for food and you decide to keep it, that's 收养. This is not a simple definition, and takes some 'learning' to understand.

 

Level 3 might be to be able to recall in the other direction. It's one thing to understand what someone else is saying, but if you want to speak, you need to know it in both directions. What was rice again? Me something? Ma fan? Something like that...

 

Level 4 might be to actually use a word. We don't learn languages to do word list based tests. You need to know the grammar and context that words are appropriate in, and then be able to use them consistently without prompting. Many HSK2 and HSK3 students know the names of various foods & ingredients, but as soon as they walk into a restaurant all of a sudden all you hear is 这个 那个 "This one. That one". They definitely know how to say "the pork dish with green vegetables" or "Chicken fried rice and a coke" in class, but it's a lot harder to use it in context and under pressure.

 

Level 5 I think is the important one for this conversation. After you've studied a word and then moved on to the next topic or chapter in your book etc. If you don't think about this word for 2 weeks or 6 months or however long, will you still remember everything above? What mungouk posted expands on this even more into multiple categories, but for now I'll just call all of that depth level 5.

 

  

On 3/16/2021 at 10:03 PM, somethingfunny said:

You can’t learn new words in a day.

To level 5? Absolutely not. To level 2? You certainly can, although the retention rate won't be nearly 100% of what you attempted to learn in that day.

  

On 3/18/2021 at 12:06 AM, Sreeni said:

I learnt tones, numbers, week days and few other characters before Radicals, but was not connecting and remembering them as solo words, but very difficult to make connections.

I don't think it's a good idea to exclusively learn lists of words, especially as a beginner. Without the context I don't think you can reasonably learn higher than level 3.

 

On 3/19/2021 at 12:03 AM, Sreeni said:

My advise is you select some text book and learn sentence by sentences, para by paras, lesson by lessons,  book by books...So refer back to your sentence and see which meaning best fits to that word and write it down as the first meaning and continue writing others.

For someone so keen to learn as fast as possible this seems like a really laborious and slow method. I don't think you'll achieve 1000 new words per month with this method, even if you put in 6 hours per day.

 

On 3/23/2021 at 6:02 AM, Apollys said:

SRS + Dedication.  Every day.

I think most people who have made it to intermediate and beyond would agree this is the most efficient method for achieving level 5 consistently. Are there other things you can combine this with to have better results? Are there some methods of using SRS that are better than others? Definitely. You'll still never achieve 6,000 unique, new words at level 5 in 6 months as a beginner though.

 

On 4/30/2021 at 5:22 AM, Sreeni said:

Olle Linga, who had learnt 1000 words per month.

From the link provided:

"Naturally, learning characters and words isn’t enough, you need to be able to remember them for a long time and access them quickly. The first problem is most easily solved by spaced repetition software (such as Skritter, which is geared towards writing characters) and the second problem by actually using Chinese as much as possible."

Well it's quite clear his definition of the 1,000 words he learned is not Level 5, which is why most people here are saying it's impossible to do. And what is his recommended method for moving those 'learned' words towards level 5? Spaced repetition, aka SRS, and practice in context (ie not word lists).

[Insectosaurus]

4 hours ago, Sreeni said:

The Brain Coach, Jim Kwik says the following 8 techniques are important to remember vocabulary. He call this as MOM, Mother Of all Memory techniques.

 

Has this Jim Kwik done any actual academic research or is he mostly selling an idea that sounds attractive? I get a bit skeptical when I see someone referring to himself as "The Brain Coach".

[Sreeni]

13 hours ago, mungouk said:

Thanks @Sreeni — it would be useful to also have definitions of what these mean. Any links?

 

@mungouk, I am following Jim Kwik and i received an email. It has photo with all 8 techniques. I tried to search that video, could not find same. So updated 8 techniques in my own words and image. Below is a bit different, but might help. will post original link when I encounter it later.

 

https://youtu.be/hfi0OiMuXcM

 

8 hours ago, Insectosaurus said:

Has this Jim Kwik done any actual academic research or is he mostly selling an idea that sounds attractive? I get a bit skeptical when I see someone referring to himself as "The Brain Coach"

 

Please go through free videos of him on youtube and form your own opinion. He is the author of the best seller book “Limitless”. I have that book with me. 

 

Might be he is selling ideas that are attractive and works.

 

I admire him as genuine person with workable ideas/suggestions.

[Insectosaurus]

3 hours ago, Sreeni said:

Might be he is selling ideas that are attractive and works.

 

If so, then he should provide the evidence to back it up.

 

I was a bit surprised to find no reviews of his works in my university catalog (not only academics get reviewed) so I checked his YouTube channel. It's exactly what I expected, motivational talks without further reference, and most interviews seem to be with other non-academic so called experts (on breathing, fasting and so on). If you like his talks, by all means, you do that, but it's important to distinguish between actual research (with is not perfect) from this (which is hardly anything). I know a lot of people will find it boring to watch a few hours of talks from researchers - I've provided a link for a talk by Paul Nation, who @munguok mentioned - but it's a step I personally think is worth trying for everyone. Or, at least, try to find interviews, since they tend to appear in podcasts and the like.

 

My personal guess about this Jim Kwik is that it would turn out that a lot of the stuff he says are established facts, while others are groundless, or at worst, shown to be ineffective.

 

P.S. I always sound a bit more harsh in English than I intend, it's the language barrier, nothing else. I'm working on it.

[Moshen]

Insectosaurus, you made me curious, so I checked out Jim Kwik's bio.  He seems to have NO academic credentials.  None.  Maybe he doesn't even have a college degree.  At best he is someone who has tried different things that worked for himself and has a gift passing those ideas along to others.

 

Some people like this type of "expert," others don't.

 

https://jimkwik.com/about/