Thread: Vocabulary learning methods

Hello all

I've been trying to teach myself Russian for quite a while now, and I'm getting a fair way with the grammar, having covered and understood the cases and the aspects system (I think), however I am very slow with vocabulary learning. Currently I use the method whereby you write the word or list of words over and over again until I remember it/them consistently, however I find this to be rather frustrating. Does anyone else have any other interesting methods that I could try? I'd be interested to know how everyone else gets to grips with committing new words to the memory, as this seems to be the main problem in Russian in particular.

Any help or views would be brilliant. Thanks very much.
Jack

Hi Jack,

The best way to learn new vocabulary is to encounter it in being used in something you're reading or listening to. This is why most textbooks have small readings in each chapter. In the New Penguin Russian Course, for example, I probably learned much more of the vocabulary reading the stories and exercises than by just looking over the vocab list for the chapter. Also, if you know most of the words in what you're reading, you can pick up new vocabulary from the context without having to look each one up.

I've gotten a lot of mileage from listening to Radio and news broadcasts as well. I've learned quite a few words from songs because I got a verse stuck in my head and went back to look it up later. Lampada has posted quite a few songs along with transcripts in the Russian Only forum, which lets you read along and listen at the same time for a double whammy. Russian DVD's with English subtitles is another good method, though I've never used it myself.

Those all sound like brilliant ideas, thanks Grogs. I have used the New Penguin Russian Course myself as well; I found it very useful in learning the grammatical structures of Russian although the author included quite a few words in the vocabularies which I would not find the occasion to use very often, and so I would forget the word. Can you recommend any sites with Russian radio on them? I read short stories in Russian, which is helping me to enlarge my vocab quite a bit. Can you recommend any good Russian bands to listen to? I would prefer rock and metal to anything else, and I would imagine the Russians are quite good at that, as the Germans are (I study German in school and learnt most of my German vocabulary from children's stories and Rammstein songs in the beginning)

Большое спасибо за помощь. Я жду с нетерпением ответа
Джек

The classic( method for memorizing words is to use flashcards: small cards, on one side of which you write a few words in Russian and on the other side their translation. You can put some of them in your pocket or wallet and every time you have five seconds you can guess and check a word.

( Barry Farber's book, How to learn a language or something, made this popular.

Today spaced repetition software is very useful. These are kind of electronic flashcards, on which you input new words and translations (or explanations in your target language). The program shows you one side of the card (either the Russian word or the English translation) and you have to guess the correct answer. After showing you the correct answer, the program asks you how well you remembered it, typically from 0 (absolutely forgot) to 5 (very easy to remember). According to your answer, the program decides when to show the card again. For a very easy word that you always remember well, the times between repetitions of the same card soon rise to months, instead a difficult word is repeated every few hours at the beginning, every few days later.

The most known commercial program is Supermemo. An old version of Supermemo is free to download. Free alternatives are Mnemosyne and Anki, which is what I use.

These programs exist both for PC and portable devices.

EDIT: you may find some existing word lists for some of these programs on the internet, but you'll learn a word better if you take the time to write it into the program. Kind of frustrating though, having to change from English to Russian keyboard for every word.

Oh, and nothing impedes you to use phrases instead of words.

Wow, I'd never even thought of that method. Presumably the reason you haven't downloaded the other program is because you don't think it's worth it? I tend to just sit down and force words into my head until i remember them, but this normally takes a while and is probably quite inefficient. I've heard of that book; I may get it just to see what his theories are like.

Спасибо за скорый ответ и помощь

Джек

I can't seem to get the program to allow the cyrillic alphabet. Is there something else I'm supposed to dowload as well as the Supermemo program?

Спасибо

Jack

Originally Posted by JackBoni

I can't seem to get the program to allow the cyrillic alphabet. Is there something else I'm supposed to dowload as well as the Supermemo program?

Спасибо

Jack

I don't know about Supermemo. As I said, I use Anki, which is quite simple to use. With Anki, I have no problem writing cyrillic, I just switch the keyboard to my phonetic russian keyboard. If you wrote by yourself that Спасибо in your message, you should have no problem with Anki. I think that all these programs are more or less the same. Maybe you can find existing word lists more easily for Supermemo than for another program, I don't know, since I prefer to write the words by myself.

About Anki, if you decide to download it:

The only "problems" of Anki are its lack of help files (but there are a FAQ and an active forum on the website) and its being of Japanese origin.

You just have to create a new deck (of cards). Be sure, in the model, to specify that for each fact you want two cards, direct and opposite.

What I mean is that дом = house is one fact. If you don't specify anything, Anki will only ask дом and you will have to remember house: that is the "direct" card. You must tell the program to create the "opposite" card for the same fact, the one where the program asks house and you must answer дом.


About Barry Farmer's book, if you find it easily (library or elsewhere), read it. But I would not buy it. It has a couple of interesting suggestions and some "inspirational" text, but nothing special.

Спасибо Leushka

I will have a look at downloading that then. Thanks for the explanation; I would almost certainly have fallen into the trap there.

Джек

Leushka, can you send me the link to "Anki" please - I'm absolutely hopeless with computers. Is the initial download free?

Спасибо,

Джек

Originally Posted by JackBoni

Leushka, can you send me the link to "Anki" please - I'm absolutely hopeless with computers. Is the initial download free?

Спасибо,

Джек

Its home page is here. There probably are links to the download page, the forum and the wiki. Anki is completely free.

Hello,
I use Interlex (runs on windows only though) and it is free also and in the "Vocabulary Exchange" section there are quite a few Russian-English files.

http://www.vocab.co.uk/

Scott

My problem with the 'classic' flashcard method is that, while I do learn words that way, they're not really part of my active vocabulary. I've got hundreds of words that I could come up with if I sat and thought for a while, but I probably couldn't use in sentences on the fly.

I'll second Scott's recommendation of Interlex. It's an excellent program. It will automatically switch you from Russian to English in the appropriate boxes while entering words or taking tests, so no ALT-SHIFTing required. It lets you test yourself either using multiple choice, or by having to type the answer in. You can choose between English-Russian or Russian-English on the testing. The English-Russian is especially challenging. You may have thought you knew a word, but when you have to type it from memory, you realize if you really knew it or not.

As for Russian radio, I like to listen to http://www.101.ru. They have lots of stations to choose from. Personally, I'm a fan of Русский Рок, but there are plenty of choices.

Another good site to check out is http://www.gwu.edu/~slavic/webcast/. They put up a newscast every 2 weeks during the school year. You can download the newscasts as MP3's, and the transcripts of the newscasts and vocabulary lists are on the site as well.

EDIT: I noticed you mentioned children's songs. Check out the детские песенки thread in the "In Russian Only" thread. There are lyrics and MP3's for some pretty cute children's songs posted there.

Thanks for all the resources everyone. They're all really helpful

Джек

I am late, but I can propose a working method.
I have a cork desk on the inner side of me WC door. I take four pages with written English words, phrases and its transcriptions and meaning. Every single page has about 25 lines (new English words\phrases). Every time you have to sit and find the sense of life you can spend your time learning these words. When you have red down one page you just change it and go to next. Every week I learn 20-25 new words, it really works - just make it as your daily prayer.

One small tip for you (or anyone else):

don't try to memorize too many similar things together. There's been some research showing that it is very difficult to memorize things that are very similar to each other. So, for instance, don't try to learn 10 colors at once, or all the days of the week, or whatever you are trying to learn.

Sentences (or song lyrics) are good this way, since they will contain a lot of different elements. If you have a set of vocab you want to learn, maybe you could make a number of odd sentences with those words and memorize those sentences.

So what is the general consensus, is Anki any better than Interlex?

Originally Posted by DDT

So what is the general consensus, is Anki any better than Interlex?

I've used Intelex for a short while. I've tried Anki, but it seems to be a little too 'involved' for me. My favorite is Lingvo Tutor. I use this almost daily. I learn both new words as well and sentences with it.

What's your experience with these applications?

I am using the Vocabulearn Russian cds. It has a booklet with the words. I can play the cds as I drive and repeat the words during the pause. The words are mixed, but grouped by noun, verb, etc. By mixed, I mean you do not get a list of body parts, months, colors, etc.. They are mix together.

There are three level, with a total vocabulary of +3000 words plus over 3000 phrases. The speakers are clear and easy for me to understand.

They play classical music in the background. It takes me many time repeating the cd tracks to learn the words.

The set works equally well for a Russian speaker wanting to learn English!

Originally Posted by DaleD

I am using the Vocabulearn Russian cds. It has a booklet with the words. I can play the cds as I drive and repeat the words during the pause. The words are mixed, but grouped by noun, verb, etc. By mixed, I mean you do not get a list of body parts, months, colors, etc.. They are mix together.

There are three level, with a total vocabulary of +3000 words plus over 3000 phrases. The speakers are clear and easy for me to understand.

They play classical music in the background. It takes me many time repeating the cd tracks to learn the words.

The set works equally well for a Russian speaker wanting to learn English!

Thanks for the info Dale. Will look it soon. I put vocabulary building at the top of my list of things to learn. Someone once said that if you try to learn new words as they are thrown at you, eventually there will be very few 'new' words you need to learn ........ and remember.

Originally Posted by DaleD

I am using the Vocabulearn Russian cds. It has a booklet with the words. I can play the cds as I drive and repeat the words during the pause. The words are mixed, but grouped by noun, verb, etc. By mixed, I mean you do not get a list of body parts, months, colors, etc.. They are mix together.

There are three level, with a total vocabulary of +3000 words plus over 3000 phrases. The speakers are clear and easy for me to understand.

They play classical music in the background. It takes me many time repeating the cd tracks to learn the words.

The set works equally well for a Russian speaker wanting to learn English!

I got these on cassette recently and think they are pretty useful. I think CD would be a bit better just to be able to replay shorter sections over and over.

I might try posting some of the phrases later to see if they are accurate and in common usage. It looks like some of the phrases/expressions are more based on what people commonly say in English rather than Russian. But these recording could be used just as well for Russian speakers learning English.