Most vocabulary is acquired incidentally

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Israel Liebana asks in a comment to the blog, how to remember all the words that he is saving at LingQ.

Let's look at my Russian studies. This is the Progress Snapshot from the Overview page of LingQ (www.lingq.com). What it shows is that in the last 7 days I have added to my known words total by 4116 words, I have saved 1659 terms (mostly words), but I have only deliberately learned 45 words. I have learned most words incidentally. They just clicked in after a while. I do not worry about what I cannot remember. (Unfortunately I could not copy over the Progress Snapshot page from LingQ so I will just mention the numbers here.)

If I look at that last 12 months I see that I have over 28,000 known words, over 10,000 saved words and around 400 learned words. I apologize for the space here it has to do wih the limited flexibility of Typepad when it comes to editing.

 

So my answer to Israel is that it is difficult to look at a list of words, even if these come from content that you have been listening to and reading, and expect to deliberately learn them. They will become part of your passive and active vocabulary when they do, on their own terms. Listening, reading, seeing the highlighted words that you previously saved at LingQ, using flash cards, reviewing lists, writing and speaking using your saved words, all of these activities contribute to the process whereby the words will eventually click for you. When you least expect it, a word will pop up in your mind.

So just continue reading and listening and reviewing. Enjoy yourself. Save more words and do not worry if you cannot remember them. I save lost of words, even if I more or less know them. I click on most of the yellow highlighted words that I have already saved when they come up in my texts. I flash card previously  saved words before starting to read a new text. I batch review my words, moving 30-40-50 of them up one status level in the Vocabulary section. Mostly I do what I want to do.

Bear in mind that in Russian there are more words to learn because the language is heavily inflected. There are many forms of different words, depending on case, gender, tense etc. I save the different forms of the words to better understand how they work. I edit the phrases in the LingQ widget in order to focus on the words that I have trouble learning. But in the end I know that it is only time and exposure that will gradually enable me to remember these words. And the more words I know, the more words I can pick up "incidentally".

Here are some definitions of intentional and incidental vocabulary learning from an interesting article on the subject. If you Google incidental vocabulary learning you will find many academic papers which try to overly complicate the subject. This article is more practical. Note that the comment below says that it takes a long time. It does, but LingQ makes it a little easier, and makes the "incidental" learning a little more systematic.

Intentional vocabulary acquisition is memorizing straightforwardly term after term with their respective translations from a list. Intentional learning is quick and therefore usually preferred by learners, but it is also superficial. Learners encounter vocabulary in an isolated, often infinitive form and remain incapable of using it correctly in context. Moreover intentionally learned vocabulary sinks faster into oblivion.

Incidental vocabulary acquisition, namely through contextual deduction in target language reading, meets these recommendations. Learners encounter terms together with syntactic information, which helps using the accurate words in an idiomatic way. Vocabulary in context often appears repeatedly under different aspects and hence engrains in the learners. minds. Unfortunately it takes long until enough vocabulary for fluent conversations is incidentally gathered.

Comments

[Ilya L.]

Steve,

I wonder if you are changing your opinion on how useful it is to learn new (saved) words from the lists, in comparison to their learning directly from the texts.

Let me explain. When I first started using the Linguist, more than a year and a half ago, your “sales pitch” on saving words was, very approximately, like that: “I (Steve) was always upset about how soon I usually forget my new words. So, in the Linguist, we developed an effective way to save the new words, so that you, the user, may review and remember them effectively.” Back then, the Linguist did not highlighted the saved words in the texts. The only way to review was from the lists. (And of course from the lists of the phrases and from the examples).

Somewhere on the way from the Linguist to the Ling, the highlighting of the saved words emerged. The highlighting looked at me directly from the texts. I instantly liked it. I was bored from reviewing my saved words from the lists, and sometimes felt guilty of not reviewing them at all. Seeing the saved words highlighted in the current and later texts was like reviewing without noticing that you were reviewing. It did not bring that boredom of a drill. And also, the highlighting sits already in the context of a phrase.

Interestingly enough, the feature of the highlighting was not immediately “pitched” by you team. I guess your team might have not planned it to be a “great” feature. That is why I am curious if you are indeed changing your opinion about the relative effectiveness of the texts versus lists. So to say, about the incidental versus the intentional vocabulary learning.

You know very well the forum How-to-learn- any-language.com. Alexander Arguellis, formerly Ardaschir, has recently resumed to post there. He described long ago and now he describes again his way of learning the new words directly from texts, without looking the words up, not to mention making the lists. I beleive there is no real contradiction between his and your experience. Still, it would be interesting to “bring you together” sometime.

[Steve Kaufmann]

Ilya,

Things are not so black and white.I enjoy reading and listening more than reviewing my words, and so I do it more.

After each time I do review my words, I am glad I did. It helps me to focus on the words. It does not mean that I learn them there and then It is just a part of the process. In a way it is part of the incidental learning process.

I edit my phrases, but not systematically. I flash card, but not systematically. I review my lists in different order, and batch move them up one status level. But I do it when I feel like it.

Gradually, through all of this and the constant listening and reading, more words just stick in a fuzzy logic kind of way.

I need the online dictionary. I need the database, the feeling that I am not losing these new words back into oblivion.

And yes, the highlighted words are very effective. I usually click on these old friends when I see them, just to confirm that I thought they meant.

[Steve Kaufmann]

I should add that it is the pursuit of vocabulary growth as measured at LingQ, and the act of deliberately adding more and more words, that is a large part of driving people to continue with their reading and listening (and therefore incidental vocabulary learning and improved comprehension and improved speaking ability.)

So, while it may not please your Russian penchant for wanting things in clear containers, language learning is a situation where one and one does not always equal two, and many apparently contradictory things are all true.The main thing is to remain motivated to interact with the language. I think that LingQ provides a framework for this that is comprehensive and effective. It is the overall effect rather than any one component that makes it effective.

[Ilya L.]

Steve,

I agree. I also think that the two ways to review the words in LingQ, from their lists and from their highlighting in the texts, compliment each other. In fact I have benefited and made use of them both. You know, things are often expressed more polar in discussions then we indeed seem those things.

As to the two ways of reading in a foreign language, namely with the use of a dictionary and without using it (and without using a parallel texts in another language), why not to present the two as seemingly contradictory, if not for the sake of a discussion? I suggest we discus these two ways of reading sometimes.I would also use an online dictionary in my reading.