What's the best way to learn more words?

When you start learning a foreign language, there are 2 main skills you want to develop.

1. The ability to understand.

2. The ability to speak.

That's the goal. You want to be able to do those 2 well.

You don't really care about grammar, tenses and all that technical stuff.

You want to understand and speak well.

The questions is: How do you get there?

There are different schools of thought when it comes to language acquisition.

I'm not even going to talk about the traditional grammar rules and classroom based method.

Because it's been proven over and over again to be extremely ineffective.

Of course knowing how to use grammar is important.

But you didn't learn grammar rules in your native language before you learned to speak.

No, you learn grammar from language. Not language from grammar.

What you need to learn in large quantities in order to understand and speak is vocabulary.

You need to know 10,000 words or more in order to be fluent in a language.

Basically the more words you know, the better you'll understand and speak.

What's the most effective way to learn more words?

Let's look at the options.

There are 3 main ways you can memorise words:

1. Rote memorisation.

2. Memorisation with associations.

3. Comprehensible Input.

The first one is the most common and also the most ineffective.

You simply repeat a list of words over and over again until you've learned them.

You'll forget most of them in less than 24 hours.

Then there's memorisation with associations.

You associate the words with their meaning through vivid & shocking visuals.

Extremely effective if done right.

You can memorise +100 words a day and actually remember them.

But words without context aren't all that useful on their own. You need something else.

Associations are also hard work and not exactly fun to do.

Finally we have comprehensible input.

CI is often the Youtube polyglot's solution to everything.

"Just spend more time reading and listening" is their answer to everything.

And they aren't wrong. Doing more of that will help you learn much faster and better than going to classes or using grammar books.

But the problem with comprehensible input is that it needs to be comprehensible.

It's hard for anything to be comprehensible when you know less than 50% of the words in the text or audio.

It's also slow.

Unlike people like Krashen or Kaufmann, some of us have goals and deadlines.

"Just read daily and enjoy the process" and "pleasure reading with short stories and in a couple years you'll be able to start having conversations" works for a retired academic who learns languages casually as a hobby.

For those of us who want results fast? We need a better plan.

My preferred solution is combining Associations and Comprehensible Input.

Learning lots of words with Associations makes Input much more comprehensible early on.

Which means you can read and listen a lot more from the beginning.

Massive Input daily also means reviewing everything you memorise with associations.

Input and Associations are the perfect combination.

Associations store lots of words in your short term memory.

Input ensures they stay there long term by creating more and more connections between words and exposing you to those words in different contexts.

I strongly recommend combining both methods and avoiding studying grammar and rote memorisation.

Want a step by step plan to become fluent in 12 weeks following these principles?

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