Some thoughts on learning foreign language vocabulary.

The “Chinese is Hard” podcast: https://open.spotify.com/show/6DdGLH8...

William Hart’s Youtube channel:    / @will3267  

Danyo Pang’s Youtube channel:    / @thedanyopang  

00:00 That's a lot of words
00:24 Different kinds of vocabulary words
2:06 Word mapping between languages
3:16 Vocabulary goes beyond words
6:25 A story about prior knowledge
9:22 Learning words by example and in context
10:31 Flashcards
12:22 Comprehensible input
13:50 Pushed output

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Acknowledgements:
Definitions of “chew” comes from dictionary.com; definitions for “hard,” “take for granted,” and "repetition" come from MerriamWebster, slightly adapted.

References:

The observations in this video are a mishmash of my own personal experience and my reading of the literature on language learning. The best survey of that literature that I know of is How Languages are Learned by Patsy Lightbrown and Nina Spada. The 4th edition is here: https://bookshop.org/a/91541/97801945... (bookshop links are affiliate links, so if you purchase through this link, I do get a small commission; I would try to find this from your local library, though).

It’s written with foreign language teachers in mind (not necessarily foreign language students), but hits on many of the key ideas, mentions a lot of great studies that I won’t enumerate here, and offers a relatively balanced portrait of the research on language learning.

The 10,000 word estimate I mentioned at the beginning of the video is low and I wish I would have been more accurate. A lot depends on how you’re defining a word and how you define what “knowing” means. This is a solid paper on estimating the vocabulary of native American English speakers: Brysbaert, M., Stevens, M., Mandera, P., & Keuleers, E. (2016). How Many Words Do We Know? Practical Estimates of Vocabulary Size Dependent on Word Definition, the Degree of Language Input and the Participant’s Age. Frontiers in Psychology, 7. https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/....

The upshot is that they estimate about ~11,000 word families and 42,000 lemmas on average. A lemma is a root word that you can derive into other things (baked, bake, baking would not be three separate words just one lemma). Word families are larger groups of related words with similar forms and related meanings.

Comprehensible Input is one of the main ideas in Stephen Krashen’s Monitor Theory. This is the classic piece that lays it out: Krashen, S. (1981). Second language acquisition. Second Language Learning, 3(7), 1939. https://www.academia.edu/download/352...

The idea of pushed output comes from Merrill Swain and her studies of proficiency in immersive classrooms. She's got a lot to say on it over the years, but here's a representative example: Swain, M. (1997). Collaborative dialogue: Its contribution to second language learning. https://riull.ull.es/xmlui/bitstream/...

There’s much more to say about comprehensible input and pushed output, and I’ve got plans to release videos on those two ideas at least.