hi there steve kaufman here today i'm
going to talk about
vocabulary words the most important
thing in language learning
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the reason i'm talking about this is
that i saw in a discussion the other day
on
uh language learning someone said you
know there are
uh what does it mean to know a word
there are all these different
stages of knowing a word and there is a
great analysis of knowing you know
the grammar of the word which word it's
used with the different meanings of the
word the scope of meaning of the word
whether you can just recognize it in
context
and to me all of that is not important
i think there is far too much analysis
yes there is a continuum the first time
we see a word we
don't know what it means of course or we
may guess at it or we're probably better
not to guess by the way better to look
it up
has been my experience but uh we get a
sense of what the word might mean in a
certain context
and gradually we see the word in other
contexts
and we have a sense of the scope of
meaning of that word
maybe the word only has one obvious
meaning
like you know wood wood can only be wood
w-o-o-d uh but wooden
can mean that someone is not very
responsive or emotional
so there can be you know shades of
meaning
of these different words but these are
all things that we gradually acquire
and there's no particular benefit in
analyzing
these different ways in which we know a
word
in my opinion uh for example
at link i think one of the very useful
things at link
is that we count words we count the
words that you have read
we count the number of words or phrases
that you have saved
we tell you how many words you don't
know
because you haven't seen them before at
link and from that we develop a lot of
statistics
which are motivating we have milestones
of your achievements or you can judge
the difficulty of a certain text by how
many unknown words there are there
i personally find 10 to 15 percent
um unknown words is kind of ideal
because i'm learning enough
new words but i'm not having to look up
every
second or third word but this will be
you know it'll vary from
person to person so but we don't worry
like people say well you know you can't
claim to know 15 000 words because at
link we count each form of the word as a
different word
yeah it's easier for the computer to
measure that
the computer has a tougher time working
out if this word is part of a
word family or not you know
activity active action are they part of
the same family whatever i don't know
so words i think it's best to simplify
to have a gordian knot approach the
guardian knot
of course was alexander was asked to
untie this
nod he just cut it with a sword simplify
the number of words that you can
recognize
passively in a given context good enough
for link it's good enough uh you may
find the next time you see it you don't
know what it means
because we forget so much we forget so
much forgetting is such a big part of
language learning
forgetting and relearning forgetting and
relearning is is such an
important part and because therefore the
process
is kind of like a fuzzy process where we
are
gradually absorbing the language and the
brain is starting to connect certain
things and forgets us
to forget certain things and as long as
we are motivated and keep going we will
acquire
more and more of the language now
i decided to do a little bit of research
for
today's video by the way you'll notice
that my thumb is okay
some people expressed you know the wish
that my thumb get better and all it is
is that uh with the winter weather and i
do
all the dishwashing and i really should
wear gloves but
then i start getting these little uh you
know chaps or or whatever you want to
call it
splits in my thumb and so i put a little
bit of cream there a little bit of you
know
saran wrap and bandage it and that way
it gets better
uh now so i went to my uh bookshelf now
i have a lot of books
on a variety of subjects i like history
i like politics i like a lot of
different things
but also on language so i just went and
got
the books that i have here
that deal with words vocabulary and
language teaching
second language vocabulary acquisition
vocabulary description acquisition and
pedagogy
the online educator that's a little
different second language acquisition
rod ellis
language teaching methodology how
languages are learned
whatever i have a lot of books i've read
them i think they're overly complicated
i think that all of that the gordian
solution
is stephen krashen so here is one book
that i got when i was in taiwan
attending a language conference where he
was speaking it's called
explorations in language acquisition and
use the taipei lectures
very inexpensive and tremendous value
and it cuts through
all the unnecessary uh stuff
learning vocabulary in another language
and i could go through them and
i mean it doesn't really matter any page
you open designing and using a
simplified reading scheme for vocabulary
development
making decisions using labeled diagrams
vocabulary in discourse reading and
sentence completion it's a whole bunch
of stuff that just
complicates everything just keep
enjoying the language
then they have these also on the subject
of how to accumulate
words you have these like toefl so they
have a bunch
of words and and uh you know essential
toefl vocabulary you'll work very hard
to learn the word treasury or
preconception or or whatever in the hope
that
that word will show up on your toefl
test but the reality is
that word frequency declines so quickly
that a lot of those low frequency words
that you'll go to
all that trouble to try and learn you're
going to forget them and chances are
they won't show up
on the toefl exam so you're better off
to simply spend your time
enjoying the language reading and
listening
as much as you can to acquire the
language
naturally and in that natural way
eventually words will stick and words
can stick
quite quickly it all depends really i'm
just going to check my time here
you know it all depends and how similar
the language is to a language you
already know
so uh i uh did a video where i was doing
czech and with my knowledge of russian i
accumulated
words very quickly uh you know if you
know spanish and you do portuguese
you're accumulating you're going to
accumulate words very quickly
on the other hand learning arabic or
persian
not so fast and in fact the biggest help
is
arabic words in persian or persian words
in turkish and so
it depends what language you know uh if
you're dealing with a language that has
very few common
you know bits of vocabulary it's going
to take you quite a while but the
process
is still the same it's not doing these
toefl books it's not doing
special oh and i should i was going to
read you something too i googled
uh what does it mean to know a word
and so you get this tremendously
complicated you know understanding it's
basic meaning
denotation connotation understanding the
grammatical form
understanding that words may have more
than one meaning we know that from every
language
understanding what variety of english
the word belongs to
the word doesn't belong to any variety
okay
just by dent of reading or listening to
english around a certain context you're
going to learn that vocabulary
so knowing how it relates to other work
words in
lexical sets hipponomy
mironomy synonymy anthony
i mean all of this stuff is tremendously
complicated
it keeps the language teachers busy but
it has very little to do with
learning learning is very simple
learning words and learning words fast
if you want to learn
fast then choose a language which has a
lot of words in common with a language
you
already know otherwise be resigned to
the fact that it's going to take
as long as it takes and as long as you
are enjoying
what you are doing as long as you are
enjoying the language
as long as you have done the things that
i referred to in my
video on on having a language plan and
you've got content surrounding you that
meets your needs and meets your
interests and is at your level
and you keep at it the words are
eventually gonna
stick and that's all you can really do
and
uh you know to finish off i would direct
you to
two videos that i did on the subject of
vocabulary acquisition and the
importance of words
to reinforce what i've been talking
about today so there you go thank you
for listening
bye for now