Reading and Vocabulary

Reading in a Foreign Language and the role of Vocabulary

Reading novels and other texts in a foreign language is a must.  It will allow you to have a greater understanding of the proper use of verbs, conjunctions, adjectives and other parts of speech.  The one main difficulty with reading texts in a foreign language is that you will start off not having a large enough vocabulary.  It will be sluggish, cumbersome and in the end very boring to get through even a short passage.  It is not fun to read anything when you have to look up every other word for its definition and still have to guess as to the meaning and context of the sentences and paragraphs.  Something that should normally only take you an hour will end up taking you three hours.

The other unfortunate aspect to reading foreign language texts in this manner is that even though you are spending the time looking up the vocabulary you are ONLY looking it up in order to get through the sentence or text at the time.  You aren’t memorizing this new vocabulary and will most likely have to look it up again when you next come across it.  It is actually more beneficial to boost your vocabulary separate from reading.  The reasoning behind this is that you usually have to read a passage in a novel in order to be able to discuss it during class.  Therefore you aren’t really concentrating on learning the majority of the vocabulary but only a few key words that you have to use in order to explain the passage.  This is not an efficient way to learn new vocabulary nor is it an efficient method to reading the passage.

The best thing that you can do to make EVERYTHING easier when learning a language is to increase your vocabulary.  Let us take a look at the perspective of someone with a large vocabulary.  Every passage they read they have to look up less words and have a greater chance of understanding the major concepts without having to waste time looking up anything.  The same person can also describe what they read with greater ability because they have the necessary vocabulary to draw from.  They get through homework, papers and classroom discussions MUCH easier than the person who does not have a great vocabulary. 

After the first initial classes, focus is never on learning vocabulary but on working with grammar.  Such as reading, writing and discussing the language.  It is true that you have to learn new vocabulary when writing or discussing something new but usually the amount of time you have to focus on that passage or context is limited and you as an individual will not have a full hour to discuss the passage with your professor or teacher but will have all of maybe 5 minutes to discuss your thoughts.  This means that the information you ‘learned’ for that classroom will not truly be utilized and it will most likely be forgotten by the next lecture.  It will be forgotten because you will have to read the next passage and prepare a new set of vocabulary that rarely builds upon the first.

I would say that the best thing to do when learning a language is to learn and increase vocabulary separate and in addition to this normal scholastic process.  This is especially true if you focus on learning vocabulary that pertains to your class or lecture.  A larger vocabulary will make even learning grammar much easier because you will understand what your teacher is trying to say, you will understand any classroom media and be able to outperform other students when having a classroom discussion.

Do not under-estimate the importance of vocabulary.

-Grover

www.worldvocab.com

Immersion Method – Rosetta Stone and Others

The type of immersion method I discuss here is the one advertised by Rosetta Stone.  Their version of immersion basically means that when using their software you will only be exposed to the target language and not exposed to your native language.  This is supposed to increase the efficacy of their lessons by mimicking a real immersion experience.

I would claim that the results are limited because it is only a superficial re-creation of an immersion experience.  A software or lesson can’t hope to put you into a tense social situation where your mind has to run at 110% in order to even keep up with a conversation in a foreign language.  Through these situations more is remembered because it is tied to us emotionally.  When you stumble over asking your new friend where the bathroom is, the slight embarrassment or anxiety created by that experience will have you mulling over it longer in your mind and make a point not to make that mistake again.

It is true that one benefit of being immersed in a culture is that you are highly exposed to the language and have very little exposure to your native tongue.  However, this alone is not something that immediately forces one to learn or even increases the chances of learning.  The level of excitement, social pressure and anxiety that accompany a trip abroad are the true driving forces behind learning the language.

I would equate Rosetta Stone to taking a trip to Cancun and staying at a nice resort.  Yes, you are exposed to the language but you don't necessarily have to focus on it in order to get by.  The internal interest, social pressure and anxiety aren't there as a driving force.  You can dabble in the language but there is no penalty for not taking it seriously.

The good kind of stress that studying abroad or visiting a foreign country creates is a truly unconscious motivating force.  You will feel this stress when you buy food, meet new people, go to restaurants, partake in class presentations, make friends, or even meet someone you like.  This type of excitement and heightened level of interest ties back into the concept of active learning.  Rosetta Stone can’t re-create the excitement and therefore their use of the term immersion is almost baseless.  It is purely an advertising technique.

The best method for learning how to speak a language is visiting that country, making a friend and keeping that friendship alive.  You would be surprised at how much you learn in this way.  You will easily increase your vocabulary by discussing experiences you have together and it will be interesting because you will be chatting with a friend.

I will close this by just stating that Rosetta stone is good for what it is meant to be.  You will learn an OK amount in an interactive and fun way but this will never get you to the level where you will be able to read, write or speak the language fluently.  These are the types of things people buy when they wish to learn a language with the least amount of effort but rarely do they really take the lessons to the next level.   

If you truly wish to dedicate yourself to learning a language then the most cost effective and beneficial method would be to buy one university level grammar book costing 50-100 dollars, an English to foreign language dictionary and a notebook.  The same kind of dedication you would put into a language learning software could be put into basic study for 1/6^th the cost.

-Grover Donlon

www.worldvocab.com

World Vocabs™ Mission

Our aim is to provide a better, mobile way to learning vocabulary, while promoting the practice of foreign language pronunciation and listening skills.  We believe that vocabulary is the true strength and knowledge behind language.  In normal day-to-day speech, most native speakers do not even use correct grammar.  For one’s point to be understood, one needs only vocabulary and context.  When in most foreign countries, you are crossing your legs, sweating and just saying the word ‘bathroom’, most foreign individuals will know immediately what you are asking.  The same goes for other single words such as, no, yes, hungry, hurt, tired, wet, cold, hot, fire, etc.  Within a particular context, using a single word is all that is needed.

Despite all of this, we realize the need for grammar but we also understand that grammar is the main focus for most scholastic approaches to language.  This is why we choose to leave it to high schools, colleges and universities.  Instead, we support their teachings by providing more of what they lack, spoken vocabulary practice with a native.

World Vocab™ focuses nearly entirely on vocabulary and one’s ability to speak the language.  In order to pass most classroom tests you need only study a small list of 20 vocabulary words (pitiful) and some focused grammar concepts.  This means that nearly all language graduates lack adequate vocabulary and spoken language skills.   

Quick Vocab™ is our initial solution to this problem.  With the guided audio you will be able to follow along and practice speaking individual words.  All the while, you will be training your ears and mind to recognize these words during normal conversation.  Vocabulary memorization then comes naturally when you combine listening, following along with the PDF guide, and following along with your voice by practicing pronunciation.  Our first goal has been to create a way to both learn vocabulary and practice one’s ability to speak and communicate in a foreign language.  We have succeeded.

Grocery Store Mishaps - The Importance of Hearing The Language

Study Abroad – Grocery Store in Germany:  TRAIN YOUR EARS! THIS IS WHY IT IS IMPORTANT

If you have never studied abroad in a foreign country, then you are missing out on a lot of fun and language experience.  You are also missing out on a LOT of embarrassing, confusing and exasperated moments.  However, you usually learn the most from those types of moments.

I remember my first time buying food at a grocery store in Freiburg, Germany.  It was a really cool experience seeing all of the different types of food, packaging and advertisements.  It was definitely a culture shock not seeing almost ANYTHING that reminds you of grocery shopping in your native country outside of meat and produce.  The actual shopping for food was the fun and interesting part. 

Checking out was the part where you have to truly put your language skills to the test.  I became increasingly more nervous as my turn was coming up.  I rehearsed what I was going to say and tried to calculate in my head how much money it should cost so I could have it ready for the cashier.  By the way, the cashier I ended up having was an old, no-nonsense woman who already looked as if she were having a bad day.  Then I show up and make her day worse! 

My turn was up and it was time to do this.  I said good morning (it was morning) and she returned the pleasantry (I think).  She continued through scanning my items and when she was almost finished I noticed a glaring difference from what I was used to back in the US.  There was no screen telling me how much it was going to be!  Having grown up in the digital age I was used to being spoon fed the total amount so I could easily get my funds together and make a smooth transaction.  I was caught up for a moment in this realization.   

The cashier growled something to me while I was wrapping my head around the fact that I had no true idea how much I owed.  I am sure that she told me how much but NOTHING registered.  Her dialect was thick and I was too inexperienced listening to German being spoken by a true native (especially one with an allemannisch dialect).  I managed to garble these words out, “Wieviel?” (how much?) and she responded again.  She knew I was foreign and attempted to slow down her speech and try to speak more towards Hochdeutsch, the school taught version German.  It didn’t matter, I still had NO IDEA what she said. 

She saw the look of complete confusion on my face, eyed my hand holding some small amount of euros and had had enough.  She opened my hand and counted out the money she needed, gave me my change and I was on my way.  Can you imagine the feeling of embarrassment?  It wasn’t like this was a large supermarket that was not very busy.  It was a smaller store with a lot of customers.  My face was flushed and I hustled back to my dorm room to finally release the breath I had been holding. 

I began thinking to myself.  I know the language well, as of that point in time I had been studying German for 7 years.  In fact, I knew my numbers very well.  This is when I came to the conclusion that it was not my knowledge of the language that was at fault, it was my lack of knowledge on HOW that language sounds being spoken by a native speaker.  I simply could not discern WHAT words were being spoken because I did not know how they sounded when being pronounced by someone who was not tailoring their speech towards a classroom or mainstream media setting (Hochdeutsch).

The main thing to take away from my experience is that it could have been avoided.  I should have practiced listening to the language more.

This is one of the reasons why World Vocab stresses listening and speaking a foreign language rather than just reading and writing it.  It is very important to learn how the language sounds.

January 2014 World Vocab Newsletter!

Thank you for joining us for our January 2014 newsletter for World Vocab™! We would like to begin by giving you a special promotion for being a part of our community! Promotion Level Plus $10: (COMPLETELY FREE +10$) If you purchase any of our vocabulary sets and are willing to submit a written, audio and/or visual testimonial to us via e-mail about how our product worked for you then we will refund the total purchase price and send you an additional $10.00's via paypal to an account of your choosing or send you a check! If you have any additional questions, don't hesitate to contact support@worldvocab.com for answers to any of your questions!

February Outlook!

Monthly Free Lesson - February 7th, 2014 Our next free lesson will be active February 7th! It will contain a mixture of vocabulary from our these three sets; Business I, Animals I, and Food and Restaurant I.  We hope you enjoy the lesson and give us tons of feedback! Power Vocab™ Spanish - February 15th, 2014 We plan on rolling out smaller, bite-sized, more affordable vocabulary lessons by mid-February.  We are coining these smaller portions Power Vocab™ because you will easily be able to POWER through them when you do not have a bunch of time to spend.  They will be 15-20 minutes long with roughly 50 vocabulary words.  They will be comprised of a Spanish to English and an English to Spanish mix of vocabulary pairs. Quick Vocab™ German and Power Vocab™ German - February 15th, 2014 We are finally finishing up some of our German vocabulary and plan to roll out our German product line and webpage updates.  The audio will be voiced by a man from Freiburg, Germany, as well as a man from Chicago, IL.  The original product line will be built to match the Spanish release. Our Future Goals For World Vocab™  After finishing the roll-out of German and Spanish vocabulary sets we wish to expand our efforts into French and Italian, while continuing to build on the German and Spanish vocabulary sets.  The next step after French and Italian are added to our language offerings we plan on taking our vocabulary lessons to the next level.  Our initial product roll-out was only going to be comprised of simple to use for all levels, hence the name Quick Vocab™. We will keep the follow along practice theme but will introduce up to 5 context specific sentences for each word.  This will allow the individual to grasp, which words need to be used together.  What is meant by this is that certain verbs have to be used with a specific conjunction when speaking about a specific noun.  An example of this would be the following; In English we say the phrase, "I cleaned off the table" In other languages the literal translation could be, "I cleaned up the table" or "I cleared up the table".   Different cultures use conjunctions and verbs differently in different context and this is what we are going to capture in our lessons.  Training with our vocabulary in this fashion will ultimately create the correct verb, conjunction, noun pairs for correct context.   We hope you will join us on our language journey and that you all will gain much from our lessons! If you have any comments or questions please contact us at support@worldvocab.com.  Please join us on Facebook and Twitter! -Grover Donlon www.worldvocab.com

Active Learning and Language

Notecards Alone - Hard To Stay Actively Learning

Let us first dissect the word active learning.  The ‘active’ portion is meant to signify how your mind is fully concentrated on the subject matter.  This is most often achieved by having the learner participate somehow with what they are learning and maintaining a higher level of focus with interesting subject matter.  An example of the opposite, passive learning, would be a university lecture where the student is simply listening and taking notes.  Most likely this student is not able to maintain a higher level of focus and mental involvement with the material.  This is due to their lack of involvement both in the physical, communicative sense (raising their hand, answering questions in class, discussing subject matter with the professor or another student) and mental sense (going over what they have learned mentally and applying a context specific situation to the material that relates it to something memorable to themselves).  ‘Learning’ in the context of learning a language would be the act of committing vocabulary and grammar principles of a language to short term and long term memory along with the ability to recall this information when needed.  It also would involve the training of the body (mouth, tongue, vocal cords, etc.) to pronounce the words and relaying this to muscle memory.  So active learning is the effort to keep your mind focused and involved with the subject matter so that you can increase the amount of information committed to memory. 

Contemporary examples of active learning are as follows; class discussions, laboratories, student projects, self-reflection, case studies and peer review. 

Becoming an active learner is relatively difficult because our minds are naturally inclined to wander from topic to topic.  This is especially true when trying to concentrate on subject matter that does not interest us.  Our minds are very complex.  A single word heard during a lecture could bring forth a memory or a daydream.  Everything we see, hear, smell or feel can trigger our minds to go in a different path and it only takes an instant.  In order to become an active learner you must train your mind to focus on the material by actively participating in the processing of the information at hand.  In other words you have to use the task at hand to consume all of your focus and brainpower.  Let’s say that you wish to memorize the word to eat in German (essen).  You would not only try to pair the word with its definition in your mind but also try to formulate different sentences and situations using the word to help with memorization.  You would speak the word out loud, while picturing yourself eating a food you like or even picturing a bunch of people eating.  Whatever would best represent ‘to eat’ in your mind.  You could also practice speaking the word out loud, writing the word down and picture yourself eating simultaneously.  What you are doing is actively involving your mind to process this information.  The most important thing is to relate the information you wish to memorize to something important to you or to something that interests you. 

Interest level is essentially what the concept of active learning revolves around.  When you are highly interested in the subject matter it takes little to no effort to focus the entirety of your mind onto it.  Those that enjoy cooking can easily focus their minds on a cooking show and soak up the information and techniques being shown to them.  Those that are not interested in cooking watch the same show and immediately their minds start to wander.  The question is, how do you force yourself become more interested?  How does this all relate to the learning of a language?

Learning vocabulary is always the most uninteresting and unsuccessful part of learning a language.  There have been many cases of spending long hours looking up vocabulary words, writing them down on vocabulary sheets or notecards and endlessly rifling through them.  You eventually ‘learn’ the vocabulary for the upcoming quiz or test and promptly forget it thereafter.  How can you become interested in learning vocabulary and retain more information? 

The only real way to have a higher level of interest is to consistently relate the information you are learning to yourself and create reasons why this information will be useful to you and your success.  If you do this then you will automatically be more interested in the subject matter.  With this increased level of interest you will have also increased the amount of information you commit to long term memory.  For example, say that a person really does not have any interest in sports.  So this person is naturally going to drift off when a sports game is on.  They will go on their phone, try to talk throughout the game about something unrelated or simply stare at the television screen and zone out.  At their current level of interest it is doubtful they will even remember who was playing or what the final score ended up being.  What could this person do to try to increase their interest level?

Example 1: Try to relate the information to something that will benefit you

The person not interested in the sports game should analyze their daily life and look for ways that this information could benefit them.  Let us say for instance that this person works with other individuals (maybe even their boss or their boss’s boss) who are very keen on sports.  If they went into watching this sports game with that in mind they would automatically have a higher level of interest.  You could then try to retain the key players, key events and key scores so that you could discuss them with your boss or coworkers the next day.  Ultimately, you do not care about the sports game.  However, you created a mental situation that increased the importance of the sports information.  You made this information interesting because its knowledge could benefit you down the line.

Example 2: Try to relate the information to something you do care about

The person does not care about sports but the person is interested in clothing.  They could approach analyzing the game with their interests in mind.  Aaron Rodger’s, threw for a touch-down and seems to prefer Under Armour where Jay Cutler is all about the North Face gear.  Oh the full-back just tore through the defensive line and appears to be thrilled with his neon orange Nike cleats.  Connecting key information to something you are interested in helps with memory retention.  Even though this person will most likely not retain as much pertinent information as the individual who truly is interested in the subject matter, it will serve as an improvement. 

Example 3: Involve yourself and participate with people who DO find the information interesting

Participation in discussions with those who are interested.  Even if YOU aren’t interested, you will go over the information, analyze what is said and come up with something good to say so that your words can hold up during conversation.  Throughout this entire process you will be taking more information to memory and automatically be more interested in the material.  Even if it means simply asking thoughtful questions for others to answer, this participation promotes mental awareness

How do we propose to increase vocabulary memorization and promote active learning? 

We promote active learning by having a follow along vocabulary lesson.  The necessity of following along with the vocabulary and having to try to pronounce words you may be unfamiliar with will keep your mind active and interested in the material.  The timing of the lesson also does not allow for much other than listening, visualizing and speaking the vocabulary words.  This consistent flow and speed of the lesson is meant to promote quick thinking and quick pronunciation.  At first you will not be able to keep up with some terms and phrases due to their difficulty in pronunciation.  This challenge is what will keep your mind involved with the material. 

The lessons actively involve visual, auditory and muscle memory.  You will be hearing the vocabulary, participating in the pronunciation of the vocabulary and can visually represent the vocabulary either with flashcards included or with your mind’s eye.  The inter-connectedness of these types of lessons will ultimately increase memory retention.

The vocabulary is also separated into categories that provide familiar contexts to all of the terms.  Due to this it will be much easier to relate the words, actions and phrases to yourself in a way that will create a longer lasting memory.

The lessons can and should also be used when studying with multiple people as a student or when trying to improve your children’s language skills.  The follow along practice with other individuals will create unique, fun and sometimes hilarious learning situations from which you will all learn more than traditional methods.

In conclusion, our efforts to promote the active learning of vocabulary has resulted in Quick Vocab™.  These lessons demand active participation by speaking along with the vocabulary lessons.  The challenging format of the lesson will keep all of your senses engaged with the material and increase overall memorization.    This fast engagement will mimic the level of mental activity necessary to communicate with others.  The words are provided in a category that gives them context, this context is yet another mental connection that can help with vocabulary recall.  Above all else would be the possibility to buy a lesson and utilize it in group practice with others.  The group practice would create a social environment around the lesson that would maximize its effectiveness.

The rest is up to you to relate the information to something that is meaningful to you. We give you the information, a way to participate, the context of the vocabulary and the involvement of your senses.

Check out our Spanish vocabulary lessons and prepare yourself for the unveiling of Quick Vocab™ German in the next couple of weeks.

Try Out Our Free January Spanish Lesson Now!

Pamphlet – Created by University of Michigan Professors – Active Learning Techniques http://www.crlt.umich.edu/sites/default/files/resource_files/Active%20Learning%20Continuum.pdf

I would definitely recommend giving this a read.  It summarizes many techniques that will help the average person increase their awareness of what active learning is and how to implement it into their studying and learning habits.

Article – Journal of Engineering Education –

http://www4.ncsu.edu/unity/lockers/users/f/felder/public/Papers/Prince_AL.pdf

This is a good article that analyzes the research being done on the effectiveness of active learning.  This will give you a better idea of what research results should be considered valid for many of the different types of active learning.  After reading this, you will be more aware of what techniques appear to be more effective than others.

-Grover Donlon 

www.worldvocab.com