Drilling single words vs learning naturally over repeated encounters?

[ZhuoMing]

Does anyone here have an opinion on the effectiveness of drilling certain words that they have trouble with in order to expand vocabulary? I know plenty of people who will bring some new words that they struggle with to a teacher, and create example sentences and practice the different use-cases until they know it by heart. I have tried this approach in the past but feel that it might be a waste of time because most of the time, the words I choose for this would end up being not so useful for me at the time.   

 

My personal vocabulary acquisition method is to just read novels and listen to podcasts. Then, when I encounter a new word that seems useful to me and/or has a particularly high frequency (according to a word frequency dictionary I have installed in pleco), I simply add it to my SRS flashcards. I don't go out of my way to fully understand the word, and I don't expect to become an expert on the word solely from SRS. I see the SRS as a way to maintain these vocabulary words in a sort of "staging area" for passive vocabulary. That way when it eventually comes up again in a conversation, or a book/podcast then I can hopefully recognize it more quickly than I would otherwise, and strengthen my knowledge of the word based on context/use-case etc until it becomes a part of my active vocabulary. I consider this a more "natural" way to learn vocabulary since I am mainly just letting it happen and soak in over the course of a long period of time and many encounters.

 

I am sure this is not a one size fits all situation, and for some words it might be more efficient to drill it into your brain, and for other words that are more complex and/or less frequent, it is probably better to go for the natural approach. I am wondering if anybody has any thoughts on this. Part of me thinks I use this natural approach as an excuse to avoid doing vocabulary drills that might otherwise be beneficial to expanding my active vocabulary. Since I have recently started doing italki classes for 1 hour a week, I am wondering if I should come into each class with a list of words that I want to learn and go through with my teacher, or if that is a waste of time. 

[Takeshi]

Personally I am quite a similar learner to you, and I have learned basically all my vocabulary naturally/passively. But my "language learning" style in general is basically just to naturally acquire the language by putting myself in situations where I can get input/exposure, and get chances to use the language. This is a lot easier if you actually live in China (but honestly, with the interconnected world now, perhaps possible anywhere; just be a 抖音 streamer or something and do tons of pk lives and also open a 微博 while you're at it).

 

I guess everyone has their own opinions. I realize that not everybody can learn foreign languages easily, and some people find that drilling new vocabulary works for them. I guess if you don't have the ability (or opportunity) to learn new words efficiently through natural exposure, then drilling might be the best method for you.

 

What I really like about the natural exposure method of learning vocabulary is, I actually get a feel of what the words mean (not just from a dictionary definition), I also get a feel of the connotations of the word, words it is commonly used with etcetc. I feel all this knowledge helps me use the words more naturally and correctly in discourse, and is much more difficult, if not impossible to acquire if you actively do your vocab learning.

 

One catch is that, as a learner, your grammar is always slowly building, so I can say my method allows me to use language well /today/, but during the process of learning I make a lot of mistakes, and this can be embarrassing. My personal technique to avoid embarrassment is to just ignore and forget about it all, and try my best to never admit to mistakes in language. So for example, if I use words incorrectly in a way that causes a small misunderstanding, I would usually just go ahead and play with the misunderstanding without trying to explain what I really meant (unless obviously it was something important). I also generally pretend to understand everything I can get away pretending to understand (even if I don't completely understand it). I choose to do this because I find it makes communication more smooth, and most of the time small misunderstandings about say what you ate for breakfast won't kill you. Eventually my language improves and these issues slowly go away. This may not be an approach that everyone can afford to do, and you have to balance the social awkwardness between danger of misunderstandings, and danger of coming off as a difficult interlocutor.

 

I do use dictionaries sometimes though. Two main use cases are: helping me to remember words that I really know but I can't come up with, and learning really hard/obscure/rare words that I am confident I will never ever encounter in daily life in a high enough frequency to understand them. For the former, I actually already have a "feel" of the implied meanings, and contexts, and connotations of the word already, sometimes the dictionary entry will help remind me of those, but not necessarily (a lot of dictionary entries are very basic), but usually when I see the word, along with the similar/related words in a dictionary, I can use my judgement to decide the right word to use. For the latter case, these words are so hard/obscure/rare that basically nobody has a "feel" of the word in the way I am talking about, so the dictionary entry itself is usually sufficient enough to use the word properly if you ever have to for some reason.

 

My use of dictionaries to help me remember words I already know passively sounds similar to your method of only making flashcards for your passive vocabulary, and I can see it being a helpful way to make your passive vocabulary more accessible without being confusing.

[Sreeni]

15 hours ago, ZhuoMing said:

I don't go out of my way to fully understand the word, and I don't expect to become an expert on the word solely from SRS. I see the SRS as a way to maintain these vocabulary words in a sort of "staging area" for passive vocabulary. That way when it eventually comes up again in a conversation, or a book/podcast then I can hopefully recognize it more quickly than I would otherwise, and strengthen my knowledge of the word based on context/use-case etc until it becomes a part of my active vocabulary.

 

can you give one example of the new word you learnt recently? If you did not use that word for a week, will you forget that? if you forgot after a week(or when you forgot when SRS throw that word) how will you recollect?

 

normally people will not drill the word to completely understand, people will see the clues from that character whether any mnemonic or picture or story can be formed to recollect that when they forgot that word. chinese characters are based on symbols so creating mnemonics help to recollect. 

 

your normal process/rote learning mostly would be tried already by (non native) people, but when they forgot they did not have any clue to guess the meaning. drilling single word learners were once natural learners I think, as most of the things were not working they will drill to recollect from the symbols as a back up plan. some words, even the drillers try to learn by natural way

 

English and other languages the characters are not based on symbols. So chinese characters have advantage to recollect from the symbols. 

[Moshen]

Quote

English and other languages the characters are not based on symbols. So chinese characters have advantage to recollect from the symbols. 

 

Wow, I feel exactly the opposite!

 

In most languages using an alphabet, if you don't know the word you can at least pronounce it.  And sometimes the pronunciation will ring a bell.  In Chinese you do not have that advantage.  So most of the time if I see a Chinese character that is completely new to me I can only stare at it helplessly.  That's why for me Chinese is the hardest of any language I have learned so far.

[imron]

17 hours ago, ZhuoMing said:

Then, when I encounter a new word that seems useful to me and/or has a particularly high frequency (according to a word frequency dictionary I have installed in pleco), I simply add it to my SRS flashcards. I don't go out of my way to fully understand the word, and I don't expect to become an expert on the word solely from SRS. I see the SRS as a way to maintain these vocabulary words in a sort of "staging area" for passive vocabulary

I've been advocating a more or less similar approach right here on the forums for at least 10 years - all you need to do now is jump on the Delete your Deck train

[Sreeni]

1 hour ago, Moshen said:

 

In most languages using an alphabet, if you don't know the word you can at least pronounce it. 

 

you can pronounce it, that is great advantage with alphabetical languages, but can not guess the meaning correctly from alphabets, where as, if you view the chinese word and know the etymology correctly or if you know the radicals you can guess

[ZhuoMing]

5 hours ago, imron said:

all you need to do now is jump on the Delete your Deck train

Actually your posts there convinced me to delete my 5000+ card anki deck and start fresh in pleco about a year ago. I haven't done another restart since then, but my daily reviews is still very streamlined, I only spend a few minutes each day to do 50-100 cards. If it ever gets out of hand I plan to start fresh once again! 

[ZhuoMing]

7 hours ago, Sreeni said:

can you give one example of the new word you learnt recently? If you did not use that word for a week, will you forget that? if you forgot after a week(or when you forgot when SRS throw that word) how will you recollect?

 

 

A word I learned recently and added to my SRS is 酣畅. I know I learned it from the book I am currently reading, though at this point I totally forget the context. I have never used this word in my own speech, and I probably wouldn't be comfortable using it properly.  I might be able to understand it in speech because I am reviewing it through SRS, though my understanding of the meaning and appropriate contexts is vague at best.  So for me to fully "learn" this word, I will need to see some number of example uses to ingrain the meaning in my head. This could either be done intentionally all at once, with the risk of forgetting after some time if I never see it again, or to just keep waiting until I see it again and again until it becomes "learned". 

 

I am starting to lean towards the latter method because it prevents the possibility of spending time to learn a word and then forgetting it later because I never encounter it again. If I never encounter a word, I don't need to know it. If I do encounter the word again, then my understanding of it will be strengthened to some degree. So based on this (potentially flawed) logic, I am starting to feel like drilling individual words is a bit of a waste of time. 

[JF]

I gave up flash cards and memorising words pretty quickly. My philosophy is to go through my study material and check words that I don't understand, while trusting that after I've encountered and checked a word often enough it will stick even if I don't practice it million times on Anki.

[brownnoser]

i like subs2srs cards + morphman a lot for this reason. it guarantees i see the words again in another sentence provided my subs2srs bank is big enough. i'm gonna dive into doing more reading though since reading is very effective and  mandarin has really good pop-up dictionaries.

[Sreeni]

“Make sure you're doing plenty of reading (which acts as repetitions anyway)”

 

@imron Excellent Advise. more reading ?.

 

8 hours ago, imron said:

I've been advocating a more or less similar approach right here on the forums for at least 10 years - all you need to do now is jump on the Delete your Deck train

 

 can we spend on SRS, 20 cards review per day maximum?

[Sreeni]

6 hours ago, ZhuoMing said:

A word I learned recently and added to my SRS is 酣畅

 

People will not drill and spend lots of hours on this. will see whether characters help to remember the meaning quickly..

 

酣畅 :

1 merry and lively (with drinking)
2 sound (sleep)
3 with ease and verve; fully

 

what is the meaning (out of 3) more suitable to your reading? or have you logged in all 3 in SRS?

If first time you forget while reviewing SRS, just go thru the meaning again? or try differently?
 

 

 

 

 

[stapler]

On 4/21/2021 at 6:10 AM, ZhuoMing said:

A word I learned recently and added to my SRS is 酣畅. I know I learned it from the book I am currently reading, though at this point I totally forget the context. I have never used this word in my own speech, and I probably wouldn't be comfortable using it properly.  I might be able to understand it in speech because I am reviewing it through SRS, though my understanding of the meaning and appropriate contexts is vague at best.  So for me to fully "learn" this word, I will need to see some number of example uses to ingrain the meaning in my head. This could either be done intentionally all at once, with the risk of forgetting after some time if I never see it again, or to just keep waiting until I see it again and again until it becomes "learned". 

 

I personally found this to be a huge trap. You may be more advanced/aware than I was (or be specifically trying to learn to read), but when I was trying to memorise vocabulary I started recording words like this, unaware that their were fairly far down the 書面語 spectrum and inappropriate for speech in most contexts. I ended up getting fairly good at reading but would often produce some bizarre sentences while speaking as I inadvertently relied on 'written-only' words

[ZhuoMing]

That's a good point.  I do think that if I were to ever make a list of words to try to learn to speak, this specific one certainly wouldn't be on the list as it just an adjective that can be replaced by other words pretty easily. 

[imron]

On 4/21/2021 at 6:10 AM, ZhuoMing said:

So based on this (potentially flawed) logic, I am starting to feel like drilling individual words is a bit of a waste of time. 

Where is the flaw? If you never encounter the word again, what’s the rush to learn it now. There are still plenty of other frequently occurring words to learn so might as well prioritize them first. 
 

On 4/21/2021 at 9:06 AM, Sreeni said:

 can we spend on SRS, 20 cards review per day maximum?

My personal rule of thumb is that for any given day flashcards should never be the activity that I spend the most time on.  I also shouldn’t spend more than 30 minutes a day on flashcards. 

[mungouk]

9 hours ago, stapler said:

fairly far down the 書面語 spectrum and inappropriate for speech in most contexts

 

At the risk of sounding like an HSK cheerleader (which I'm not) I do think this is one thing that the syllabus does quite well... I'm now working through the Level 5 textbooks and they're very explicit about what is 书面语 and what is 口语... in fact, level 5 seems mostly to be about introducing lots of 书面语 (and 成语), and focusing on longer, somewhat more academic texts or articles about history, science, research etc. 

 

As for drilling individual words, personally I find that practicing collocations (not even full sentences) can help.  In the early days I had big problems with 2-character words in getting them the wrong way around (still do in fact), but as an example... once I had stopped thinking of 世界 and instead thought of 世界上 the pattern (SJS) became much more embedded in my brain and felt natural enough to be memorable. 

 

btw if you need example sentences, Pleco has loads of them.