I‘m just gonna assume this is a serious post. Your brain is not a hard drive. You can‘t just memorize 30k words on a whim. Use a flashcard system for common words and than read books that are interesting to you. If you encounter words that are essential to understand whats going on, look them up. Usually you don’t need to know every word to understand a passage and the meaning will come to you through context.
Language learning is a process. You can’t just update your brain in a couple of months and be perfect and you don’t need to be perfect to use the language. You‘ll always come across some new words. The number will decrease over time.
You can get 98% coverage with “just” 9000 words ([source](https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ1044345.pdf)). Is it really worth learning 3 times as many words just to get 1% more comprehension?
Don't get me wrong: you can and will learn more than 9000 words if you learn a language for a long time, but you can do it in a much more relaxed way. With just 8 words a day, you can cover them all in about 3 years.
Average native speakers know 15,000-20,000 words. The fuck you gonna do with 30,000 words in your head? Need to write a dissenting opinion for the Supreme Court?
To just memorize it, there are tricks employed by the people in memorization contests. That's where you'll hear about mind palaces and all that. Apparently most of the most successful memorizers aren't genetically gifted or anything, it's mostly techniques.
That said, there's a big difference between memorizing a dictionary and actually having those words available for useful recall. That's mostly done by use, reading talking, etc. A big list doesn't lend itself particularly well to that. On the bright side, you definitely don't need anywhere near 30000 words to read the great majority of English literature.
You need to have realistic expectations. 40-100 new words per day is still generally too many if you want to actually retain them, and after a few days you'll have way too many flashcards to be able to go through at all. Language learning is not a race.
The best way to memorize those is getting exposure, read, listen to podcast and watch TV shows films, you should use some flashcard program app alongside.
It is very difficult to absorb new vocabulary if you don't practice it, just reviewing vocabulary apart of being very boring is not going to stick with you. You can for example learn an adverb word but depending on context it can have a different meaning usage and the way to learn to use them is to see them many times, write essays and exercises so you put them to use. So the thing is you have to practice to expose yourself to the language otherwise the words are not going to stick with you.
If you memorize 20 words per day using Anki, you can learn 7200 new words in one year. Obviously you can't learn them in one year, but you are going to familiarize yourself with many of them, and if you don't practice them, use them you will lose many.
I am currently on my way of learning the 2000 most common German words, next I have a book of 4000 most common words, I always try to write a new phrase with the words I find myself struggling to memorize.
The best way you could probably go about this is learn the root, prefixes, and suffixes and their meanings that make up a huge chunk of those words and learn them that way instead of each single word individually.
Firstly, why would you do this?
Secondly, 30K is mad. You only get like what, 2% more comprehension for the last 20K words?
This is because after a certain number, maybe between 5k-1k every new word is highly specialised or contextual, so you'd very rarely use it...
Thanks for the interesting article, but obviously it is the "natural" way to gain the vocabulary. What if we select the books intended for vocabulary building, we can decrease the number of books needed. I am looking for a "method", not natural input. But thanks and the total vocabulary size is almost identical to my computing.
Duolingo is effective to learn some like 3k words, and that's it, and it is a very slow way of griding things, it is a good resource but Anki is the Holy Grail of word memorization.
It’s solely based around spaced memorization. You can go through 50 words in 5 minutes compared to a 5 minute duo lesson that goes over the same 10 for 5 more lessons
Thanks to Anki, I've been able to learn over 10k Japanese words in just 2 years with 90-95% retention. You're not getting these sorts of numbers without spaced repetition.
This comment makes me grateful that I'm learning Japanese. You *can* only learn infinitives because all of the inflections/conjugations come for free as long as you can tell which category of verb it is.
Of course English has verb conjugation. It conjugates mostly by tense (with a bunch of periphrastic tenses at that, along with the past tense, either in -ed or with a change in vowel (sing vs sang)), though there's still the -s ending in the third person singular (he sings vs I sing). Plus, "to be" still has several forms (am, are, is, be, been, was, were).
In my opinion, it's not possible to learn 30k words (you would need the whole life). It's not enough to memorize a word. You need to practice them to remember. Why would you do it btw? It would be waste of time.
And what is your current level of this language?
Are you simply memorizing them to regurgitate them later? If you're trying to memorize words just to have an expansive vocabulary, I don't see the point. If you're planning on using words for better reading comprehensiom you'd be wasting a lot of time. The reason you can be very productive with 10,000 words is that many of the rest are completely superfluous in everyday life.
If you're not in a math science field, how often will you use the word googolplex? Why bother knowing merdivorous when you can just call someone a shit eater?
If you really want to learn the words, it takes time for your brain to actually integrate it into your working set. Otherwise if you focus on 100 words a day without generating context you're just going to forget 80% of what you learned.
Science has proven that on top of needing context, your brain needs rest after stress to properly form new memories. You'd do better spacing it out during the day, but spaced repetition will be difficult to manage as the data set grows larger. Having an expansive vocab is admirable, don't get me wrong. Just don't try to condense your learning timeline too much or you'll fatigue yourself and diminishing returns will set in. The whole effort will become increasingly difficult.
I’d suggest taking a look at spaced repetition and the memory palace mnemonic technique (memory palace’s are how world memory champions can perform seemingly impossible feats such as memorize thousands of random strings of numbers being read to them in real time without any pausing). But keep in mind utilizing these techniques to maximum efficiency is in itself, it’s own skill, and it won’t be an easy method even if it’s powerful if used properly. If you want to look into a more natural stable longterm approach, I’d suggest exposing yourself to as much English as possible and to see as many example sentences as possible of the words in your lists in all kinds of contexts, maybe even record and note down the ones that hold the most relevance/weight for you for future review.
Depends on how much time you can spend on this. Use anki and start out with just 20-30 new words a day. It gets tough real quick if you’re a busy person, but if you stick it out for an year or so you should have most of it memorized long term
The quickest way is learn numbers. I have over 999 billion unique German words memorized this way
Wait, what comes after billion in German? Is it Squillion or Squilliarde?
I dunno man. I could only memorize so much. Seriously tho, in German, million=million, milliarde=billion, billion=trillion, and billiarde=quadrillion
I didn't think about billiarde. Of course!
I‘m just gonna assume this is a serious post. Your brain is not a hard drive. You can‘t just memorize 30k words on a whim. Use a flashcard system for common words and than read books that are interesting to you. If you encounter words that are essential to understand whats going on, look them up. Usually you don’t need to know every word to understand a passage and the meaning will come to you through context. Language learning is a process. You can’t just update your brain in a couple of months and be perfect and you don’t need to be perfect to use the language. You‘ll always come across some new words. The number will decrease over time.
This is a serious post, otherwise, I will ask on TikTok. The human brain is not a hard drive, it is more powerful than it. Lets see what will happen.
> How to memorize 30k words Read the dictionary like a novel.
Ok, Kim Peek!
You can get 98% coverage with “just” 9000 words ([source](https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ1044345.pdf)). Is it really worth learning 3 times as many words just to get 1% more comprehension? Don't get me wrong: you can and will learn more than 9000 words if you learn a language for a long time, but you can do it in a much more relaxed way. With just 8 words a day, you can cover them all in about 3 years.
Average native speakers know 15,000-20,000 words. The fuck you gonna do with 30,000 words in your head? Need to write a dissenting opinion for the Supreme Court?
To just memorize it, there are tricks employed by the people in memorization contests. That's where you'll hear about mind palaces and all that. Apparently most of the most successful memorizers aren't genetically gifted or anything, it's mostly techniques. That said, there's a big difference between memorizing a dictionary and actually having those words available for useful recall. That's mostly done by use, reading talking, etc. A big list doesn't lend itself particularly well to that. On the bright side, you definitely don't need anywhere near 30000 words to read the great majority of English literature.
anki if that doesn't work, try restarting your computer
I'm not sure if you are serious or not.
Ebenfalls.
You need to have realistic expectations. 40-100 new words per day is still generally too many if you want to actually retain them, and after a few days you'll have way too many flashcards to be able to go through at all. Language learning is not a race.
The best way to memorize those is getting exposure, read, listen to podcast and watch TV shows films, you should use some flashcard program app alongside.
Yeah, but it is too low. I don't want to watch a 40-minute length video to learn several words.
It is very difficult to absorb new vocabulary if you don't practice it, just reviewing vocabulary apart of being very boring is not going to stick with you. You can for example learn an adverb word but depending on context it can have a different meaning usage and the way to learn to use them is to see them many times, write essays and exercises so you put them to use. So the thing is you have to practice to expose yourself to the language otherwise the words are not going to stick with you.
Reading will be a lot more efficient than watching video.
You can memorize 40-100 new words a day? If that's true, I don't see the problem.
If you memorize 20 words per day using Anki, you can learn 7200 new words in one year. Obviously you can't learn them in one year, but you are going to familiarize yourself with many of them, and if you don't practice them, use them you will lose many. I am currently on my way of learning the 2000 most common German words, next I have a book of 4000 most common words, I always try to write a new phrase with the words I find myself struggling to memorize.
The best way you could probably go about this is learn the root, prefixes, and suffixes and their meanings that make up a huge chunk of those words and learn them that way instead of each single word individually.
Anki. Also why do you want to learn the 30K most frequent words?
I need to read some technical and academic books, also for entertaining reading.
You could just learn the relevant vocabulary for the subjects you want to read about.
Firstly, why would you do this? Secondly, 30K is mad. You only get like what, 2% more comprehension for the last 20K words? This is because after a certain number, maybe between 5k-1k every new word is highly specialised or contextual, so you'd very rarely use it...
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Thanks for the interesting article, but obviously it is the "natural" way to gain the vocabulary. What if we select the books intended for vocabulary building, we can decrease the number of books needed. I am looking for a "method", not natural input. But thanks and the total vocabulary size is almost identical to my computing.
>[https://puroh.it/reading-for-a-fine-vocabulary/](https://puroh.it/reading-for-a-fine-vocabulary/) Vocabulary is linear in the amount of books?
The quicker you try and memorize something the quicker you’ll forget it unless you review it over time.
Anki
Duolingo
Duolingo is effective to learn some like 3k words, and that's it, and it is a very slow way of griding things, it is a good resource but Anki is the Holy Grail of word memorization.
Idk I thought this sub agrees duolingo is better than anki?
no.. Duolingo is only a good starting place. Anki helps you to actually crunch down on vocab in a shorter amount of time
How does it do so though?
It’s solely based around spaced memorization. You can go through 50 words in 5 minutes compared to a 5 minute duo lesson that goes over the same 10 for 5 more lessons
Is that many words?
Thanks to Anki, I've been able to learn over 10k Japanese words in just 2 years with 90-95% retention. You're not getting these sorts of numbers without spaced repetition.
Yes it’s a lot
I've never heard this. Where did you see this?
Ever seen Clockwork Orange?
If you memorize 30k words but only use ~500-1000 then you memorized 29k for nothing and you forget them easily
I don't know what language you are learning, but do these 30K words include verb conjugations? Learning only infinitives will be pretty useless.
This comment makes me grateful that I'm learning Japanese. You *can* only learn infinitives because all of the inflections/conjugations come for free as long as you can tell which category of verb it is.
I guess that is compensation for the other complicated grammar stuff Japanese throws at you? lol
I would say Japanese grammar is only complicated for beginners; there are few rules and they're almost never broken.
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do you think english doesn't have verb conjugation?
Of course English has verb conjugation. It conjugates mostly by tense (with a bunch of periphrastic tenses at that, along with the past tense, either in -ed or with a change in vowel (sing vs sang)), though there's still the -s ending in the third person singular (he sings vs I sing). Plus, "to be" still has several forms (am, are, is, be, been, was, were).
Do you think this person is asking in very perfect English how to learn English? They are obviously trying to learn something else.
In my opinion, it's not possible to learn 30k words (you would need the whole life). It's not enough to memorize a word. You need to practice them to remember. Why would you do it btw? It would be waste of time. And what is your current level of this language?
Are you simply memorizing them to regurgitate them later? If you're trying to memorize words just to have an expansive vocabulary, I don't see the point. If you're planning on using words for better reading comprehensiom you'd be wasting a lot of time. The reason you can be very productive with 10,000 words is that many of the rest are completely superfluous in everyday life. If you're not in a math science field, how often will you use the word googolplex? Why bother knowing merdivorous when you can just call someone a shit eater? If you really want to learn the words, it takes time for your brain to actually integrate it into your working set. Otherwise if you focus on 100 words a day without generating context you're just going to forget 80% of what you learned. Science has proven that on top of needing context, your brain needs rest after stress to properly form new memories. You'd do better spacing it out during the day, but spaced repetition will be difficult to manage as the data set grows larger. Having an expansive vocab is admirable, don't get me wrong. Just don't try to condense your learning timeline too much or you'll fatigue yourself and diminishing returns will set in. The whole effort will become increasingly difficult.
Are you Asian, by chance?
I’d suggest taking a look at spaced repetition and the memory palace mnemonic technique (memory palace’s are how world memory champions can perform seemingly impossible feats such as memorize thousands of random strings of numbers being read to them in real time without any pausing). But keep in mind utilizing these techniques to maximum efficiency is in itself, it’s own skill, and it won’t be an easy method even if it’s powerful if used properly. If you want to look into a more natural stable longterm approach, I’d suggest exposing yourself to as much English as possible and to see as many example sentences as possible of the words in your lists in all kinds of contexts, maybe even record and note down the ones that hold the most relevance/weight for you for future review.
Be reincarnated in the UFSA
The biggest mistake in language learning is thinking that 'memorizing words' = knowing a language. So, I'd personally recommend against it.
Depends on how much time you can spend on this. Use anki and start out with just 20-30 new words a day. It gets tough real quick if you’re a busy person, but if you stick it out for an year or so you should have most of it memorized long term