Diminishing returns with vocabulary acquisition

[dakonglong]

As of today, I have read three and a half books in Chinese: 小王子，撒哈拉的故事，饥饿游戏 and about half of 你是我的荣耀. I think that reading such a variety of novels has been great, because it has exposed me to a pretty wide breadth of vocabulary. However, after only three and a half books I am noticing extremely diminishing returns in my vocabulary acquisition, especially towards the back half of each book.

I read each of these books in paperback. When I come across a word I don't know, I use Pleco character recognition to create a flashcard, unless I immediately deem the word too obscure to bother with (some of the military terms in 撒哈拉的故事 or the gaming-specific terms in 你是我的荣耀, for example). This process creates my general vocabulary list.

 

Every day I go through that list and select the first fifteen words I encounter that seem worth learning. At first, this was like 95% of the words on the list, now it's more like 25%. Recently, I have noticed that nearly all of the the words that make it onto that list are either marked "literary" or "colloquial" in Pleco. The rest are either chengyu or the third/fourth synonym of a word I already know. It's pretty rare for me to come across a word and think, "wow, this will be useful!"

 

I will keep learning fifteen words per day indefinitely, because why not? However, I'm starting to wonder if this vocabulary is useful for anything other than reading novels, because it doesn't seem like 耗尽, which is at least the third way I have learned to say "exhaust" will be useful in conversation if I already know synonyms for it (this is a word I deemed worthy of learning, by the way, so other words are more obscure).

 

Is this long tail of vocabulary that you can learn from novels really useful in day-to-day life?

 

At this point Pleco estimates that I know 6,200 words based on my flashcard history. Shouldn't I still be encountering a lot of useful vocabulary at this level?

 

It makes me wonder if: (1) 5,000 - 10,000 words is actually enough to be reasonably conversant (express most of what you want to outside of specialized topics), or (2) my vocabulary is larger than Pleco estimates (if I have learned words sub-consciously without flash-carding them).

 

I'm really curious to hear other opinions on this, especially what people's experiences were like as their known vocabulary approached the 20K-ish level. Did that vocabulary actually help you in areas other than reading novels at 98%+ comprehension?

 

Thanks!

[Jan Finster]

Your frame of mind sounds very pragmatic. Maybe you should go back and ask yourself why you are learning Chinese at all. Is the whole purpose being able to navigate daily life in China and having everyday/standard conversations?

 

If you want to grow your vocabulary, how about reading a more diverse array of books. Just switch genre with every book you read be it fiction or non-fiction.

[becky82]

First of all, this sounds like you're making great progress.  Indeed, there seems little point in learning a seventeenth word that basically means "green", unless if you're going to write novels yourself (and even then, you can look it up in a dictionary).  Nevertheless, reading speed and fluency are both important, even if just to make reading more enjoyable.

 

On 2/6/2022 at 1:34 PM, dakonglong said:

(1) 5,000 - 10,000 words is actually enough to be reasonably conversant (express most of what you want to outside of specialized topics)

 

When having conversations, it is possible to express most things with very limited vocabulary, provided you have mastered that vocabulary and accept speaking imprecisely (I recall this Hacking Chinese article written using only the most common 1000 English words).  However, that doesn't mean who you're speaking with will also use limited vocabulary.  Besides, once you hit a certain depth, all topics are specialized topics.

 

I feel that at a certain level, improving the depth of one's vocabulary knowledge becomes more important than breadth (i.e., fluency development).  Can you hear the words correctly and effortlessly?  Do you know all of their meanings, even metaphorical?  What are these words' collocations?  For speaking in particular, learning obscure words in novels is probably not very useful (unless you're going to talk about the novel).

 

On 2/6/2022 at 1:34 PM, dakonglong said:

(2) my vocabulary is larger than Pleco estimates (if I have learned words sub-consciously without flash-carding them)

 

Possibly.  Want to find out?  You can estimate your vocabulary by taking   500 random words from CC-CEDICT (which has around 117700 entries) and counting how many you know.  For example, I found I know about 73 of these words (14.6%), which implies I know around 14.6% of the CC-CEDICT words, or (with an appox. 5% margin of error) I know around 14.6% * 117700 ≃ 17200 of the words in the CC-CEDICT dictionary.

[Moshen]

Quote

Is this long tail of vocabulary that you can learn from novels really useful in day-to-day life?

 

Generally speaking, no.  It will help you read other novels.

 

I agree with Jan's suggestion of getting clear on what your goal in learning Chinese is and using that to decide how to spend your learning time.

 

For example, in my learning of Spanish, I like to watch telenovelas, which opened me up to a whole vocabulary like "kidnapping" and "blackmail."  I don't believe I'll have occasion to use words like that when I travel in Latin America.  (I hope not!)  But learning such words helps me understand other telenovelas - and crime novels.  Likewise, I like to listen to Spanish news, and the words there help me understand Spanish news on radio, TV and in newspapers - but again not so much when trying to order in a restaurant or discuss a reservation at a hotel front desk.

[alantin]

I think this depends a lot on what you mean by day-to-day life. They say that X number of words will cover 80% of the language and if your goal is to buy groceries and train tickets, then that's probably going to be enough. But the fallacy in this is that anything else you want to do in your day-to-day life is going to require the next 18%. You may only use a portion of your vocabulary during any given day, but it is usually a different portion any given day. How do you choose? I think it is very telling that when I checked the character statistics for my WoT books, each chapter usually has around 1000 - 1200 unique characters, but the whole books have somewhere between 3000 - 4000 unique characters.

 

Also, native Chinese use the language in their day-to-day lives and if 10 000 words (an arbitrary number from my hat) was enough for them for their day-to-day lives, they wouldn't have larger vocabularies than that.

 

 

Should you continue to use the size of your anki deck as a yard stick for your language goals? Should you keep reading novels? (Btw, after three books, I think you've just begun to read! It's not that many yet so reading should still have a lot to give to you in regards to your vocabulary learning.)

I think those are very good questions that only you can answer. Reading is an extremely good way to develop your vocabulary (probably best there is) and SRS is a way to artificially boost that vocabulary acquisition, but if doing those are burning you out, I personally would advice dropping the SRS and concentrating on reading for pleasure. The suggestion to read different genres is also a really good one. I read a study somewhere that found that the variety in the contexts a word is seen, seems to be more important for retention of that word, than it's frequency in a single context. In other words, It is easier to remember a word you see once in ten different places, than a word you see ten times in once article. By this definition, SRS is also quite bad at providing different contexts, unless you build it into your deck somehow like having different example sentences from different contexts for each word with the word clozed off. Reading will also naturally let you retain the words that are actually appearing in different contexts, rather than reviewing the obscure synonym for "green" that will only appear in the Analects anyway.

 

The vocabulary that you slowly develop from reading, in turn is the foundation for all other skills and activities in the language. Of which I would argue 90+% are day-to-day situations.

[Woodford]

I've done something similar to what you've done, and now I'm approaching about 20,500 flashcards. I'm surprised at how often I find an obscure word in a novel, thinking, "This seems useless," and then the very next day, I hear somebody use that word in a Chinese YouTube video about some casual topic. Also, the words that feel useless to me are often used again in the very next book I pick up. 

 

But I would definitely join my voice in agreement with those who are saying that it depends on what your goals are. For me, personally, I want to "jump into the deep end" with Chinese, enjoying all that it has to offer. I want to be a competent reader of good books, as well as a decent conversationalist. I bought a textbook on classical Chinese, and I even want to dabble in that someday. So I'm just committing myself to learning (in one way or another) a lot of words. I'm getting close to that area where I can say I've learned "enough" words, but that's a really tricky word, because I have to ask myself, "enough for what?" Sometimes, I approach a new book or conversation topic, and I find my vocabulary level to be really inadequate. My previous book required me to look up almost no words in a dictionary. My current book, on the other hand, has presented me with about 1,000 new words (over 600 pages). 

[dakonglong]

Thanks for the advice all!

 

On 2/6/2022 at 7:40 AM, Woodford said:

I'm getting close to that area where I can say I've learned "enough" words, but that's a really tricky word, because I have to ask myself, "enough for what?" Sometimes, I approach a new book or conversation topic, and I find my vocabulary level to be really inadequate.

 

"Enough vocabulary for what?" is a question I am really curious to answer. 

 

At present, my 6K+ words are enough to understand 你是我的荣耀 at 98% comprehension (I look up < 4 words per page, assuming there are 200+ words per page). There are more difficult sections where I can't do that, but for 80%+ of the book, I can. This allows me to read relatively smoothly and only lookup words when I want to, which makes the experience relatively enjoyable. I can't understand everything, and I can't read harder materials without heavy use of a dictionary, but I'm pretty satisfied with that level.

 

Now if I consider that 6K-ish words allows me to do this, but it will take another 14K to read at 99.8% comprehension, I have to ask myself, is it really worth it?

 

It makes me wonder if I would be better off focusing on speaking, writing, etc... in the short term where I see a better return on the time invested, but if I "stabilize" my vocabulary at the 5K - 10K level am I limiting myself?

 

As Jan pointed out, I think my goals are more pragmatic. I'm not interested in reading Nietzsche in Chinese, I just want to be able to effectively communicate with friends, and it seems like my current vocabulary is sufficient for that too.

 

So, how much vocabulary is really required to be functional/conversational? I wonder if it's closer to 5k words than 20k.

 

 

[alantin]

On 2/6/2022 at 9:39 PM, dakonglong said:

I'm not interested in reading Nietzsche in Chinese, I just want to be able to effectively communicate with friends, and it seems like my current vocabulary is sufficient for that too.

 

So, how much vocabulary is really required to be functional/conversational? I wonder if it's closer to 5k words than 20k.

I would say, practice what you want to do. To me it seems like you're practicing swimming to play basketball and changing approach should bring results where you want them. I would expect your vocabulary to be large enough already to be conversational, but if you haven't been talking to people yet, you'll probably require some time before you start feeling it Large vocabulary does help, but people can be amazingly conversational with very small vocabularies. However, if you only read, it's passive vocabulary and you'll need to activate it with actually using it. Also you seem to assume that if you stop what you are doing now, your vocabulary will "stabilize" where it is now. It will not. Talking with people is also a constant source of new words for your vocabulary and, as long as you use the language, your vocabulary will be in a constant state of flux. You'll forget some words, learn others, and relearn yet others. The general direction is still quite easy to keep up if you just keep using the language, and also learning new words gets easier too over time.

 

If you start taking tutoring sessions, you could continue your collecting words for SRS just like before to gauge your vocabulary growth. I get a list of unfamiliar words from my tutors after every session and I'm sure you would too. But If you have the time, I wouldn't drop reading altogether. Just find people to talk with and read with the time and energy you have left after.

 

I'm having about 4 iTalki free talk lessons a week, but conversing with them is still only about 20% of my study time and 30% being reading (listening 30%, writing 20%). My goal is to have well rounded Chinese skills and I find practicing the different skills complements each other very nicely, but maybe you should begin to emphasize listening and speaking. I began talking to tutors about two and half years ago and it took me a lot of time to actually be able to move over to using only(mostly) Chinese. However I always required my tutors to only speak Chinese to me and for a long while I had extremely interesting discussions where I spoke mostly English and the tutor would only speak Chinese. I was only finally able to shed English about a year ago. On the other hand there are others who just begin speaking from day one and get great results that way too. Though I think that approach will lead to a smaller vocabulary if you don't read too.

[ZhangKaiRong]

If you feel that vocab you acquire from novels are useful in everyday life (or about topics you in general would like to converse about), then just broaden the genre you're reading (as you did alread). Try urban fantasy, sci-fi, Western / Chinese historical fiction, scientific non-fiction, or whatever you think is interesting for you.

I think you want to overgeneralize what day-to-day life means, and without a good definition, it's way too hard to tailor the approach you're following.

 

Personal example: when I lived in China, day-to-day efficient communication meant casual chit-chat with my friends around common hobbies - video games, then-current pop music and TV shows -, school things, love life, as well as some more official language for handling myself with the international office. When I started to work, I had to acquire finance and business terms to be able to communicate with clients (mostly peer level ones, so it could still be somewhat casual). As I went further on the corporate ladder, my clients became more senior personnel, so I needed to broaden vocab to find words that are more formal / respectful / selective, but still on a very specific topic. With my significant other, we spoke Chinese at home, ever since we met (~8 years now). It is definitely the hardest one, and even though I adjusted to her area of interests with the vocab, random discussions can be still reeled to topics where I feel like I'm absolutely in the dark and have to ask back what specific words mean. Last time she read an article about China's space program and then we started to discuss it briefly, had a few moments when I felt as a total beginner haha. Are these situations considered to be day-to-day communication? Definitely. Do they mean the same? Not at all.

 

Also, caveat: I personally don't like reading fiction in Chinese, and thus I may see little added value in them for useful vocab. Translated contemporary foreign novels feel weird to read in Chinese (albeit I find them to be an easier text), while novels written originally in Chinese often go over the top with the fancy (and obscure) language. I believe the authors can dig up chengyus, but I see little value in learning (or even checking in the dictionary) the 700th chengyu that I probably never come across ever again. But language learners' habits may differ for sure. 

[Woodford]

On 2/6/2022 at 1:39 PM, dakonglong said:

Now if I consider that 6K-ish words allows me to do this, but it will take another 14K to read at 99.8% comprehension, I have to ask myself, is it really worth it?

 

I would definitely say that if you can tolerate 98% reading comprehension (with several unknown words on each page), then you're probably in a good place! I think that because of my own personality, I've had to keep pushing forward to that 99.8% level (and even beyond). I can tolerate the occasional unknown word, but having too many of them bothers me.

 

Even though the return on investment seems small, I think there's a big difference between, for instance, 99.5% comprehension and 99.8% comprehension. For a book that has 250 words on each page, that's the difference between having to look up 1.25 words/page and 0.5 words/page, respectively. That feels like a big improvement--I'm looking up less than half the amount of words as I did beforehand. Over the course of books that are hundreds of pages long, that's far less work to do. For example, my 6th overall book was "Decoded" by Mai Jia, and if I remember correctly, I had to learn about 1,500 new words from it. 11 books later, as my 17th book, I read another book by Mai Jia, which was similar in genre, style, and length. That time, I looked up less than 500 new words. A different experience, definitely.

 

I once knew a visiting PhD student from China who said she only knew 7,000 English words (another one of my friends says he knows 10,000). Both of them functioned quite well here in the USA, and I could have pretty involved conversations with them. I know that English isn't exactly like Chinese, but it serves as a good analogy, I think.

[dakonglong]

On 2/6/2022 at 12:23 PM, ZhangKaiRong said:

I think you want to overgeneralize what day-to-day life means, and without a good definition, it's way too hard to tailor the approach you're following.

 

I think this may be exactly what I'm doing.

 

I am in an interesting position right now, because I have achieved the main goals I set out to achieve when I started: (1) read native novels at 98% comprehension, (2) be able to communicate with a good friend completely in Chinese, without the language feeling like a hindrance, and (3) be able to communicate in Chinese exclusively for extended periods of time (a 1hr tutoring session, for example).

 

Now that I have achieved those goals, I want to go back and make sure my foundation is solid, and that I don't have any any gaps in my knowledge (for example, what Jan did with The Chairman's Bao). However, I'm not sure whether I should do this now, or after I have achieved a larger vocabulary (whether my vocabulary represents a gap). Based on the above, I'm thinking now because: (1) my vocabulary doesn't feel like a hindrance to me in any area except for reading novels at 98%+ comprehension. For example, in a tutoring session last week, I realized I didn't know the word for "expire", I just said that my test results "became too old" and my tutor got the idea. I wish I knew the word for "expire" but I don't feel limited in my communication by the fact that I don't.

 

All of these questions about what you need for day to day life are my way of trying to understand what that foundation should be. But I think everyone's comments above are leading me to realize that, just like every other goal with the language, everyday life is just specific to the learner. So is the foundation you need to achieve those tasks with the language. I guess I already have the foundation I need if I can do the things that I want to do.

 

Either way, it's not like I will stop learning! I guess I don't need to pay as much attention to what, specifically, I focus on as long as I keep moving forward.

[phoneticsem]

专注于中文的其他方面

[黄有光]

@dakonglong I'm not sure I have any particular advice for you, but I do have personal experience which migh provide useful perspective to you.

 

At the beginning of last year, I was in a position not dissimilar to the one you find yourself in now -- I had a fairly limited vocabulary (~5000 according to Chinese Text Analyser), and I really wanted to improve my Chinese. Now, you read a few books with a semi-intensive study method, and noted some improvement. And now you are questioning to what extent you want to keep going. Well, I did keep going, so I can give you a preview of what it is like at the other end of that tunnel.

 

I dedicated all of last year to cramming as much Chinese vocabulary as possible. I learned the vast, vast majority of unknown words in each of the books I read, advancing at a pace of 30 words per day, and in this way I covered 7 and a half books over the course of the year, bringing my vocabulary from ~5000 words on January 1, 2021 to ~17,500 words today. So what is the difference?

 

Well, I am significantly closer to being able to read real, adult literature in Chinese with near 100% comprehension, without the aid of a dictionary. To be clear, I cannot do that yet -- but my calculations suggest that I should be able to reach that level within another three years of consistent effort (the same calculations that I ran through suggested I would need a vocabulary of around 50.000 words to be able to read most adult literature with <1 unknown word per page). I think you probably are not aiming for the same level of comprehension of literature as I am, though, based on what you've written in your posts. However, even for conversing with others, I feel like the massive gains in vocabulary I have made have proven immensely useful.

 

Firstly, I feel myself able to converse much more smoothly than I was able to before the start of this project. There are so many things that I did not know the word for before, and now, I do. I can speak precisely without much effort, instead of having to awkwardly talk around holes in my vocabulary, or worse, having to avoid topics entirely due to an inability to properly express myself. Nowadays, if I want to talk about solar energy, I can do that. If I need to mention microchips in daily conversation, I can do that to. If I want to describe a warm, lush, forest, I can do that in vivid terms instead of saying something simplistic like "wet green trees". And other people have mentioned this, but I want to drive it home as well -- you can't necessarily count on other people to use a heavily restricted vocabulary when talking to you, especially if you want them to be themselves when doing so. So learning all of this vocabulary has given me that much more confidence that I won't be left in the dust when someone talks to me, or when I observe conversations between native speakers.

 

This is the long tail of vocabulary. Once you reach this level, there isn't a such thing as a wildly useful word anymore -- not in the same way that words were when you were at a lower level. You're pretty much never again going to find a word and think "wow, my skills were severely impacted by not knowing this specific word!" Vocabulary growth at these levels isn't measured in the single digits at this point -- it is measured in the hundreds or thousands. Hundreds or thousands of words that, on their own, are not going to make much of a difference to your ability to communicate individually. But taken as a whole, they make a huge difference in your skills. And I think, if your goal is to really be able to fully immerse yourself in the language, you'll eventually need that level of competency. Having this dramatically large vocabulary allows you to be eloquent when speaking, not "technically able to get your point across". It allows you to engage in media the same way a native would. 

 

You might personally choose not to go down the same path that I have chosen, but make no mistake that the fruits of your labor, if you do, are immense.

[dakonglong]

@黄有光 This is an amazing answer. You have convinced me. Thank you!

[alantin]

On 2/19/2022 at 11:56 PM, 黄有光 said:

You might personally choose not to go down the same path that I have chosen, but make no mistake that the fruits of your labor, if you do, are immense.

 

Thank's for the amazing reply!
Can you describe how you go about your study of the words? Do you cram them as isolated words back and forth or in sentences? How do you get them? do you just export all unknown words in a book from CTA or do you collect them as you read? Do you feel it gets easier to memorize them? etc.

[黄有光]

On 2/20/2022 at 11:06 AM, alantin said:

Can you describe how you go about your study of the words? Do you cram them as isolated words back and forth or in sentences? How do you get them? do you just export all unknown words in a book from CTA or do you collect them as you read? Do you feel it gets easier to memorize them? etc.

Wow, that's a lot of great questions!

 

I think it's useful to start with my goals, and why I have them.

 

Going into the beginning of last year, I was frustrated that I had been studying Mandarin Chinese for six years, but still felt like I couldn't properly engage with the language. I couldn't read any books (even children's chapter books). Browsing even the simplest websites was quite painful for me. And of course, although I could converse with natives, it was obvious from the way that they spoke with each other vs. the way they spoke with me that they were "dumbing down" their speech to a signficant degree. I had to avoid many topics because I did not have the vocabulary to properly express myself. When I did talk about things, my communication was generally the bare minimum -- this was purely functional communication, with absolutely no bells and whistles. I was frustrated that, after six years, this was what I had to show for my effort.

 

I decided that the biggest obstacle was just...vocabulary. Sure, my listening comprehension was shit -- but it would improve a lot faster if I could count on understanding the vast majority of the words I was hearing. Yeah, my speaking skills weren't that great -- but again, it's hard to talk to people if you know that every third word out of their mouth is something you don't know. So I decided, before I focused on literally anything else, I was going to focus on building my vocabulary as much as possible, as quickly as possible. So I laid out my goals as follows:

1.  Develop an intensive study routine, and stick to it consistently (my study habits up until this point had been extremely inconsistent)
2. Focus on building passive vocabulary. Active vocabulary can be ignored for now.

Why ignore active vocabulary? Well, I know from experience learning German that once you can read books and watch TV shows (and just generally engage with native media), your vocabulary will EXPLODE. You don't need active vocabulary to consume media, so focusing on that would've only served to slow me down. Plus, I also know from experience that, as your passive vocabulary grows, a lot of those words will leak over into your active vocabulary without active effort on your part. And I could always come back and study my passive vocabulary later -- the important thing, for now, was to get to a level where I could read books as quickly as possible.

 

So, with all of that in mind, I found the simplest book I could find (a Chinese translation of The Witches, by Roald Dahl -- 女巫), and I used Chinese Text Analyser to pick out all of the unknown words, and I started working through the book, one chapter at a time. My flashcards looked like this:

 

Front:

1. Chinese vocabulary (hanzi only) + recorded pronunciation

Back (in order of preference -- usually only one, but sometimes a combination):

1. Chinese synonyms
2. English synonyms
3. Short explanation of the word's meaning in Chinese
4. Short explanation in English
5. Picture

Most of my flashcards list English synonyms, or give an explanation in English. I know that goes directly against what a lot of people would advise, but I was prioritizing speed -- I want to be able to immediately absorb the (approximate) meaning of a word at a glance, and my reading speed in Chinese is far, FAR to slow for that. So if I don't know any Chinese synonyms (or can't recall the ones I know off the top of my head), or if the explanation my Chinese dictionary gives me is more than like 4 hanzi, I automatically use English instead.

 

In keeping with my prioritization of passive vocabulary over active vocabulary, my flashcards are aimed at giving me an approximate understanding of each word or phrase. That means that, for many or even most of these words,

• I don't know what makes them different from their synonyms
• I probably don't know what contexts they are most commonly used in
• I may or may not understand any implied meanings or connotations the word carries
• I might not be able to use it in a sentence in a grammatically correct way (e.g. Do I need to use 把？Does it need to be used in the negative? etc etc)

The only important thing for me is, can I understand what is being communicated if I encounter this word in context? Because that is the only thing I really need to be able to engage with native media. If the answer to that question is "yes", then I have succeeded.

 

The vast, vast majority of my flashcards contain only isolated words, chengyu, or phrases, and not whole sentences. I used to include sentences, but found that memorizing whole sentences was too taxing and slowed me down. I'm going for volume, not precision. Precision will come later, once I have a good foundation (i.e. "can actually read books and not just stare at them like a blithering idiot", lol)

 

On 2/20/2022 at 11:06 AM, alantin said:

How do you get them? do you just export all unknown words in a book from CTA or do you collect them as you read?

 

I did talk about this above, but just to be absolutely clear -- I make flashcards and memorize on a chapter-by-chapter basis. Once I know all the words (or most of the words) in the chapter, I go ahead and read the chapter. This way I can read more-or-less for pleasure, while at the same time reaping the benefits of extreme intensive reading.

On 2/20/2022 at 11:06 AM, alantin said:

Do you feel it gets easier to memorize them?

 

Yes, it absolutely gets easier to memorize new words. I am way, WAY better at memorizing words now than I was when I started.

 

 

[alantin]

Thank you for sharing that! It looks very similar to what I've done in the past with Anki. The focus on general meaning of the word only for passive vocabulary recognition. But I haven't tried memorizing words this way before reading a chapter in a book though. I did do that for the words in a text book that was used in a Chinese course I took in the beginning of my studies though. But the teacher ended up not covering more than probably the first chapter of that. lol. Need to progress at the speed of the slowest student, right! And he didn't really do anything except sit there during the lessons...

 

I think I might try something like this for my reading in the future, with my reading on a chapter by chapter basis. Though I'm not sure how good the CTA is for that. It seems to interpret word boundaries wrong quite a lot.

[黄有光]

You are right that it doesn't always get word boundaries right, but by and large it is still an excellent tool for seeing unknown words at-a-glance. After all this time using it, I would say that if it could perfectly divide words 100% of the time, it would be only a relatively small improvement over its current capabilities.

[becky82]

On 2/20/2022 at 9:02 PM, 黄有光 said:

Once I know all the words (or most of the words) in the chapter, I go ahead and read the chapter. This way I can read more-or-less for pleasure

 

I do this with textbooks.  The texts are so tedious, but they're less painful when you already know the vocabulary.

[黄有光]

I find it helpful because (A) learning from material that interests me is more efficient than learning more scattered vocabulary by orders of magnitude，and (B) because most of the words I learn are consistently reinforced as they continue to appear in later chapters of the same book (or other similar books thereafter).