kick-starting foreign language learning

Martins   Monday, October 28, 2002, 10:02 GMT
I'd like to present an idea which helped a lot on my early German learning. It's all about choosing the words which are used most frequently to learn first. Like all people nowadays I have a computer in which I can read electronic texts from Internet (various articles, e-books ect.). You take a subject area in which you are interested or, as a beginner, you start by picking most tangible words using a text analysing program, which sorts the words by frequency. Then you can take words which are used most often and check whether they have one or more meanings. The trick is that about 1000 to 2000 basic words often have only one main meaning with negligible accessory meanings, which are used much less commonly. At start you need only one meaning to learn - the most obvious, tangible and apparent one. That applies also to more advanced words if they have one meaning which is used much more commonly than the others.
So, you pick such words and either by using word lists (which I used in past when learning English and nevertheless it worked surprisingly well) or SuperMemo (which works wonders in this case) you build a database of these words with two items for each two-word pair, namely, one item in your native language and the other in foreign language, so you will learn them both ways. Then you can choose a definite amount of words to learn each day (for example 30 word pairs a day) and stick to your schedule. But be aware that you must make sure that the words are either complete equivalents or extremely close in meaning (which applies to almost all physical objects, physical actions and so on) so you don't learn them in wrong way, which would be very hard to correct later (I have had such an unpleasant expierence). That way it is possible to use two-word pairs, which comply with principle of univocality and you can make strong links between the words in your memory. By this strategy I was able to learn 100 words a day (before I learned about SuperMemo), by means of preparing the equivalent words earlier (and I am not joking), but unfortunately after about 40 or 50 days I was overwhelmed by the repetitions, which were very unpleasant, because the words I repeated were either too easy to remember or too hard (and I lost many time that way).
By that time I discovered Supermemo and after reading the entire website of Supermemo World I realized that this was most wonderful computer program ever invented. I'm very surprised that Supermemo in my country (Latvia) is very uncommon, because it is the best computer program ever invented. So, back to my experience, you can learn as much as 300 word pairs a day (which was my record I attained by asking my family members to test me) and remember all without exception at the end of given day, but the problem is that next day you will remember much less because of the known effect of forgetting curve. So such a program as supermemo serves it's purpose VERY well. you CAN learn 300 words EVERY day (if you have a material already prepared) and not to forget more than 5 percent on a given repetition.
So my point is that if you have a database of univocal two-word pairs you can use that to learn foreign language in lightning speed, enhancing recall by incorporating items with reversed question and answer fields. That way these words will become a part of your active vocabulary (I have tested this on myself even without supermemo). However, this principle applies only to univocal words ( which are about 3 to 5 thousands in every language) and you shouldn't include synonyms in the database, which would interfere with the existing items and make active recall much harder (tested on myself long time ago). Earlier the only problem was the scheduling of repetitions, which is now resolved by Supermemo so it is a sin to say (as many people in this website do) that they need a special help to learn a language-, when they can take a link to Supermemo world website and introduce themselves to supermemo program (or to paper version of supermemo which I would be lucky to have seen in my early days of language learning expierence).

So, people, don't say that you have a low level of English just because you don't learn it, and think that someone will do it for you. Nobody will learn a language for you either it would be your teacher of English classes ( which rarely have a good command of English) or Supermemo program or anybody else.

Supermemo is only a tool, yet extremely powerful in the right hands, with help of which you can learn many languages by exerting minimal effort, spending minimal amount of time provided that you have a database prepared.

To beginners, my suggestion therefore is to extract the univocal words (found in many foreign language learning books for beginners and not only) and learn them both ways -from your language into foreign language and vice versa. That way you will provide that basic words will become a part of your ACTIVE vocabulary (a strong link will be formed between the both words).

Visit www.supermemo.com and read about the method of Supermemo and you will get an extremely powerful tool (not paying a dollar for earlier versions) to learn any subject matter, not only foreign languages.

By the way, I started learning English only 3 years ago, two of them I spent in English classes and this year I started leaning on my own, because classes did nothing for my level of English.