Transcription
In this video, I will show you different methods of learning foreign words and draw attention to one point that many ignore. Each method works only at a certain language level. What helps at level A1, for example, the method of spaced repetition at levels B begins to slow you down. And after this video, several very common confusions will be untangled in your head. For example, about the method of association and mnemonics. You will understand that these are two completely different methods for different purposes. Research and data from the last 50 years clearly show why some methods are successful at the beginner level, while others only start working at higher levels. In general, by the end of this video, you will understand which methods are specifically harming you at your stage of language learning, and which ones truly help and will help you move to the next level without losing years. Let's start with the initial stages of language learning, levels A. At the initial stage, our main task is to quickly, as quickly as possible, enter the language and form a basic vocabulary. But in English, as in any language, there is a huge number of words. And a person who thinks, who values their time, asks the question, which of these words should be learned first. Linguists have already analyzed a huge number of texts for us, once manually, now on computers, and have determined which words occur more frequently than others. And it turned out that language, the vocabulary of a language, obeys Zipf's law. In a language, words occur unevenly. A small group of words covers almost the entire language, about 90 percent of it, and all other words are the remaining 10. It is this small group of super-common words that forms the core of any language. And this is about 3,500 words. Moreover, this applies not only to English but also to all other languages as well. It is these words, forming the core of the English language, that you will constantly encounter, no matter what you do. Articles, books, just on the internet, videos, reels, anything. That's why these words are called frequent. Without knowing these words, you simply cannot move forward in the language; they are universal. Let me show you an example of how this works. Let's take an article, for example, this one, and highlight the words from the list of the most frequent words that are part of the language core. Look, the majority of the article consists of them. Therefore, if you understand them, you already understand the essence of what will be written, and you will be able to more easily understand the remaining words. A list of such frequent words can be easily found on the internet, and these are the ones you need to start learning. This is why good tools for English learners mark the frequency and commonness of a word. For example, the Longman Dictionary will have a mark with circles after such words, indicating how common the word is, whether it's in the top 1,000, 2,000, or 3,000 most common words. In fact, how many dots are there is not so important. If you see them, it means this is a word that is part of the English language core, and you definitely need it. For those who missed it, the dictionary is called Longman Dictionary. A very cool one, I recommend it. And knowing this, there is a feeling of suspicious simplicity. It seems that there are 3,000 words. If I know them, then that's it, I will understand 90% of any text. However, this law has another interesting property. The more frequent a word is, the shorter it will be and the more meanings it will have. Conversely, the less frequent a word is, the longer and more precise it will be. So, it turns out that these 3,000 words from the language core are very polysemous. Literally, each of these words will have several, or even tens, and even hundreds of meanings. For example, the word "take" has about 30 basic meanings, and over a hundred in total, if you consider all its possible meanings. Or the word "run" has up to 80 main meanings. And, my God, 600 in total. And this is not a joke. And here you might want to get scared, but you don't need to, because if you think this through to the end, there will be nothing to be afraid of. At the first stage, we don't need to try to memorize many meanings of words. That will come later. And it will require completely different methods. At the first stage of learning, we need to memorize just one basic meaning of a word from this list of 3,000 words. Roughly speaking, "take" means to take, "run" means to run. That's it. You don't need to delve into the nuances of a word at the initial stage. At level A, words are learned straightforwardly and only with their direct meaning. Because the main thing that happens at this stage is that your brain learns to recognize the form of the word, and this is the most important thing, because it will be the foundation on which the next stages will be built. And it is at this stage that methods like flashcards, lists, and spaced repetition will work perfectly. Because the task at the beginner level is to quickly go through the words that form the core of the language, and not to delve into the shades of meaning. Don't learn phrasal verbs here yet. You just need to build a base of words that your brain will recognize. At levels A1, A2, the brain learns individual words as separate objects. Go, cat, make, blue. You will understand why I am emphasizing this in a few minutes when I start talking about context. Yes, learning words can be uninteresting, and motivation can disappear here. But unfortunately, it's impossible without it. You can't skip this stage in any way, so it makes sense to go through this first stage of language learning as quickly and intensively as possible, without stretching it out for a year. Now I will talk about mnemonics and the method of association. I've noticed that they are often confused on the internet, but these are two completely different, well, not completely, but different things. You'll understand why now. Mnemonics is a way of memorizing a word where we memorize a new word using a fabricated connection that we create for this word through some vivid, memorable image. These are artificial methods that help to fix this word in your memory. For example, mnemonics are often based on sound. The word "сани" (sani) sounds like what word? The word "сани" (sani), which we ride on snow. You can memorize the word "сани" (sani) based on such a sound similarity, but there is no meaning in this. That is why mnemonics have a very limited application in language learning. There are areas where you just need to memorize a lot of poorly connected numbers, words, or something like that. That's where mnemonics help and are needed. But in language learning, we need meaningful semantic connections and associations, not just our fantasies from our heads. Therefore, in language learning, there is only one area where mnemonics are truly useful. This is learning rare words with one main meaning. For example, like these. The context in these words is not particularly important, and if you memorize the word, it's generally clear how to use it. But the fact is that at the initial levels A, we practically have no such words. The words we work with here are frequent, common, and most importantly, polysemous words. No matter how much you want to tie a word to a specific artificial image, it's better not to do it. It might help to memorize more words in the moment, but it will only slow you down in the future. Moreover, fantasizing these connections by sound or by the appearance of the word is a resource-intensive process. If you've done it before, you know how much time it takes, and at the initial stage, we are simply getting acquainted with the word and learning to recognize it in text in its direct meaning. Now for the tricky part, which is why mnemonics are confused with the method of association. Associations were used in mnemonics, but the associations were artificial and fabricated. This was precisely the problem when we study a language. The method of association is not about inventing connections and what comes to mind, but about natural images, natural connections that arise from our experience, from life context, when we encounter a word. Let's take the same word "sunny" as an example. Imagine you have an English lesson, and it's a sunny day. Bright light falls on your face. The teacher sees this and says, "Oh, such a sunny day." You hear the word "sunny," and from this situation, an association with a sunny day naturally arises, which is reinforced by the word "sunny." But this also requires luck, and the lesson to be on a sunny day. Can this process be accelerated in any way? Yes, but you should use natural associations, not mnemonics. For example, you are trying to memorize the word "sunny," say it and recall a specific sunny day from your life. At this moment, a natural connection, a natural association with the word "sunny" arises. And it is linked to the situation and the meaning in which this word is actually used in the language. This is the difference. Association connects the word with its usage situation. The word "sani" and a sunny day, and I just have some random sound similarity that comes to mind, with those poles moving on the snow. Let's talk about levels B. When you move from level A to level B, everything changes dramatically. And at this point, many people get stuck for many years and cannot move forward, without understanding why. But you will understand now. The fact is that at level B, the basis of your language learning and progress in it becomes context. It is at this stage that we begin to truly immerse ourselves in the language. At levels A1, A2, we learned words straightforwardly: table, go, come. One word, one meaning. Everything is clear. That's why flashcards, spaced repetition, and simple rote memorization worked well there. But at levels B, the world of English words ceases to be flat. Now each word is its own universe with a whole set of meanings. For example, the word "run," which we learned as "to run," now begins to modify its meaning depending on the situation in which it is encountered. For example, "run late" means to be late. "Run a business" means to manage a business, not to run a business. To manage a business. "Run smoothly" means to proceed smoothly. "Run out of time" means to run out of time. You see, one word, but five different meanings. That's why other words start appearing in translations, because the meaning conveyed by the word begins to change. And here's the mistake that can cause people to stay at level B1 for 2-3 years without moving forward. The fact is that they continue to learn words the same way they did before, but the brain works differently at this stage. At levels B, the brain needs to memorize not the word, but the situation. This is called input-based learning, i.e., learning through meaning. How does this look in practice? For example, you are reading a B1 level text, and the word "take" appears here, I don't know, 5, 6, 10 times, but each time in its real role. For example, "take responsibility," "take a look," "take time," "take place." And each time this phrase will be in a situation through which you understand its meaning. Did you notice what's important here? Not the translation of individual words, but the situation in which you saw it. This is how the brain learns meaning. Not through translation, but through a clear, repeated situation it encounters. Of course, you can make flashcards out of these phrases, but if you haven't encountered this phrase in a real situation where you saw how it works and what meaning it carries, these flashcards will be useless. Therefore, only those flashcards that you create from phrases and meanings that you encounter yourself will be useful. And you've noticed that we're not talking about individual words here, but about collocations, about stable phrases, stable word combinations. These will be the heart of level B1, B2. It is because of collocations that native speakers will sound natural, while those who learn the language often sound textbook-like. Why? Because when you need to say "strong rain," a person starts saying "strong rain," but a native speaker says "heavy rain." Why? Because for them, it's just a single collocation. And these collocations cannot be learned from a list. They can only be caught and assimilated from real contexts that you encounter. Next, phrasal verbs. And here, learning them from a list absolutely doesn't work. Break up, break down, break through, break in, break out. If you learn them dry, the brain just gives up. But if you take these same verbs not from a list, not from flashcards, but encounter them in specific movie scenes, in an adapted text, they are memorized naturally, because it is precisely through context and encountering words in specific situations that natural language acquisition for our brain occurs. Now I want to explain in more detail why word flashcards and spaced repetition stop working here. Because I feel like you haven't understood, you haven't understood. So, look. The fact is that word flashcards and apps like Anki and similar ones are based on the work of Ebbinghaus's forgetting curve. Ebbinghaus was a German psychologist who studied how the forgetting of meaningless information works. I'm emphasizing this with two lines now. Meaningless information, because that's the key. He wanted to find out how pure memory works. That's why he used not specific words for his experiments, but simply meaningless syllables or word combinations, like these, and watched how quickly a person would forget a set of such meaningless syllables after encountering them. All spaced repetition systems or methods of spaced repetition and the work of apps like Anki are based on this curve. They stimulate you to repeat words at the right interval. And this is supposedly better for memorization. And at levels A, when you were mastering the first set of words with their direct meaning, this worked perfectly. Why? Because at that moment, the words were not yet integrated into the language system for the brain. What does this mean? That you haven't used them yourself yet, you haven't encountered them in live speech, in dozens of different combinations. They didn't evoke any automatic reaction in you. These words were essentially the same meaningless syllables that Ebbinghaus used in his experiments. The word worked like a label, and Ebbinghaus's curve also worked, but only until the word started appearing in context. At levels B1, B2, the word ceases to be a label. It ceases to be an object in itself and turns into meaning. And Ebbinghaus's curve cannot work with meaning, it cannot retain polysemy. And at levels B, the main mass of difficulties people have is not that they forgot the word, but that they don't understand the word in a specific combination in which they encountered it. That is, at levels A, the problem is: I don't know what this word is, but at levels B: I don't know what this word means here. And now the most, most important thing: forgetting words is no longer a problem. The problem is a lack of context. It is around the lack of context that the main mass of problems at levels B1, B2 is built. What really works? Reading adapted texts for this level works. Watching videos where you understand about 70-80% of what is being said, collecting collocations that you have actually encountered. And these collocations can then be written down on flashcards and used later. But the most crucial thing is that you must have encountered this collocation yourself somewhere first. Writing down phrases, not individual words, also works. This is a super important point. Everything works through phrases. And when a person stops focusing on individual words and starts working with meanings, then their B1 turns into B2. Finally. Level C. Of course, a separate video needs to be made about this, because when I reached this level myself, I understood and felt how diverse and very precise such work with the language should be here. But if we try to highlight the most important, the main thing from the perspective of vocabulary, then level C is not about words, but about thinking in English. What does this mean? Think about it. Thinking in English means if you cannot explain a word, then it is not your word, not yours. That is, you do not own it and do not use it. At this level, knowing a word means being able to determine its meaning, provide an example, integrate it into your thoughts, and replace it with a similar synonym. And at level C, what is important is not memory, not memory at all, but flexibility of thinking in English. This is developed not at all through lists of words, but, for example, through reading complex, unadapted texts, deep contemplation of context, and using these words in real speech. And also through your own writing. Writing is a very powerful tool for developing flexibility of thinking in the language. I think that later, perhaps next year, I will record a separate video about this level. In the meantime, if you are studying English and want to develop in English, you can subscribe to my Telegram channel. There I regularly share my author's content on word usage, on the peculiarities that I notice while living in an English-speaking environment, and simply funny things from the world of English to maintain our interest and motivation. The link is in the description. See you again. Ah, no, no, no, you still need to like and comment, right?