Diminishing returns with vocabulary acquisition

[Jan Finster]

On 2/19/2022 at 10:56 PM, 黄有光 said:

I dedicated all of last year to cramming as much Chinese vocabulary as possible. I learned the vast, vast majority of unknown words in each of the books I read, advancing at a pace of 30 words per day, and in this way I covered 7 and a half books over the course of the year, bringing my vocabulary from ~5000 words on January 1, 2021 to ~17,500 words today. So what is the difference?

 

This is very inspiring. Are you a full time student or is this a hobby aside from work? To me Anki is just too boring.

 

I would expect to get the same results just with intentive and extensive reading and no SRS/Anki. 3 months ago, I started reading more (i.e. 1-2 hours per day) and in those 3 months I averaged 1000 new known words per month on Lingq (see picture). For those, who know Lingq, it is not a perfect way to track known words. However, I have used Lingq consistently for the last 2.5 years and I "know" my baseline. As the graph shows there were months were I did not study any Chinese or read very little. So, I could expect to get to 12K words if I do not run out of steam.

 

 

[黄有光]

On 2/22/2022 at 7:40 PM, Jan Finster said:

This is very inspiring. Are you a full time student or is this a hobby aside from work? To me Anki is just too boring.

 

I would expect to get the same results just with intentive and extensive reading and no SRS/Anki.

I work, on average, 4-5 hours per day, so I have plenty of time and energy to devote to my Chinese studies. As for Anki being boring, I'd refer you to Dr. Wong -- which is to say, of course it's boring! But it gets the job done.

 

My Anki habit is informed by my German studies. With German, I took the approach of passively acquiring the language through media consumption. And...it kind of worked? But also at the same time it really, really didn't. I have a very weak grasp of German, and there's a LOT of vocabulary I never properly internalized, and I think that's precisely because I was not rigorous with my studies. So I'm going out of my way to avoid that with Mandarin Chinese. So far I have been very pleased with the results.

 

In the next five or so years I would like to attend a season at the International Chinese Language Program in Taiwan, to solidify my speaking skills. But that will come after I've built up a passive vocabulary ranging from 30.000-50.000 words. And I'm still at least four years away from the upper end of that range if I continue to study at my current pace -- which I won't, seeing as I'll need to put Chinese down starting next year to focus on Dutch.

 

There's always another language that needs learning, lol.

[Xiaowang]

@https://www.chinese-forums.com/profile/79945-黄有光/ That’s an impressive number of new words learned. When you say you learned them - were you able to also learn the tones? Or do you already know them for many characters so that there a is a certain base?

[Xiaowang]

Sorry, I don’t seem to be able to work out how to @ someone who uses Chinese characters as a user name. 

[Flickserve]

On 2/20/2022 at 9:02 PM, 黄有光 said:

Yes, it absolutely gets easier to memorize new words. I am way, WAY better at memorizing words now than I was when I started.

How do you cope with the tones? When you learn the new word, do you associate the tone with it?

 

Secondly, when you watch something and comprehend, are you reading the text faster and then associating the sounds or just able to listen better and then comprehend?

[黄有光]

@Xiaowang @Flickserve

 

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How do you cope with tones?

 

Hm. This is an interesting question, but I suspect not for quite the reason you would think. Your question suggests to me (1) that you are both relatively new to studying Chinese, and (2) that you have an incorrect mental model of tones. I highly recommend you read Imron's article here: https://www.chinesethehardway.com/article/internalise-the-tones/ , as it addresses the concerns that your question raises.

 

More directly, my flashcards all contain recordings of the vocabulary, which I use to memorize the pronunciation. I am also lucky in that I have an innate skill with sound mimicry that I think escapes most people. Nevertheless, it's not just luck. Having a correct mental model of tones goes a long way to being able to correctly master Chinese pronunciation.

 

@Flickserve I do not understand your second question, sorry.

[realmayo]

On 2/23/2022 at 11:21 AM, 黄有光 said:

I am also lucky in that I have an innate skill with sound mimicry that I think escapes most people.

 

There is a theory (unless I'm making it up, in which case I guess it's my theory) that it is this skill which characterises all seriously gifted language learners and, at an extreme, those true polyglots. Jealous!

[黄有光]

On 2/23/2022 at 3:22 PM, realmayo said:

There is a theory (unless I'm making it up, in which case I guess it's my theory) that it is this skill which characterises all seriously gifted language learners and, at an extreme, those true polyglots. Jealous!

Uhhh, I don't know about that ? I'd say my Chinese is still pretty lousy. And I work really hard to make it so it's not lousy. I dunno. I just know I've never had difficulty with sounds like the people around me do. I used it to get work as an accent coach, which is something I still do. Actually it makes up a fairly significant portion of my income. 

[alantin]

On 2/23/2022 at 1:21 PM, 黄有光 said:

More directly, my flashcards all contain recordings of the vocabulary, which I use to memorize the pronunciation. I am also lucky in that I have an innate skill with sound mimicry that I think escapes most people. Nevertheless, it's not just luck. Having a correct mental model of tones goes a long way to being able to correctly master Chinese pronunciation.

 

I guess tones are something you get better and better at if you pay attention to them and just give them a chance. But I doubt anyone is a master with them their second or third year of study. And even if you have the right model in your head, in my experience it is very easy to overlook your weaknesses in this aspect, especially when you're in the ballpark enough to get understood by the natives.

 

In my case the best approaches I found for correcting the problem is just repetition and exposure. I really think some deliberate effort is also in order almost in any case, so I'm making an Anki deck for myself that gives me a word, asks me to type in the complete pinyin and then shows me if I got it right and plays the sound. My problem is not anymore about how to pronounce the tones or initials (though there are a couple of initials that are just somehow flat-out unnatural... ?) but rather which one to use if I'm a little bit unsure about it ("is it a third tone or light tone here" etc.). I'm expecting brutal drilling to expose the flaws and fix them, but I still need to create a good order for the characters and words to drill.

[黄有光]

I decided to record myself reading a paragraph from The Witches for kicks. My ability to read fluidly off the page is awful -- it took me like seven takes to get this. And my sentence level intonation needs a LOT of work. But my grasp of tones themselves I think is quite solid: https://voca.ro/193MZp2J53fX

 

Also, here is a random selection of vocabulary from the novel (pronouncing words in isolation): https://voca.ro/1fwhufKIbQme

[Flickserve]

On 2/23/2022 at 7:21 PM, 黄有光 said:

 I do not understand your second question, sorry.

 

True that I am not a great learner of Chinese.

 

Let me rephrase the second question.

 

When I watch a video with Cantonese (stronger for me), my brain tunes into the voice first and then if I don’t know the word, my eyes will flick to the subtitles

 

When I watch a video in Mandarin, my brain looks to the subtitles first because it doesn’t understand spoken mandarin that well.

 

I was wondering with the extensive reading, when you watch media in Mandarin, do you tend to read a subtitle first and then listen or do you find you can already make a lot of sense of the aural input without needing the subtitle.

[黄有光]

ah, I see. My listening comorehension in Chinese is quite poor. I find it difficult to look away from the subtitles.

[phills]

On 2/24/2022 at 9:31 AM, Flickserve said:

When I watch a video in Mandarin, my brain looks to the subtitles first because it doesn’t understand spoken mandarin that well.

 

My reading is still way ahead of my listening, but as I've gotten better at listening, I find myself reading less of the subtitles.  I still read here and there, but it takes too much energy to read all of it.  Plus 250cpm audio speed is still at the very upper border of my reading speed, so it's not that casual and easy, even if its not exactly hard either.

 

I find listening just takes less energy than reading, assuming you can comprehend it.  My brain seems to automatically choose the method that uses the least energy, and listening often wins out.  (The worst for me is when the subtitles and the sounds don't match, then I get horribly confused and everything takes a lot of energy).

 

Of course, I kick-started this by turning off subtitles and forcing myself to be able to learn to orient myself in a mess of sounds that I don't fully understand. Before doing that, I remember I used to rely intensely on subtitles to understand.

[Moshen]

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The worst for me is when the subtitles and the sounds don't match

 

I've often seen instances where the actor clearly substituted a synonym or alternate expression for whatever was in the written script.  The subtitles weren't updated to match.  But the gist is the same.

[phills]

On 2/25/2022 at 10:39 PM, Moshen said:

I've often seen instances where the actor clearly substituted a synonym or alternate expression for whatever was in the written script.  The subtitles weren't updated to match.  But the gist is the same.

 

Yea that confuses me.  I'm associate it with older translated movies & shows, which seems to often have different dubbing vs subtitling.

 

It used to not bother me until I got better at both listening and reading.  Maybe when I get even better, it won't bother me again, and it'll become humorous.

 

But for now, I prefer to turn it off if I find the mismatch too great.

[黄有光]

My vocabulary is on the cusp of crossing 18.500 words!  This has absolutely no bearing on anything whatsoever, I'm just really proud of myself and wanted to share ?

[黄有光]

On 2/6/2022 at 4:40 PM, Woodford said:

Also, the words that feel useless to me are often used again in the very next book I pick up.

The worst of these are the ones that are, on top of everything else, difficult to learn. Obscure nouns (like names of specific plants, flowers, tools, etc), or abstract words that do not cleanly map onto any word or phrase I know of in English. I've mostly given up putting words like that into my Anki deck. I suppose in the short term it does not matter if I triage them out of my studies, and in the long term I can expect to pick them up via contextual learning if they are important enough. But man, they sure are frustrating.

 

Right now they are a minor nuisance but I assume they will be a much bigger problem once my vocabulary is in the range of 40.000-60.000 words and much of the low-hanging fruit has been exhausted.

[Moshen]

Quote

Right now they are a minor nuisance but I assume they will be a much bigger problem once my vocabulary is in the range of 40.000-60.000 words and much of the low-hanging fruit has been exhausted.

 

At that point, they probably pose no bigger problem than the same sorts of words in your own language.  After all, think of any specific vocabulary in your own language.  If you're not interested in cars you have no reason to learn words like "transmission," catalytic converter," or "4-wheel drive."  But once car mechanics become important to you, you'll learn them - or you'll just gloss over them.  Same with names of trees or flowers.  I know most of the kinds that grow where I live but if I'm reading a novel set in the South, I only need to know that "acacia" and "catalpa" are kinds of trees.

 

Deciding to learn all the words you encounter is not necessary or desirable, in my view - whether in a foreign language or your own.

[黄有光]

@Moshen In some ways you're right, but on a deeper level I think you are actually wrong here.

 

Being a native speaker, I have run into these words enough times and in enough contexts to have a feel for them, even if I am unsure of their precise meaning. I know that acacia is a kind of plant, perhaps a berry of some kind. I know that a catalytic converter is a piece of machinery, and I have a sense that it has something to do with cars -- the same goes for "transmission". When I come across words like this in Chinese, I lack that context, which makes the words significantly more of an obstacle in Chinese then their equivalents usually are for me in English.

 

I would say it is rare for me to come across a word in English that I am truly, absolutely, 100% in the dark about. I usually have been exposed to the word enough before that I have that kind of useful background, or I am familiar enough with the context or the components of the word to get an intuition for its meaning that way.

 

And, of course, Chinese has the added difficulty that many of these obscure, niche vocabulary words use obscure, niche hanzi -- hanzi which I can't reliably pronounce without having memorized before. If I were a native speaker, and had been raised in an immersive environment, in most cases I would likely be able to use the context (and the semantic and phonetic components of the hanzi in question) to select a likely corresponding word from my spoken vocabulary and insert it into the text ("Oh, this is probably how X word is spelled..."). As a non-native speaker, I don't have that benefit.

[Woodford]

On 3/22/2022 at 5:35 AM, 黄有光 said:

The worst of these are the ones that are, on top of everything else, difficult to learn.

 

I think the difficult words for me are those that resemble other words too closely, as well as words with odd tones. I find that, too often, certain characters are pronounced with different tones in different words or chengyu, and that's hard to remember. Otherwise, my ability to remember any given word is completely random. I'm often surprised that my brain retains really impractical words like "isotropy" and " potassium permanganate," but it has a horrible time untangling words like "eel" and "squid." Like you, I've become a bit more reserved about adding names of odd plants, flowers, or other objects (just as long as I understand that it is a kind of plant, flower, etc.). At the same time, I do recognize that there are some plants that seem obscure to me as a Westerner, but they are very central to Chinese culture. So it's hard to discern which ones are important to know. Sometimes, I have to search for the plant on Google to get a feel of what they look like and what they're used for.

 

My SRS test presents me with about 200 words a day (less than 1% of my total vocabulary) that it thinks I'm the weakest on. My score is usually around 80%, more or less. I'm happy with that. I have to re-learn around 40 words a day (which, of course, is easier than learning them for the first time, and they'll likely stay in my memory for longer and longer intervals). Once I stop adding new words (which, I hope, happens within the next 6-12 months), that review load will fall off a cliff, and within a couple of months, I'll likely only be reviewing around 40 words a day, needing to re-learn around 10 a day.

 

I've often wondered what it would have been like if I had just not used SRS at all with Chinese (and just invested that time in more reading practice). Unfortunately, I don't have the ability to go back in time and try again to compare! However, I'm learning German these days (more casually than Chinese), and I'm going to go without flashcards for that. I'll see what comes of it! My German-speaking wife is already thrilled with my progress. Of course, there's a big difference between learning German and learning Chinese...

 

I was originally driven to use flashcards, because when I had finished learning HSK5 vocabulary and began trying to read native content, I was frustrated by the fact that I was continually forgetting the same words over and over. I built my way up to HSK6 with flashcards, and it seemed to help a lot. Either way you do it, though, it's always going to involve a certain level of tedium, I suppose.

 

On 3/22/2022 at 7:58 AM, 黄有光 said:

Being a native speaker, I have run into these words enough times and in enough contexts to have a feel for them, even if I am unsure of their precise meaning. I know that acacia is a kind of plant, perhaps a berry of some kind. I know that a catalytic converter is a piece of machinery, and I have a sense that it has something to do with cars -- the same goes for "transmission". When I come across words like this in Chinese, I lack that context, which makes the words significantly more of an obstacle in Chinese then their equivalents usually are for me in English.

 

I would say it is rare for me to come across a word in English that I am truly, absolutely, 100% in the dark about.

This is currently one of my biggest challenges, and it can make reading advanced content a little uncomfortable.