How to Permanently Learn a Word
It is said that this method can aid memory. Your brain can retain these words.
Words are arbitrary symbols, and when we use words, we're employing a conventional name, like "dog," to represent a specific meaning. For English speakers, this conventional name is "dog," for Chinese speakers, it's "狗" (gǒu), and for Japanese speakers, it's "いぬ" (inu). Further, let's assume we create a new symbol and agree that everyone will use it to mean "dog" when they wake up tomorrow morning. As long as everyone remains consistent, this arbitrary symbol will transform into a new word, becoming the new name for "dog."
So, when we speak words in a language, we're assigning arbitrary symbols to the myriad things in the world, effectively giving names to everything. The first and greatest challenge faced by foreign language learners is to remember thousands of these arbitrary names and their corresponding meanings one by one, and this is no easy task. Because words are names, remembering a word is hardly different for the brain than remembering a person's name or a string of random numbers.
It can be said that this is the first challenge in the realm of vocabulary learning. The arbitrary symbol challenge is akin to trying to remember the names of 50 new classmates; every time you learn the 10th word, you'll forget the first 7. By the time you reach the 50th, you'll briefly forget the meaning of life. Psychologists widely believe that our short-term memory, working memory, can hold around 7 units of information at a time and quickly dissipates after 20-30 seconds.
So, how can we conquer the problem of forgetting? An obvious answer is that you should combat forgetfulness with repetition.
Any word memorization tool, be it printed paper, flashcards, intelligent vocabulary apps, or memory software like Anki, falls into the same category of language learning methods – word-list learning.
Using a word list, through extensive repetition, to memorize the names of everything in another language. It's said that since humans began learning foreign languages, this has been one of the most popular methods, because it truly works. In fact, for a beginner, this might be one of the most efficient methods. What you might not have considered is that when an infant learns the vocabulary of their native language, they simultaneously come to understand a new thing, like a rose, and remember the name of this thing, the word symbol "rose." As foreign language learners, we already know what a rose is; we just need to remember its new name in another language.
When learning foreign language vocabulary, due to our existing knowledge of the world, our learning burden is actually lighter than that of native-speaking infants. That's why ensuring various word-list learning methods involve significant repetition can theoretically lead to rapid vocabulary growth for beginners.
However, the disadvantages of this approach are evident.
1.Even after many repetitions, the countdown to forgetting these words continues ticking. Unless you tirelessly continue reviewing until the countdown resets to zero, memories will not return. It's akin to seeing a former classmate from elementary school after ten years and being unable to recall their name, no matter how hard you try. The weakness of word-list learning lies in its inability to integrate unrelated, context-independent words into the brain. Our sole reliance is on translations in our native language. While word-list learning is a useful method, it's not a comprehensive one.
2.You might have already noticed that many words have more than one meaning or can change meaning when placed in a different context. "Words have a habit of changing their meaning from one context to another." This phenomenon is known as the polysemy of vocabulary. My favorite example comes from psycholinguist Frank Smith.
"I found a book by Dickens by chance by the tree and shall return it by mail by Friday."
In this sentence, the word "by" has five different meanings: authored by someone, at a certain circumstance, beside a location, using a certain method, and before a specific time.
And that's just a fraction of the word "by"'s commonly used meanings. By the way, polysemy isn't exclusive to any one language. If you open a dictionary, you'll immediately find that the more common a word is, the longer its list of meanings, sometimes spanning an entire column or page.
In the Oxford English Dictionary, "at" has 39 meanings, "for" and "with" have 40 each, and "of" has 63.
Merriam-Webster's Dictionary has two main entries under "give," with one of them containing 55 definitions.
Linguist Fries' statistics show that the 500 most commonly used English words each have an average of 28 different definitions.
For example, I thought I had learned the meaning of "take" as carry or pick up until I encountered phrases like "take after my dad," "take apart the TV," "take down my address," and "take on a friend." It wasn't until then that I realized I might not have fully grasped the word. This is because English is full of multi-word combinations, fixed phrases that form a significant portion of both written and spoken English. Unfortunately, most of the time we can't infer the overall meaning from the individual words in these phrases, making them arbitrary symbols that need to be memorized one by one. So, what you perceive as the 500 most common English words being straightforward and simple entries that you can check off one by one is actually a vast collection of word forms, meanings, and idioms, making the true scope of vocabulary much wider.
3.The knowledge of words isn't a shallow pool; it's an expansive ocean, and the depths of the sea are unfathomable. After struggling to memorize hundreds of words, the next challenge I faced was how to use them. The answer, of course, was to misuse them – don't lie to me, I'm sure you've done the same. Look up a few advanced English words online, such as "exceedingly" for "very," "enraged" for "angry," "monstrous" for "bad," and so on. And even before understanding why they're considered advanced, you go ahead and replace every instance of "very," "angry," "bad" in your composition with "exceedingly," "enraged," "monstrous" like a peacock displaying its feathers.
As a result, what was once a perfectly fine sentence like "I'm very angry about the bad weather" transforms into the awkward "exceedingly enraged about the monstrous weather." This clearly showcases improper word usage.
Moreover, don't forget that many words gradually change in meaning through conventional usage, and dictionaries might not have caught up with these changes.
In reality, knowledge of words is a bottomless well. It includes variations in word forms, syntactic rules, suitable contexts, meanings, features, and much more.
Every small word contains a wealth of knowledge broader and deeper than we imagine. That's why anyone who claims they can teach you thousands of words in a matter of days, whether through memory techniques or etymological logic, is attempting to create a physiological miracle. Scientists have yet to discover such miracles anywhere on Earth.
So, do I still have hope? Yes, absolutely.
The ultimate method of learning vocabulary - contextual learning
Unlike the word-list learning approach of memorizing words one by one, the focus of this method lies in thoroughly understanding the information we read or hear. It's about comprehensible input and learning words through the power of context. As far as I know, contextual learning can help you overcome the challenges discussed earlier regarding vocabulary learning.
Firstly, context can help you remember arbitrary symbols. If I show you and your friend the same photo, but I tell you that the man is a "baker" (a profession), and I tell your friend that the man's name is "Baker."
A few days later, I ask both of you to recall any information about that photo. Your friend might struggle to remember Mr. Baker, while you can easily recall "baker."
This is known as the well-known "Baker Paradox" in psychology.
Even though you and your friend saw the same photo and heard the same words, the lowercase "baker" will leave a deeper memory than the uppercase "Baker." This is because the lowercase "baker" has numerous associations in your brain. It triggers images of a white chef's hat, the sound of baking trays clinking, the aroma of freshly baked bread. Visual, auditory, olfactory, and gustatory experiences act like nails or anchors, interweaving like threads, firmly anchoring "baker" in your memory.
That's why neuroscientist Lisa Genova believes that context is key to human memory of anything. Your brain captures and binds together the contextual details surrounding what you experienced: where you were, who you were with, how you felt, and so on.
And what associations does the uppercase "Baker" have? Virtually none, much like those context-independent words you memorize. Unless you find a way to provide them with contextual cues. Google Images can assist in this regard. Input the newly learned word into Google or Bing's image search engine, and see for yourself how violet the color "violet" is, how "shimmering" a lake is in the sunlight, and how "ferocious" an angry beast can be.
We also face the more complex challenges of breadth and depth.
Is it true that learning words in context can also help us grasp multiple meanings and precise usage of words? Yes. In certain cases, encountering a word within a context is sufficient for us to acquire a comprehensive understanding of it. For instance, in a groundbreaking study conducted in 1985, linguists from the University of Illinois had a group of middle school students read two articles and then tested them. The results indicated that all the students gained significantly stable vocabulary knowledge, with around 10% of unfamiliar words reaching a level of complete understanding after just one encounter.
For example, one of the articles was a story involving spies. In the protagonist Follower's imagination, agents were suave and mysterious, handling firearms and mingling with beautiful Bond-like women. However, when he trailed an actual spy, he found the individual to be overweight with big ears, residing in a dingy hotel room. As a result, the protagonist felt disillusioned.
By integrating the context, a portion of the students could immediately accurately describe the meaning of "disillusion," which is, if you have ideas about something and you find out it's the opposite, you become disillusioned, and your beliefs are shattered.
However, the premise of this learning effect is that you need to have a general understanding of the article. You might not recognize "disillusion," but if you're familiar with preceding terms like "fell to," "let down," "disappointed," and "frustrated," and you understand that the protagonist experienced a gap between imagination and reality, you have a high probability of inferring that "disillusion" is related to strong feelings of disappointment.
This is akin to a puzzle; if the majority of the pieces are already assembled, the missing one or two pieces won't hinder your understanding of the whole picture, and you can leverage existing knowledge to deduce what's missing.
If your vocabulary level is at "i," and you can find slightly more advanced "i+1" level texts, you can learn those "+1" words in comprehensible contexts. This aligns with the renowned language learning hypothesis known as the "comprehensible input hypothesis" by eminent second language acquisition researcher Professor Stephen Krashen.
As an additional point, linguist Paul Nation suggests that with a vocabulary coverage of 98%, we can essentially comprehend foreign language texts without needing a dictionary. This implies that for every 50 words read, encountering a new word or having around 6-7 unfamiliar words per page in a 300-word book is typical, or even fewer.
If this number drops to 95%, where a page of a 300-word novel contains over 10 unfamiliar words, you might need to rely on a dictionary frequently or skip over passages you don't understand. If this number falls significantly below 95%, you're not reading, but deciphering a code .
Even if you've found your comprehensible input, your vocabulary learning isn't an instant achievement, because in linguistic studies, while 61% of contexts provide explicit indications, 31% offer limited assistance, and there's around 8% of context that is misleading.
This indicates that we need to encounter words in multiple changing contexts to gradually calibrate their meanings and usage. In fact, even infants learning common native words like "poor" and "fail" typically need several years until their early childhood to fully grasp these words. This illustrates that learning words is a slow, progressive process. Vocabulary knowledge isn't a binary state of either learned or not learned; it's continuously growing. Learning words isn't about checking off boxes; it's about a very long progress bar. Every encounter with a word's variation pushes that progress bar forward just a little bit.
You ask me how many times to repeat. A good question.
It depends. I believe intelligent individuals like you and me have a natural ability to learn profanity in various languages after just hearing it once or twice. Because these words have the most explicit contextual cues and the strongest emotional color. However, nearly all high-frequency, polysemous, and complex words with extensive fixed phrases require you to diligently encounter them in changing contexts through repetition.
To fully learn most words, you need to encounter a word in naturally changing contexts at least 12 times. With that, we arrive at the following formula for how to permanently learn a word:
Find comprehensible texts with vocabulary coverage around 98%, read 100 words, encounter about two to three unfamiliar words, and repeat encountering those unfamiliar words at least 12 times in changing contexts.
So, how can you achieve that? The answer is through reading.
Of course, reading isn't the only method, because let me tell you what reading cannot accomplish.
Learning pronunciation and intonation, you need to manage to learn phonetics, you need to spend a lot of time listening to the language, and even practice speaking to yourself. At this point, reading alone is not sufficient; reading also takes a lot of time, and it can't guarantee you'll score high on an exam in just a couple of months. Compared to the claims of some online experts who promise to make you remember 10,000 words in a few days, reading can't achieve that, but there's one crucial thing reading can undoubtedly do.
It is only books that provide an unlimited amount of repetition.
It is only reading that can be returned to again and again without being an ordeal.
In other words, the demand for unlimited repetition can only be met by reading. Contextual clues and unlimited repetition make reading books an unparalleled vocabulary learning tool. In fact, we seem to be naturally adept at utilizing this learning tool.
Linguists have found that nearly any student can acquire the meanings of a significant number of words from stories, comics, and novels without much guidance. One of the consensuses in applied linguistics research for nearly 40 years is that this spontaneous leisure reading is likely a major source of an individual's vocabulary, both in their native language and a foreign one.
An ordinary high school student in the English-speaking world recognizes at least 20,000 core words, word families, and their at least 40,000 derivative forms. This doesn't even include tens of thousands of proper nouns, place names, acronyms, and other specialized terms. Now let me ask you, in this vast vocabulary, how many words did you learn from looking them up in a dictionary?
The answer is likely a small portion, or else starting from your first birthday, you would need to consult a dictionary every two to three hours while awake to add a word to your vocabulary, just to reach your current vocabulary by your 18th birthday. And how many words did your teachers actually teach you? The answer is still a small portion. Linguists estimate that even the most efficient schools can teach only three to four hundred words in a year, and these are the most basic ones. In comparison, mastering a language requires thousands upon thousands of words—this ocean-like expanse.
Where does knowledge come from?
The only source can only be reading.
This is like what Asimov said, "I believe that self-education is the only kind of education there is." Formal education will stop, but self-education never will.
Vocabulary learning may well be the epitome of self-education. If school teachers can only teach you a few hundred words, then no one can help you absorb the remaining thousands of words into your mind. Only through copious comprehensible input, through a lifetime of repeated reading, can you forever learn them.
But ask yourself, which field of knowledge doesn't work this way? What kind of learning is there that a teacher can entirely do for a student? From mathematics to language, from piano to dance, from chess to cooking, the arduous journey of acquiring any knowledge can only be completed by you. If vocabulary knowledge is an endless expanse, boundless in width and depth, then the sea inside it can only come from the continuous rain of your middle-aged years, and this rain is reading. So, the next question is, where should this rain come from?
The answer, of course, is that it must come from a million raindrops.
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