Vocabulary

I’ve written in the past about my attempt at using word lists, and if you’ve kept up with those posts, after reading this one, you’ll probably think I suffer from split personality syndrome. But, I can at least say I’m being honest here.

I’ve gone back to Using German Vocabulary and am adding words - lots of them - to Anki. No sentences; indeed, I’ve added no extra context unless it was needed with a particularly ambiguous word. The result? It’s working extremely well. I’ve added nearly the whole first chapter, which, while I can’t give an exact number, probably hovers around a total of 500-600 words. The vast majority of them are sticking in my memory quite well. Some words, particularly those that have a few siblings which are similar in form and nearly identical in meaning, have given me some headaches (Bettbezug, Bettzeug, I’m looking at you!). Overall, though, most of the words I’ve been able to memorize after a few appearances in Anki.

So, what’s different? I said before that I kept forgetting word pairs that I added to Anki, right?

Well, the difference is, I did something I should have been doing from the start: I enabled Recognition and Production cards in Anki. Previously, with all of the material I added to Anki, I was doing Recognition only - see the foreign word, think of the (often rough) equivalent in English. I’m not sure where I got the idea of leaving out production cards - I think it might have been All Japanese All The Time (but don’t quote me on that).

I’ve found this time around though, that the production stage is where you really get to prove your mettle. It’s far easier to look at a foreign word and say “yeah, I understand that perfectly!” than it is to be given a word in your native tongue and to produce a foreign equivalent.

But Why?

I used to think that learning vocabulary in context was the way to go - that is, the only way to go. I still view it in a good light, and it still makes up a large part of my language learning regimen. However, as I’ve used Using German Vocabulary, even just adding all of the words from the first chapter - out of 20! - I’ve realized just how many words in English I take for granted. You can see what I mean by skimming through the English-to-Whatever-Language-You’re-Learning section of your dictionary. I never realized how many English words I knew until I looked at how many German equivalents I needed to learn to have a decent command of the language. And by decent, I mean knowing simple words like broom and kitchen sink, words which I didn’t know until I started going through the vocabulary book.

It’s words like those that lead me to be hesitant to vouching solely for contextual vocabulary learning. I’ve read a lot of articles in German, but unless I’m reading about housecleaning or home renovation, how often am I going to see der Besen or das Spülbecken? Probably not that often at all. And yet these are words that we all pretty much take for granted - every native speaker of English knows broom and kitchen sink.

So, for me, the reason to go through the (at times boring, I’ll admit!) process of adding huge numbers of word pairs to Anki is simple efficiency. I can learn more words in an hour with this method than I’d learn in three or more hours with reading articles or books. Taking the “brute force” approach lets me cover a lot of different ground, covering all sorts of everyday words that I need to know. With most of them, with a few key words added, I can make sure I don’t get things confused due to a lack of context. For example, I recently added die Umgehungsstraße - bypass to Anki. While the Recognition portion would be easy, simply seeing bypass could be troublesome - what kind of bypass? Are we talking about heart surgery here? By simply changing it to bypass (think cars!), I avoid any stupid word confusion.

Furthermore, by using large thematic lists from a book, I avoid the issue I mentioned above: if you rely solely on articles and other reading for vocabulary, if the word doesn’t show up in something you read, you don’t know it. Period.

While I’m not going to set anything in stone at this point, if my luck with this process using the above-mentioned book continues, I may make “word hoarding” one of the first steps in approaching a new language. Inadequate vocabulary has been my number one problem with German, and I think a systematic approach like this may be the solution to said problem.

I wanted to add a little bit more to my previous post about words in context vs. word lists. I said in my last post that going through and adding word lists to your SRS application, like Anki, could be effective, if only you could bring yourself to do it. At this point, however, I’m thinking words without context are perhaps more trouble than they’re worth, even if you can bring yourself to adding them to your SRS program.

Before I became dreadfully bored with the process, I had added 40 or 50 German words from Using German Vocabulary to my Anki deck. They’ve been in my deck for a few weeks now, and I’ve noticed a rather blatant trend: I keep outright forgetting these words, or getting them completely wrong, whereas with words that are in context, I rarely forget them completely, and only very occasionally will I make a mistake in remembering them. Some of the words that I’ve added without context, I’ve forgotten completely 3 or 4 times.

Die Kommode is one example of one of the words I’ve “lost” repeatedly. It means “chest of drawers”, something rather simple, but everytime die Kommode would pop up in Anki, I’d blank on it, or think of something similar - a coatrack, a closet, etc.

A couple of days ago I added some context to the card, changing it to die Schubladen der Kommode aufziehen (essentially “to open the drawers of the chest [of drawers]“), and the word seems to be sticking well now. It hasn’t been long enough to see if the context makes a long-term change, but I expect it will.

So, I have to reiterate something that I’ve seen elsewhere many times: while it may take a bit more time to find example sentences / phrases for the words you’re trying to learn, they really do seem to make a difference.

I wrote previously about word lists vs. words in context, and said that I thought for a lot of words, context just wasn’t needed much. This is especially true of concrete nouns. A bakery is a bakery, whether you say “bakery” or “die Bäckerei,” a library is a library, whether you say “library” or “die Bibliothek.”

But…

One aspect I didn’t really think about when I was writing that post was the issue of enjoyment during study. I checked out Using German Vocabulary, which consists almost entirely of thematic word lists, with some exercises / authentic German material after each unit, from the university library. I had the intent of systematically adding all of the words in it to my SRS application, Anki. The book has a huge number of everyday words, and so I figured learning all of them would be a good thing.

Except… I’m not doing it. The book has sat on the shelf for a while now, while I’ve continued yanking whole sentences from news articles and from my monolingual German dictionary. Why? Mostly because sitting and typing in word after word into Anki isn’t a great deal of fun, whereas reading articles and slowly increasing my understanding via learning new words, is.

Maybe a dual approach is needed - use the word lists in the book as a guide as to what to learn, but look up sentences for each word via Google or my dictionary. I’m hesitant to just toss out the book (or return it to the library, more specifically), because I’ve found that if I just read news articles and what not, I end up with large holes in my vocabulary, particularly words for everyday things. I’ve not read many articles which have dealt with bookshelves, shelves, sets of shelves, etc., which are all things I recently learned the German for, via the above-mentioned book.

Certainly, though, I don’t think just cramming word lists into Anki isn’t going to work for me, at least not as a long term learning practice. It’s effective - I could learn a lot of words in a short amount of time - but only if I can bring myself to do it, which I’ve failed at. Live and learn.

I forgot to write a quick post on this at the time of it happening, so here’s that post a bit late:

Damien, the maker of Anki, has put out a number of updates over the past weeks. I wrote back in November of ‘07 that I had abandoned SuperMemo for Anki, due to its simplicity and cleanness of design (unlike the monumentally cluttered SuperMemo).

One of the updates that Damien released fairly recently added something that I was actually missing from SuperMemo: the ability to change the color of text in the cards. You could do this before for a whole side of a card, like making an entire sentence green or blue, but you couldn’t select individual words or other parts of the card and change their color. I prefer to emphasize what I’m learning in a sentence with a color rather than with bold or underlining; no real reason, just a preference I have.

Now I can do that.

If you’ve not checked out Anki yet, do so - it’s a great app. And, if you end up liking it, consider donating to the developer - he’s put a lot of time into the app, as well as helping users in the support forum. If you want to donate, there are PayPal buttons on the main Anki page as well as the download page.

I sat down a few minutes ago and flipped through a few pages of Using German Vocabulary, not really looking for anything in particular - just enjoying seeing new words, really. I landed in a section on the animal word. Looking over some of the words for animals and their associated parts, a couple of the words made me genuinely smile: das Nashorn, and der Stoßzahn.

Das Nashorn is basically “nose horn”, if you take the elements apart, and means rhinoceros. Der Stoßzahn is a little trickier. Der Stoß can mean a push, shove, punch, as well as stab or thrust. I suppose the most menacing literal translation of Stoßzahn would be stabbing tooth. To me, that has so much more character than tusk.

In poking around at the How to Learn Any Language forums, I’ve come across many good discussions on vocabulary acquisition. One of the things that the discussions usually revolve around is whether one should avoid using word lists, relying solely on items in context. For a long time, I had stuck strictly to context items, basing my usage of SuperMemo and Anki on the strategies given at antimoon.com. However, based on one of the forum member’s (Iversen) posts, I’ve been giving word-to-word cards in Anki a try, and they’re working well, depending on the type of word.

Iversen views wordlists (or simply learning L1-to-L2 and vice versa translations without context) as a stepping stone, not the end of the road. He figures (rightly, I think) that by exposing himself to the translations of words, when he encounters the words in context, he’ll either A) understand it correctly or B) have something to work with in regards to figuring out what the word does mean, if the translation he learned doesn’t work.

Furthermore, while I see the value in learning words in context, particularly verbs, with many words, the context just isn’t needed, because the usage in L2 corresponds so closely to the usage of its translation in L1. For example, do I really need context to understand der Hund (dog), die Stadt (city), der Korb (basket)? Certainly, by simply learning that der Korb means basket, I won’t be learning any idioms, but I wouldn’t be doing that anyway, even if I had a sentence with Korb in context. To learn the idiom I’d have to see it in context or look it up in a dictionary, and then add that to my SRS program.

I’m coming to see that it’s not really a matter of “words in context vs. wordlists.” Instead, I see them both as things which have their purposes along the way toward proficiency in a language. For many words, context is vital, and trying to learn the words without it is a waste of one’s time. An easy way to see this is to pull up the English-German translation of “to go.” Here’s the page for the translation at Reverso. For the vast majority of those words, you really need some context to figure out what exactly is going on.

On the other hand, for many words, context isn’t really needed. I think by obsessing over “words in context only!“, people have made it sound as if languages have no correspondences whatsoever, that if you learn the word der Hund, you better learn how it’s used. To that, I say: unless I’m missing something, dogs in German-speaking areas behave essentially like dogs everywhere else in the world. And, again, learning anything about a word in your target language, even if its a simplified idea about it which will be refined through reading and use, is better than learning nothing at all. (As can probably be gleaned from that last remark, I don’t go for the idea that making mistakes in your target language is devastating; if that were the case, no one would ever learn any foreign language decently - let alone their native tongue.)

I’ve finally given up on SuperMemo, the beefed up flashcard program I’ve been using for vocabulary acquisition. After having used it for a few months, I had become accustomed to its idiosyncrasies, if not having fallen in love with them. However, I was poking around in the forums at How To Learn Any Language, and came across a thread about SuperMemo alternatives. In it, there was a link to Anki - and there, I found true love (at least in regards to a piece of spaced repetition software).

Anki does everything that I used in SuperMemo. What it doesn’t do is cause me to pull out what little hair I have. Whereas SuperMemo was bloated beyond belief, with menus, sub-menus, and sub-sub-menus (I’m serious), Anki is pure simplicity. You add cards; you repeat them, grading how you did on remembering the answers; and Anki does the rest. There’s some basic customization available in the cards, such as bold, italics, and underlining, but there aren’t complex template registries; there are no branches; there are no leeches; in short, most of the “extra” stuff that’s in SuperMemo isn’t in Anki, and the program is better because of it.

Anki also has a quite useful feature that SuperMemo doesn’t have: you can sync up your data with an online version of the program. This will solve a problem I’ve had for a while now: how do I handle vocabulary that I want to put into SuperMemo when I can’t access SuperMemo? Between classes at the university, I often read foreign language articles. When I see vocabulary that I don’t know, I typically want to record it and learn it. However, not being able to access SuperMemo from home, I’ve been, up until now, saving the sentences and vocabulary into a Google Docs file, and then transferring them into SuperMemo at home. In essence, I’ve been doubling my work. Being able to add stuff into the online version and have it all sync up at home solves this problem wonderfully. By the way, even the online aspect of the program is free; it isn’t subscription based or anything like that.

My experiences with SuperMemo (and now Anki) highlight an important aspect of language learning: the tools you use. If you don’t like the tools you’re using, your language learning will suffer from it, guaranteed. I know that I’ve slacked on entering vocabulary lately, specifically because I’ve grown to dislike the clunky SuperMemo so much.

A new age has arrived. The age of Anki. Bye, SuperMemo. I won’t miss you.

I’m in the middle of reading The Mote in God’s Eye, a science fiction novel by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle. A lot of the action takes place abord the ship MacArthur. I’m around page 100 at this point, and three or four times, I’ve seen the phrase “take the con”, usually spoken by the Captain to one of his subordinates. It was clear that he was saying “take over control of the ship”, but I was curious about the usage of the word con. I thought that it was perhaps an shortened form of control; I was wrong.

Apparently, the verb con can mean, on top of its meaning in the sense of a “con artist,” to direct the steering of a ship. Furthermore, the word con can be a noun, meaning “the action or post of conning a ship.” The word is indeed a shortening of another word, but not control; instead, the word is a shortened version of the now-obsolete cond, ‘conduct, guide’, which comes from the Old French word conduire.

(All of the information in this entry is from Oxford Online Reference.)

I’m from southern Ohio. Throughout my growing up here, I’ve heard the word tarnation slung around, as well as used it quite a lot myself. For example (or e.g., now that I know how to use the abbreviation correctly):

Just what in the tarnation do you think you’re doing?

Or a shorter expression, which conveys confusion or dismay about something that’s happening or happened:

What in the tarnation?

It was only today that, after saying something with the word tarnation in the sentence, that I realized I didn’t know what it meant. So, of course, off I went to the OED. The word tarnation is a variant of darnation, which is a variant of damnation. If I fill in damnation where I would normally say tarnation, the result sounds surprisingly weird to me:

What in the damnation are you doing?

Odd. Very odd.

In the set of Russian language learning videos I linked to a few days ago, there were two that dealt with the “Gold List” method of learning vocabulary, created by “Uncle Davey“. After watching the videos, I checked out his page on the system. While I’m not sure if the system is for me, it’s still a very interesting one.

What he does is this:

• Writes out 25 head words in the top left of a page, along with their translations and any other pertinent information (gender, special constructions, etc.)
• Waits at least 2 weeks (but no more than 2 months). He then selects 70% of the words that he remembers the least, thus “distilling” the words. In his words: “You are looking to distil out the “hard to learn” expressions and obtain a concentrated, whisky-like list of distilled words that are an absolute bugger for you to learn (by which time you will, of course, actally have learned them, because they will have gone through this distilation process ten times with two weeks’ break in between each time).”
• With that smaller list, he simply repeats the process: he waits at least 2 weeks, and then distils the list again, selecting 70% of the words that he remembered the least (or removing 30% of the words that he remembered best; same thing).
• After you’ve done this process down to the third distillation, for a number of different head word lists, you combine the third distillation lists into a new head word list. This further “concentrates” the list of words that you’ve had trouble remembering.

That is, of course, a very short overview of the process. If you’re interested in it, check out his full explanation as well as the videos.

One thing that I thought was intriguing about his process is that he says that it works best if you don’t really worry about remembering the words. When you’re writing out the words, you shouldn’t be cramming them; instead, you should just write them out slowly and neatly, enjoying the process. His explanation for this is the following:

The long-term memory is not a conscious function. Its samples are taken automatically and subconsciously out of the material which is run through the conscious. What we decide to memorise or forget only relates to short term memory. You cannot decide to learn to the long term memory any more than you can decide to forget to the long-term memory. … We banish unpleasant experience from the long-term memory and garnish pleasant experince to the long term memory.

Following that train of thought, he believes it makes little sense to suffer during vocabulary learning, because suffering won’t help you remember it; in fact, it might make it less likely to be remembered. I’m not an expert on how memory works by any means, but it’s an interesting idea. Can anyone vouch for the validity of his claim?

I do have some aversion to the system, mostly because it sounds rather clunky. I’m particularly against the idea of having multiple books to continue lists in; I can’t really say why that turns me off, but it does. Perhaps I’m thinking too far into the future with the system, and envisioning stacks and stacks of A4 notebooks all over my desk. (Not that that would be much different than the state of my desk now, but I digress.) Perhaps that is the reason I’m hesitant about the system: I’m a terribly disorganized person, and the idea of dating all of my lists, and keeping track of when a list is due to be distilled, sounds like a nightmare for me. There’s a reason I like computer programs to keep track of when a word needs to be reviewed.

The other concern I have is that using this method, I don’t think a lot of contextual information can be given easily. If you were to put a sentence with each word you want to learn, you’d need far more space than he’s allowing. Furthermore, when you distilled your list, would you copy over the example sentence again? How does one deal with words that have multiple meanings? Do you put all of the meanings under one head word and hope you know when to use which word, or do you make a separate head word for each meaning?

How does one deal with various expressions that one can build with one word? There are some words in my German dictionaries that have dozens (literally) of different expressions. Do you make a new head word for each expression, or include all of the expressions you care about under the pertinent head word?

At any rate, as I said, it’s an interesting system. I especially like how he stresses that one shouldn’t “cram” while writing the words out. Just write them out and enjoy the process; it’ll probably help you remember them.

Google recently released their new dictionary feature on their translate page. While they offer fairly simple translations (and don’t give any contextual information about the translations - yet), something I thought was pretty cool was that they do offer a large number of “related phrases” for whatever you search for. For example, if you search for an English-German translation for “language”, for the translations, you get:

1. Sprache f 2. (Fach)Sprache f 3. ordinäre Sprache 4. Spr, Sprache

While I won’t list all of them (you can see all of them here), here are some of the related phrases that are offered:

• by making the language extremely scientific ( or technical)
  durch die Verwissenschaftlichung der Sprache
  
• English is used everywhere there as the language of communication
  (die) Umgangssprache ist dort überall Englisch
  
• literary language
  Schriftsprache
  
• first language acquisition
  Erstspracherwerb
  
• technical language
  Fachsprache f n
  
• colloquial language
  Umgangssprache f n
  
• official language
  Amtssprache

Certainly, it needs a lot of work - plural forms aren’t given, irregular verbs aren’t marked, nor are the irregular forms given, etc. But I think it’s a good start, and the related phrases thing is nice, even if the definition section leaves a bit to be desired.

The languages available right now are:

• French <-> English
• German <-> English
• Italian <-> English
• Korean <-> English
• Spanish <-> English

I’m curious as to how other language learners tackle their vocabulary learning. Do you just read lists? Do you not write any vocabulary down, in any form, and simply rely on your memory and exposure? Do you use flashcards? If you do, do you use the index-card kind, or a flashcard program? Do you do something that’s a relatively unique approach?

I use a variety of things to tackle vocabulary. More often than not, I use software to learn words with. In the past, I’ve used Pauker a great deal, a free, open source flashcard based on the Leitner system.

More recently, however, I’ve switched to using a duo of programs: VTrain and Interlex. VTrain is a flashcard application like Pauker, but it’s a lot more robust (and, admittedly, a lot more complicated to use, at least until you figure out the cluttered interface). One of the things I really like about VTrain is that you can set the default language / keyboard setup you want for each side of a flashcard. What this means is that if you’re making, say, Russian-English cards, you don’t have to manually switch your keyboard back and forth between the keyboard setups. When you’re on the Russian side of the card, your keyboard will automatically be in Russian mode; when you move to the English side of the card, it will switch over as to be expected. VTrain has another thing that Pauker doesn’t, and that’s a slideshow mode. In this mode, one side of a card is shown, and then the other; you can customize the time delays involved. If you’re wanting to review but not in the mood for an all out flashcard test, it’s a nice alternative.
Interlex is different from both VTrain and Pauker. Interlex doesn’t use the Leitner system at all; when you create a collection, when test yourself on the words and get the words right, they’re considered “learned.” They don’t move to the next flashcard box or any such thing, because there aren’t any boxes in Interlex. Instead, to go through the words again, you have to reset the statistics of the file, i.e. make all of the words “unlearned” again.

So, why is Interlex in my repertoire? Because it offers something unique: a multiple choice test. I’ve found that using a multiple choice test is a good way to get myself familiar with new words; after that, I can move on to the more difficult types of learning.

Interlex also produces a nicely formatted printed list of the words in your file, much nicer than VTrain (and Pauker doesn’t do it at all). This has been my solution for when I want to “study on the go”; not having a laptop or a high tech cellphone, I can’t bring my software along with me when I’m out and about. So instead, I’ll print out a list of words, say 50-100, fold up the list, and stick it in a pocket. When I’ve got a minute or two I’ll get the list out and go over it.

I’ve found one other good thing about using VTrain and Interlex: they play nicely together, with a little bit of effort on the user’s part. After figuring out how to setup the export options in VTrain, I was able to import words and translations into Interlex, without any bizarre characters thrown into the mix. This is something that would probably hold true for many applications, at least if you’re using VTrain, because you can customize what it exports, and how the words / translations are separate (comma separated, tab separated, whatever you want).

Anyway - when I started writing this post, I certainly didn’t intend on it being so long! Back to my initial question: how do you learn vocabulary?

I came across a good resource for learners of Russian just now: this page, which has the top 2000 words used in modern Russian. The words provided are based on The frequency dictionary for Russian.

According to the frequency dictionary, the top 2000 most used words in Russian account for 72% of the word forms used in texts, so if you learn these, you’ll be well on your way to being able to (slowly) work your way through many Russian texts. The site provides both lists of the words, coupled with their usage frequency, along with their parts of speech, and of course, the translations. Also available are quizes for all of the words.

While the frequency dictionary page doesn’t offer any definitions, they offer lists of Russian words beyond the top 2000. They offer one list of “32,000 words with frequency greater than 1 ipm (one instance per million).” They offer a second list, with the top 5,000 most often used words in Russian. I’d say the latter would be more useful for learners of Russian.

There’s a bit of “interesting” data on the frequency dictionary page which I enjoyed reading:

• The average word length is 5.28 characters.
• The average sentence length is 10.38 words.
• 1000 most frequent lemmas cover 64.0708% of word forms in texts.
• 2000 most frequent lemmas cover 71.9521% of word forms in texts.
• 3000 most frequent lemmas cover 76.6824% of word forms in texts.
• 5000 most frequent lemmas cover 82.0604% of word forms in texts.

I think it’s interesting to note that the first 2000 words gets you to 72%, and yet learning another three thousand words will only gain another 10%. Diminishing returns, ineed.

Everyone who has worked on learning a foreign language and communicating with it has most likely experienced a similar problem. You’re trying to talk to someone in the language, you’re doing okay, but then the dreadful happens. You want to say something - something that’s perhaps even relatively simple - but you have no idea how to say it. You might even know the grammar bits that you’d need to use, but you don’t know the vocabulary words.

There’s something you can do to make this happen a little less often. A lot of the time when you’re talking to someone, you’re talking about what you did during your day, what you thought about, etc. This obviously isn’t always the case, but it let’s face it: we all talk about ourselves, and a lot.

So, here’s what to do: throughout your day, carry a small notebook around with you, or even a stack of index cards. As you go about your day, when you have a moment, just think about what it is you’re doing. What action are you performing? What are you looking at? What’s around you? And then, try to think about that in your target language. Do you know all of the words to express what it is you’re doing or thinking about? If you come across a word or expression that you don’t know, write down word that you’d use in your native language. Later, when you’re home and can get to your language learning materials, look up the words you need and note them in whatever vocabulary storage you use, whether it’s a plain notebook or a computer flashcard program.

This is a good way to hunt down the words that you really want; the words and expressions that are important to you. While I think it’s a good idea to learn the vocabulary lists that are provided in language books, often, these vocabularies are quite generic, and will not cover what you as an individual want to express in your target language. For those words and expressions, you’ll have to take matters into your own hands and hunt them down. Paying attention to what you do throughout your day, along with your thoughts, and trying to express those actions and thoughts in your target language, is one way to find the words you really want to know.

A native German, kittyiseverywhere, commented on my May German vocabulary list, at Language Geek’s former location (languagegeek.wordpress.com). (Here is the complete vocabulary list for May.) Here’s her comment:

Hey there, some words you have on here are pretty uncommon in daily life if you still need sample sentences, I’m happy to help (I own three blogs here - you can write me under (her email address) in MSN ^^)

Her comment highlights an issue that all language learners must deal with: what words are used in everyday life, and what words are typically reserved for news articles or other registers?

Even though words might make sense in a sentence meaning-wise, they might seem peculiar, in that they don’t really fit into the context. For example, let’s look at some English adjectives that have similar meanings:

• great
• awesome
• exquisite
• marvelous

Now, all of those words, while not exact, mean similar things. Someone learning English might find it okay to use “exquisite” in a sentence, when the word they really should be using is probably “great” or “awesome.” A native speaker of English would probably recognize this issue right away, i.e., which of these sentences sounds like something you’d hear in an everyday conversation:

1. Our trip to the amusement park was exquisite / marvelous.
2. Our trip to the amusement park was great / awesome.

There’s nothing really wrong with the first sentence - a native speaker of English would understand the message being conveyed - but it still sounds pretty bizarre.

So how does one deal with this issue? How do you figure out what words a native German (or Russian or whatever) would use, and what words they’d find to be a bit odd in an everyday context? You deal with it through lots and lots of exposure to different types of language material. A language learner has to realize that the language style and vocabulary that the news site Deutsche Welle uses will be quite different from the language style and vocabulary that say, a personal German blog uses. The differences can be easily seen in your native language (English, in my case). Do I write on my blogs the same way journalists write on, say, CNN.com? BBC News? Do I use the same vocabulary? Of course not.

It’s easy to forget this, however, when learning a foreign language. A language learner can fall into the trap of seeing all foreign language material as basically “the same” - it’s in the same target language, so all of the vocabulary, styles, expressions, etc. can be used in any context. This is wrong, and you need to watch out for it. You don’t talk the same way at a rock concert as you do at a formal wedding dinner, do you?

So, when learning a foreign language, make sure you have lots of examples from various sources - both formal and informal. More formal or “reserved” examples are easily found on lots of news sites. On the other hand, with the explosion of blogs during the past few years, there are countless sources for informal language all over the internet. Reading personal blogs in particular is a good way to gain access to everyday speech in your target language. Casual podcasts in your target language are another source for everyday speech, for example, Schlaflos in München offers a huge amount of casual German speech for learners of German.

Finally, it should be noted that most decent dictionaries will tell you if a word is strictly used in informal situations or is typically offensive. In one of my German-English dictionaries, for example, many words are marked as “umgangssprachlich” (colloquial). Other words are marked as “formell” (formal), impersonal, offensive, etc. However, this is rather rare in most dictionaries, in that while these markers are applied to some words, most words have nothing of the sort. You are given the meanings of the word, and are not told whether the word is formal, informal, offensive, etc. It’s up to you to know how the word is used, and in what context. To be able to do that, you have to be exposure to various forms of the language you’re studying.

I posted back on the 14th of May that I was going to try and add 5 German words to my “to learn” vocabulary list. It now being June 1st, the list is officially complete (more on that shortly, however!)

I fell a little bit short of my goal. Since I started on the 14th, and the month ended on the 31st, I had 17 days. 5 words per day, for 17 days, should come out to 85 words total. I ended up with 72. I missed some days completely due to being swamped with other work; other days, I did far more than 5 words. All in all, I’m happy with the results. I fell a little short of my goal, but 72 words isn’t too bad. For June, I think I’m going to try and do 7 words per day.

In regards to the list being complete, it is complete, in that I won’t be adding any more words to it. However, a huge proportion of the words don’t have example sentences. I’m trying to go back and get sample sentences for all of the words, but if you want to help, that’d be great, too, particularly if you’re a native German speaker. You can drop me an email at langgeek (at) gmail (dot) com, if you want to contribute example sentences.

I just went through my vocabulary notebook and added a bunch of words to my May, 2007 vocabulary list. While a large number of the words don’t have them yet, I’m also trying to find example sentences / usages of each word, to make the list more helpful to me, as well as to others. After Kelly mentioned it, I’ve started using Google search to find example sentences. It’s actually pretty effective, and doesn’t take much time at all, at least for words that are used often in everyday speech and writing.

I’ve decided to copy (hey, at least I’m honest) edwinlaw’s plan of learning so many words per day. I’ve created a Resources page, which links to the lists I’ve worked on thus far (only one, for German, currently). I’m planning on 5 words per day, at least for the first month. I got started yesterday, but as can be seen, there’s more than 5 words on the list. During my studying of an article in German, I just kept going and going, so I decided to copy out all of the new words that I’d written down in my notebook. Starting either tonight or tomorrow, I’m going to try and learn 5 new German words per day.

Heavy Russian vocabulary learning is on hold at the moment. I’m still exposing myself to some Russian, particularly in the listening department, but I just don’t have time for a lot of active studying of it right now. College classes and German are eating up most of my time.