Lost for Words

Forget the trojan war, there are longer battles out there. Like the battle with vocabulary.

last time i wrote about how important association and creativity is in vocabulary building. I’ve learnt over the last few years that words just simply don’t get absorbed if they’re considered independent objects, but I didn’t always know that. Because I hate to appear like i’m telling you all these things on this blog from some great pedestal of higher knowledge – it’s not the case at all – I want to share my experience so far of learning how to learn vocabulary.

German – the school language days

My first language after English was German. I started it way back at the start of secondary school and now it’s part of my degree. Up to GCSE (around 15 years old), I never studied vocabulary as a separate part of language learning. Not even for my GCSE exams. I got A* in 3 out of 4 sections.

it was only in A levels (the last two years of school in the UK), that I sat down with actual vocab lists due to the sheer amount of vocab I needed to learn. Interestingly enough, I didn’t seem to have such a photographic memory of all those words we were learning in class as in GCSE.

Why?

How was it that when I actually sat down to learn vocab, I couldn’t learn it so easily?

I’ve thought about this quite a bit recently, and it does in my humble opinion truly boil down to my views in the last blog. In GCSE, the vocabulary always had some form of association in the classroom, whether it was colours for different word genders, or pictures to new words when they were introduced, new words came with stimulus. At A level, it was common to have a long impenetrable  list of words in the ‘good’ old traditional a way – a list of words in black Arial font on a white piece of paper.

Now, for the entirety of my A levels, I never made the connection between ease of vocabulary learning and stimulus. My view was that the long boring list was the ‘academic’ approach. This was the way it was to be from now on. Academic work calls for seriousness.

…well.

Association, Association, Association!

When language learning, in my experience now, seriousness is terrible silly. Silly is seriously good. I’m convinced that if I had approached vocabulary study in a more creative way back in A levels, I would have done a lot better!

In lists of, say, a hundred words, I would usually remember no more than half after pretty intense periods of study. One may instantly criticise the large number of words being attempted, but this would have been over a period of days.

In contrast, now I’m at uni I go through my vocab lists for the week in Chinese, and know 80% of them by the time I’ve closed the page for the first time.

Because I associate the words as I see them.

It is admittedly easier to remember Chinese vocab if learnt creatively than most languages (I can almost here the disagreeing majority screaming from here), but I’ll come back to that later.

As for German these days – I’m the first to admit i’m currently rather lazy with learning new vocab, but what i do learn tends to stick and it’s entirely down to creative association. I’m going to give some examples of how a little bit later too.

But before that,  there’s the period between school and university to mention. How did I approach vocabulary in China?

China – learning on the go, learning for the day

As a teacher for a year, learning the Chinese on my own from scratch as I went, building a strong active vocabulary was excesively important. I learnt a lot from it and the experience has turned into a great example of learning from mistakes. Let’s start with those mistakes!

My German teacher was kind enough to arm me with nearly 1000 flashcards of Chinese characters before I moved to China. These turned out to be indispensable, but i did in retrospect use them in pretty silly way. By the nature of these flashcards being organised to an extent in order of frequency of use (which is incredibly important in choosing what to learn first!), the further I got through them, the less likely I was to see certain characters day to day. At the start, using these flashcards in a similar way to my old A level vocab lists was fine; i learnt the characters then associated them with the world outside. Later on however, there was a high chance of not seeing a particular new character outside in the world and it would simply be forgotten again.

My other big mistake was not directing my vocabulary learning to the themes I was most likely to need! It was all fair enough learning words for climate and business – themes that eventually turned up in my textbooks and flashcards – but I was buying vegetables most days rather than shares in huawei.

On the positive side, being in the country of a target language means you learn how to communicate in general. You learn that language isn’t actually only language. language includes movements, your composure, how you act in a conversation, tone of voice (a bit more complex in Chinese, but the concept remains the same), and the sounds you make that aren’t technically words, among other things. I became a master of the Chinese ‘ng’ counterpart to the English ‘hmm’, for example, rather quickly.

Also, and perhaps more importantly, constant practice in real life situations rather than role playing with a textbook. Although you could just walk in to a restaurant and grunt ‘beef noodles’ at the staff, you’re not only going to appear more fluent with a whole sentence such as ‘could I order some beef noodles with extra beef and make it spicy please’, but you’re going to start remembering hundreds of new words in a very short time. To prove my point, lets take some situations in a normal day and have one simple sentence for each situation and count up the words used…

(to a flatmate in the morning…) 早上好！-zaoshang hao! – Good morning!

(breakfast down at the dumpling shop) -我想买三个包子。一共多少钱？-wo xiang mai san ge baozi. yigong duoshao qian? would like to buy three steamed dumplings. How much is that all together?

(getting a ticket on the bus/underground to work) 一张票。我给你两块钱。-yi zhang piao. wo gei ni liang kuai qian. One ticket please, here’s 2 kuai.

(someone asks you a question you don’t understand) 不好意思，我听不懂。我说中文说得不好。你会说英语吗？-buhaoyisi. wo ting bu dong. wo shuo zhongwen shuo de bu hao. ni hui shuo yingyu ma? – I’m sorry, I don’t understand. I don’t speak Chinese well. can you speak English? (…ok that one wasn’t a simple sentence. sorry)

…now those are phrases you would learn whether you like it or not in your first couple of weeks without trying and in those sentences you wouldn’t have only learnt 30 words (in only 4 phrases!), but you have a big chunk of basic Chinese grammar down too.

And you won’t even notice all that achievement, because you’re using it every day. Awesome.

Putting creative association for vocabulary learning into practice.

With all this talk of association working, it seems a pretty good idea to show the idea in practice! I touched on this a little in the last post (you can find it here) but you’ll find a real expansion on the idea here. First, lets take a word, and do what exactly what I told you not to do – look at it on its own. here’s a word I learnt recently in German –

Finsternis.

Finsternis means ‘darkness’ in English, but are you really going to learn that by staring into a German abstracted darkness, repeating desperately to yourself ‘Finsternis, darkness, darkness, finsternis…’.?

It does work eventually, but lets be more creative. The first thing I see is the ‘ Finster’ part looks a bit like ‘Fenster’,which means Window in German. If you look out of a Fenster at night, you’ll see nothing but Finsternis. Some think its scary, but personally I think it’s pretty nis – all that finsternis out my Fenster.

How about the sound of Finsternis? can we associate that? If you’ve ever been in a wood in the dark? The leaves of the trees form a soft rustling sound…the wind blows one way and the leaves softly ‘ffffff’. the wind stops a second and the trees move back ‘sssss’. in the FfffinSssssterniSssssss, the word starts to form. I know this may seem a pretty loose association, but different people appeal to different senses, and so sound association can be very powerful.

You could relate to English words too. Someone who has a dark personality might be described as stern. so in German darkness, you may well find (fin)stern(is).

You can also associate the word with the source you first found the word! I found the word Finsternis firstly in the German book ‘die 13 1/3 Leben des Kapt’n Blaubärs’, and as a result had a rich literary world to associate my new vocabulary with. I will for example because of this book never forget that Germans transform in after the rather surreal sentence in the book “Ich war endlich in einer Sardine verwandelt” (i had finally transformed into a sardine).

You can do this with any word. Any word at all! There are of course many words which are easier to associate, but this shouldn’t stop you with more complicated vocabulary.

Lastly, I mentioned much earlier that Chinese vocabulary can be easier to learn than most languages. Emphasis on the can, guys. The (pretty justified) argument and complaint of Chinese students for why Chinese is harder to learn than other languages, is the constant struggle to remember a character for every word. This can be a massive burden. It can also however be made into a huge advantage – as Chinese students are given a head-start on association material.

Chinese characters started their lives off as pictograms; small drawings depicting their meaning. Many components still keep visual elements and if used smartly they help you remember the Chinese word and its English translation much much better. Here’s a very basic character – 木。It looks a bit like a tree, which handy because it means wood, or tree. If you take another character containing a tree, like 相，made of up of a tree/wood, with an eye, you’ve got multiple starting points for building an image/story to remember any words built around this character. Chinese has an in-built association system. It’s quite frankly brilliant.

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so…is vocabulary boring? It doesn’t need to be. The best bit for me is that I know that there will be even better ways to learn all those words. This is just a starting point built around my experience of vocabulary learning so far. What I haven’t said however yet is the influence that learning more about how memory works has had on my techniques, so memory in general is a topic for you all to look forward to in the future!

But for now, thanks for reading!