moreVocabulary

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07/22/2010

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Repetition is essential to remember words over the long run.
06/19/2010
See the term “spaced repetition” in a Wikipedia article:
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spaced_repetition>.
This technique is not easy to implement, but with a little discipline and organization you can make it work. If you are using flash cards for example, you can make it a rule to review the flash cards you mastered  after a week, or a couple of months. It is not a big deal to repeat those cards you are supposed to know, and check to see if you still remember most of the words as you test your confidence in your real knowledge of the language.
The thing you will achieve is reinforcement of your vocabulary skills. You certainly have experienced perfectly mastering perfectly a set of questions for a school exam and then forgetting most of them after a few weeks. The issue with language need not be passing another school exam on a specific day, but being ready to engage in an impromptu conversation.
What you really want to do when learning a foreign language is more than being ready for the next school test. If you learn new vocabulary with a newspaper and dictionary, it is a good idea to go back to last month's articles with no dictionary and see how much you understand. If you are learning with another method like Pimsleur, the tape will take care of the repetition since it is a basic principle of their system which is called “timed interval repetition”. Words learned with spaced repetition usually stick to your memory, provided you do your homework on a regular basis, with discipline.
This is why we are using a variant of this method as a key part of the learning sequence in our Language Tutor as opposed to most flashcards programs, which we believe provide a rather superficial learning.

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Reverse Flashcards
06/09/2010
I would like to discuss one of the main issues encountered with using reverse flashcards programs, when you learn languages.
- Let’s take the example of the English word “striped”, like in the expression “I am wearing a striped jacket”.
You would translate “striped” for a “chaqueta” in Spanish by “a rayas” or “de rayas” but the words“rayada” and “listada” would also work.
Note that those last 2 Spanish words have a different meaning and means also “scratched” in English.
- The same word translated for a “veste” in French will be “à rayures”, “rayée”, “striée” and even “zébrée”
- The reverse translation for the French “rayé” as an adjective is therefore “striped” for a fabric or “scratched” for a record or for a surface. You may also use “crossed out” in English for this word.
There are many examples such as this in foreign languages which makes learning language very funny sometimes. The point is that a serious vocabulary learning program must use for each word to learn a precise context, like “fabric” or “record, surface” to get the user to learn the right word in the proper context. Otherwise, so many possible situations or contexts will create a lot of confusion.

It is therefore absolutely impossible to translate these words from one language into the other and vice versa.
The original meaning of the word might be completely lost and could lead to a totally false reverse translation.

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About Me
06/03/2010
I have learned several languages and now want to share some of my own experience and help others.
I have developed a Vocabulary Language Tutor software and it will be soon out for trial on my web site.
I am very focused these days on promoting this research and the software coming out.
You can joint me on Facebook, MySpace, Google Buzz or Twitter
Visit my page at <http://morevocabulary.com/Link_page.html>

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About LanguageTutor
05/28/2010
This vocabulary tutor software lets you work in a more productive and intensive manner as opposed to a passive manner such as learning with flashcard software:
- During each lesson, news words and already viewed words are proposed randomly with a special program feature thereby avoiding the most recent words being drawn from the pool again. The software constantly monitors each user’s learning speed and a helpful progress bar is displayed with each word for each lesson.
- Detailed progress statistics for each lesson are made available at any time.
- Three users can be accommodated and work on the same application concurrently.
- The software will keep track of each of the users and their words and progress individually.
- The program is designed for fast and complete learning.
- The repetition module remembers the words for which you have the most difficulty and those words will be asked again and again until you perfectly memorize them.
- You also have the possibility to skip any word and come back to it later. Or you might simply not  be interested in a particular word and you can remove it.
- Automatic software and vocabulary base update is embedded in this program.
- These two pieces of software both function as systematic tools for effective learning of thematic Spanish or French vocabulary.

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The biggest challenge:
05/24/2010
The biggest challenge when studying vocabulary is to actually remember the words you just learned. Some words seem to stick to your memory immediately, whereas with others you always seem to forget. There are several ways to improve your memory when learning foreign language vocabulary. None is foolproof, and all require some work, but with these tips you will be able to learn more efficiently:
When encountering a new word, you need to make its meaning stick to in your mind.
You can picture your memory as a giant pine tree, with many branches each representing a part of your memory. To remember a new word, you need to hang it on either something existing or something new. It is extremely difficult to remember more than a few new words when they come totally out of nowhere and are not linked to anything else that is already in your memory.
Fortunately, there are many ways to tie a new word to something in your memory like using cognates, but be careful since some of these might be false friends. You might try using the common roots of words which can often be the same in the two languages. If you learn and remember the root and recognize it in some new words, you will better remember them.
One other way to learn vocabulary is to connect words using vivid mental images made up to connect a new word to something you will be able to remember. Using words in context enhances the chance you will remember them, but it is not quite effective (as what?) and might confuse you. This can be as simple as memorizing dialogue from a film or  language program or learning a song and later reading a text where the words are used.You can also be exposed to the word in a memorable context.

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How to learn vocabulary and why?
05/22/2010
Mastering vocabulary is a difficult and time-consuming task but necessary and probably the most important part of the language learning process for many reasons. Just listen to the radio or watch a movie in a foreign language or try to follow a conversation and you quickly realize how much you do not catch or understand because of all the words you miss. You need to practice and acquire more vocabulary, because knowing the basic of the grammar and the words you learned at school or through any language learning method is simply not enough.
Words have many false friends in any new language and they also have confusing spellings. The rules of pronunciation are full of exceptions and all of that add up to the difficulty of the process.
People rely on memory and realize that a known word cannot be retrieve when needed, unless it has been well "imprinted' through a long, sometimes mysterious and often erratic series of steps.
This is why, decades of learning experience and long hours spent in practicing vocabulary, led us to refine our methodology for learning vocabulary, and there it is coming soon in a dramatically efficient package with many features you will most likely appreciate.

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