100 foreign language words a day: Can it be done?

[JeremyW]

I am learning Mandarin. I have been learning from many sources the best probably being an application called "Before you know it: Chinese" I have set a goal of 5 words a day to begin with but would love to do alot more than that. I have been applying mind mapping techniques to assist my learning. I would love to learn 100 new Chinese words every day. If anyone has experience with learning foreign languages do you think this is a realistic goal?

[pinkhighlighter]

I have attempted to learn a new language before, but personally for me to retain the words I could only learn maybe 10/week. I would go over and over and over them. 100 a day seems a bit much unless that is all you are doing. But if you want to attempt it, flashcards would certianly come in handy.

Just for another idea, maybe listen to mandarin tapes or programs etc. while doing your 5 words a day (or however many you choose). Hearing the language a lot might be of great assistance.

These are just my own ideas, I'm not a teacher or anything

Good luck.

[Kenny Lindsay]

I have lived in China for 1 and a half years and have a working vocabulary of around 10000 words. I have studied everday and so that would equate to around 20 words per day. I think 100 would be difficult unless you were literally living and breathing chinese.

[Radek Pilich]

That depends on your abilities. I think that pretty every intelligent healthy person can learn some 20-50 new words each day. It would be tough just with pen and paper, but with software like Supermemo (Super Memory), which takes care of repetition scheduling it is pretty easy.
I think 100 worlds per day is achievable too, but you definitely need to employ advanced memory techniques (Memory Master Main Menu)

Hope this is helpful .)

[aelle]

You did not say if you wanted to learn the pronunciation or the writing of n words a day. In pictographic languages it makes a huge difference.

If it is about the pronunciation, 100 a day can probably be done (it's just a matter of training your memorizing skills) ; the hard part will be to remember these 100 words for more than a day or two.
From my experience, the best way to remember vocabulary for a long time is to use it in sentences, so you'll have to spend time talking to someone (or to yourself) (preferably about something that makes sense )

If you want to learn to write n words a day, I think it is more tricky. If you truly want to learn the language, the best investment will be to study the keys/radicals used in the Chinese characters. This will be tedious as you will have the feeling of cramming useless symbols, but once you master them it will make the future learning much more structured and easier.
Some people find flash cards useful ; I don't like to use them. When I buy them ready-made I find they don't help much, and they are way too time-consuming to make. I like to "mentally write" the caracters - it helps memorize both the caracter and the order of the strokes, and is faster than actually writing.

As said before, the number of words you can study per day will depend on how, how much and how long you study daily.
I did an intensive Japanese program a few years ago : 4 hours of class by groups of 10-15 with a native teacher + 2 to 4 hours of homework every day.
With this rythm I memorised about 50 words of vocabulary (pronounciation) and 10 characters every other day, but once the program ended I forgot a lot of it.

[kat]

Yes, it's possible. For a variety of techniques, see
Language Learning Forum: Super-fast vocabulary learning techniques

For learning the ideograms, it should be possible to learn a few thousand of the most common in as little as a few months, if you approach it intelligently. I'm personally a fan of Heisig's book, "Remembering the Kanji", but it's for Japanese - he's supposed to release one for Chinese eventually (possibly as early as this fall, but it's been delayed before).

The basic idea of "Remembering the Kanji" is to put them in a logical order, based on their radicals, and then use a useful memory trick (association with absurd imagery) rather than using the conventional ordering and drilling. I vaguely remember having seen a similar book for Chinese once, but I'm drawing a blank on the title and author.

[rene_stpierre]

I can't talk about the pace of learning. However, if you invest a lot of time learning a foreign language, you must make sure you will keep a regular exposure to the language after you have completed the intensive learning. Otherwise, you will lose all you have learned very fast.

In my opinion, the best exposure to help retain what you learn is living in the language. If that is not possible, watching TV or listening to audio recordings in the language in question on a daily basis, will allow you to retain what you have learned and help learn how to speak.

If you are not constantly exposed to the foreign language, you will not be able to learn it.

René

[Jonathan]

100 words a day is a very ambitious target, but by no means impossible. For my French and Spanish A-levels I revised a lot of topic-specific vocab at this pace, albeit only over the period of a couple of weeks, and I had no classes, work, etc and so could, as someone above put it, "live and breathe" the target language. And remember this was revision, not learning from scratch.

I'd recommend learning vocab grouped by subject matter, eg. food, music, sport, whatever, as this can provide a good basis for the learning when you at least know the vague ballpark the word is in. After working on one subject area, over the next couple of days, read articles or websites about that subject in order to cement the knowledge. I've found vocab learning is a matter of repeated and prolonged use, not cramming. And as mentioned previously, the importance of listening and immersion cannot be over-estimated!

Although it doesn't support Mandarin, I can strongly recommend the free Interlex (Free Vocabulary Builder) software for learning vocab in a variety of languages for anyone else reading this. It allows you to test yourself with custom word and phrase lists.

Good luck JeremyW (let us know how you get on!), plus any other linguists out there.

[ken nubo]

Sure, why not, but you need to be a trained memorian.

Try using the peg system (google it) to help you remember the words.

[Michael Tipper]

100 words a day is possible if you break it down into chunks, used the right techniques and that is all you focussed on. However I'd imagine that there are other things you also need to be doing with your life :-)

The key thing to understand when you are learning a language is not that you develop the ability to recall lots and lots of words, but that you develop the skill and understanding of being able to use those words yourself in the right context and with the right pronunciation. You also need to be able to recognise the words when spoken to you so that you can understand their meaning in the context you hear them.

Whilst having a good memory for the words is good, it is only part of the challenge in learning to speak another language.

The other contributors have already given you som great advice and some good resources to try out and I'd suggest you have a look at some of them. However the one thing I would suggest you consider when you memorise the words is this:

Within 1-2 days of learning something new, you will be unable to recall 80% of it because of something called the "Ebbinghaus Curve of Forgetting" - essentially everything you encounter and experience is stored in your mind as a very weak memory trace. If left in that fragile condition, you will quickly lose the ability to recall it because of it becoming "confused" with all of the other equally faint memory traces. It is for this reason that most people cram for their tests and exams the night before, pass the exam but if they sat it 2 weeks later would fail.

So the important thing for you to do, however many words you end up memorising every day, is that you should also recall them from memory after 10 minutes, a day, a week, a month, 3 months and 6 months. Each time you strengthen the trace until eventually you can recall the word at will.

It will take a bit of discipline but combined with the conversational practive you should be doing and the other exposure you should be having with the language it will help reinforce your memory of the words so that you will always be able to recall them.

Now if you can do this at a rate of 100 words a day then you might find yourself a little busy. 5 - 10 would be a good target and as you progress you will build up your recall of these words.

But one final thing to be aware of, most languages have a working vocabulary of 1500-2500 words. At a rate of 100 a day you could be done in just over 3 weeks! My advice is to take your time, ease the pressure off yourself a bit and start with a small number. If you want to increase the number of words, do so by adding 1 every day until you find the figure that you can comfortably handle.

Good luck with the Mandarin. For me it is Russian and German:-)

[kat]

Originally Posted by Michael Tipper

The key thing to understand when you are learning a language is not that you develop the ability to recall lots and lots of words, but that you develop the skill and understanding of being able to use those words yourself in the right context and with the right pronunciation. You also need to be able to recognise the words when spoken to you so that you can understand their meaning in the context you hear them.

Absolutely true, though a few experienced language learners (a minority) start by cramming a few thousand vocabulary words + basic grammar so they can read native materials as soon as possible. WARNING: this does -not- lead to fluency by itself, or even being able to make yourself understood to native speakers. It's probably not the right technique for a first foreign language, or for anyone who doesn't know how to supplement it.

Originally Posted by Michael Tipper

Whilst having a good memory for the words is good, it is only part of the challenge in learning to speak another language.

Extremely true. It's arguably not even the biggest part (idiomatic use and vocabulary are the two major contenders).

Originally Posted by Michael Tipper

The other contributors have already given you som great advice and some good resources to try out and I'd suggest you have a look at some of them. However the one thing I would suggest you consider when you memorise the words is this:

Within 1-2 days of learning something new, you will be unable to recall 80% of it because of something called the "Ebbinghaus Curve of Forgetting" - essentially everything you encounter and experience is stored in your mind as a very weak memory trace. If left in that fragile condition, you will quickly lose the ability to recall it because of it becoming "confused" with all of the other equally faint memory traces. It is for this reason that most people cram for their tests and exams the night before, pass the exam but if they sat it 2 weeks later would fail.

So the important thing for you to do, however many words you end up memorising every day, is that you should also recall them from memory after 10 minutes, a day, a week, a month, 3 months and 6 months. Each time you strengthen the trace until eventually you can recall the word at will.

It will take a bit of discipline but combined with the conversational practive you should be doing and the other exposure you should be having with the language it will help reinforce your memory of the words so that you will always be able to recall them.

The easiest way to do this, by far, is with software helping you. Anything which uses a "spaced repetition system" works on basically this principle. Mnemosyne is a good open-source, cross-platform program of this type; I've used it a bit. Another alternative is supermemo, but it's apparently buggy, and I've never used it.

Originally Posted by Michael Tipper

But one final thing to be aware of, most languages have a working vocabulary of 1500-2500 words. At a rate of 100 a day you could be done in just over 3 weeks! My advice is to take your time, ease the pressure off yourself a bit and start with a small number. If you want to increase the number of words, do so by adding 1 every day until you find the figure that you can comfortably handle.

That's a working vocabulary for spoken language. Written language requires at least a passing knowledge of perhaps ten times that many. Furthermore, figuring out which are the right 2500 isn't entirely obvious, and a small percent will vary by context. Understanding informal language and slang is an additional challenge.

[Royce_aus]

Hi Jeremy, I've always been interested in learning a foreign language. In the past I've made attempts at japanese with techniques that many people have listed above and I got a good result for the effort I put in.

I was listening to one of steve's audio talks and he spoke about coming into resonance with your goal. I think it was about reaching goals faster. So I was wondering if there were any people here who have learnt a second language that could help out by mentioning what mental changes happened as you learnt a second (or 3rd 4th 5th ) language.

In what ways did it change your thinking?

[Jae]

I've found flash cards a help with learning things like this. If you don't feel like making them, this site has a program I like (www.byki.com). There's a free limited version of it avaliable. I guess it depends how advanced you already are as well, I think it's probably catering for the more beginning language students unless you make your own lists.

[tor]

It can be ''easily'' done with the giordano memorization system.

School of Phenomenal Memory??

According to the Gms manual you cannot learn more than 5-6 word a day by repetition, but with using the Gms(which is only mnemonics organized into a system and improved a lot) you can memorize any amount of words using pictures and fix it in 3-4 days(you don't need pictures anymore because the words will be fixed in the memory)
You don't even have to buy the course, all information in given in gms manual.
I'm currently learning japanese kanjis using gms and j.heisig ''remembering the kanjis''

good luck

[aslimlady]

i am chinese and i am glad to be your pen friend if you like to. we can communicate in chinese or english