Welcome to the Listening Time Podcast.
Hey everybody, this is Connor and you're listening to episode 185 of the Listening Time Podcast.
I hope you're doing great.
I think this episode is going to be very helpful for a lot of people, because I'm going to talk about some techniques for learning vocabulary.
So recently in my French learning process, I've discovered a few things that have helped me learn more vocabulary.
So I wanted to talk about those things in this episode today.
I think that some of these things might be things that you can implement easily into your own learning process.
Some of them might not be that interesting for you, and that's okay, but maybe they'll give you some ideas.
They'll kind of help you think more critically about how you're learning vocabulary in English or in any other language that you're currently learning.
So we'll talk about that today, and I'm sure it will be interesting for you.
And I want to mention, as always, that you can use my advanced podcast episodes to start practicing with real English spoken fast.
It's still me.
It's my voice, so it'll still probably be easier than listening to another person speak fast, but it's great practice for you.
I provide the transcript for each episode, so you can check that out by clicking on the link down below.
And you can also check out my US Conversations podcast, in which I talk to other native speakers from around the US, from different states, different cities, and we talk all about the US, the different regions, about a ton of different topics.
It's a lot of fun and it's great practice for your listening, because You're listening to two people talk at normal speed.
So eventually you'll need to be able to develop that skill.
So that's why I created my U.S.
Conversations podcast.
It's kind of like an introduction to that.
I give you the transcript with each episode and there are definitions of key words and phrases on that transcript as well.
So the link to that is also down below.
All right, let's get started.
Are your ears ready?
You know what time it is.
It's listening time.
All right, let's talk about learning vocabulary.
Before I get into the techniques that I mentioned, I first want to talk about spaced repetition.
You'll often hear this referred to as SRS, Spaced Repetition Systems.
So these are fantastic and this is why I want to talk about them, even though I don't use them currently.
So these types of apps and websites are are designed to help you learn vocabulary in the most optimal way.
So they show you the vocabulary word right around the time when you're gonna forget it.
And there's a science behind this.
It's great.
It really is like a scientific method of learning vocabulary.
And this type of app, these types of tools, they work for many people.
I've used these in the past and they've worked for me in the past.
And I 100% recommend trying them because I've benefited from them before.
And I think many of you can as well.
And I'll endorse these apps.
For example, if one of these companies wants to sponsor my podcast podcast, I'll do it, because I think these are really useful tools.
So maybe in the future you'll hear one of these companies as a sponsor on this podcast, if they're interested.
But I have to admit that I don't currently use them.
So, even though I endorse them, I recommend that you try them.
They aren't for everyone, in the sense that it might not be your exact style of how you want to learn vocabulary.
So I think you should try them.
I think that many of you will actually benefit a lot from them, but some of you might find that it just really isn't for you.
And right now, that's how I feel.
I'll probably try these at some point again in the future and implement them into my learning because, like I said, I did that in the past, but right now I'm not using them.
So I want to talk about some of the techniques that I've discovered that aren't quite as scientific and aren't quite as clean as these spaced repetition systems, but they've worked for me.
Nonetheless.
OK, when we say nonetheless, it's like saying despite this, even though that is true.
OK, so even though these techniques that I'm going to talk about are not quite as scientific, they've helped me nonetheless.
So what I've done recently is I've created strategic lists.
I'll call them strategic.
So I've talked about this before and you've probably heard this many times that lists of vocabulary words are pretty much useless, right?
When you just take lists of words and you try to learn them, this doesn't usually go very well.
You should probably spend your time doing something else.
Right.
And, in my personal opinion, I think that the best way to learn vocabulary is through listening and reading and speaking to people, because they speak back to you.
Right.
So I think that we learn vocabulary very well in this natural way and hearing these words and phrases repeated again and again in different sentences and in different contexts.
I've talked about that a lot, so I'm sure you already know my opinion about that.
However, I also think that you can add something to this natural exposure to enhance your vocabulary learning.
When you enhance something, That means you make it better, bigger, more effective.
So what I've done is I've used strategic lists, not just random lists of words that I've found on the internet.
Like, okay, here are 50 useful adjectives.
Here's the list, learn them.
No, not like that.
What I usually do is I listen to one person or one channel, one podcast.
I listen to one source of content, whether that's a YouTuber, a podcaster, or whoever.
And I listen to or watch a ton of their content and I have them as my main focus for a while.
Maybe it's for a month or a few weeks or whatever, sometimes even more than a month.
But, for example, I'll find a YouTuber channel that I really like because I like the way their videos are made.
They're optimal for language learning, for example.
And then I will watch dozens and dozens and dozens of their videos, and it will usually be the same person talking and I use this for my listening practice and I note down the different words that the person uses that I'm not familiar with or I don't know at all and that draw my attention.
So I don't note down every new word.
I don't do that.
But the words that really draw my attention and that I feel like I want to learn, because I'm not familiar with that word and I want to be able to understand it or use it, and it's not a super technical word that won't ever be useful for me, for example.
So I note down these words and I have this list of words that pretty much all words from this one person.
Sometimes I'll mix in some other words that I hear from someone else, but what I usually like to do is to just focus on one person at a time, and so all of the words that I've noted down are are words said by one person, and that's really important, because we, as speakers, tend to use the same words and phrases over and over again.
Okay, i do this.
You've probably heard me say the same words over and over again, the same phrases over and over again throughout my episodes, And that has probably helped you learn a lot of phrases and a lot of words that I tend to say over and over again.
So this is really cool because, with the list of words that I have for this one YouTuber or this one podcaster, a lot of these words will end up being repeated in a future video, because this person has a certain style, a certain way of speaking.
They use certain words over and over.
And so a lot of the new words that I note down from this person.
They come up again naturally, as I'm watching another video from the person.
And that's part of the strategy behind this list is to hopefully be able to learn the words on this list without even needing to review them as much as you would with just a random list of words, right?
So I will review these words that I've noted down from the person.
I'll review them maybe three times a day, maybe just twice a day, usually at least in the morning and at night.
But I don't make this a big part of my learning.
Really, this is like five minutes maximum.
I just kind of go through this list.
Sometimes I'll quiz myself.
When you quiz yourself, it means that you test your knowledge.
Sometimes I'll quiz myself to see if I know the meaning of this word or not.
But at least I look at them two or three times a day.
And that helps me become more familiar with them, of course.
But really, what I'm hoping for is to hear these words repeated again today. by that person it doesn't always happen okay so many of these words unfortunately don't get repeated for a long time so those words aren't going to be as strong in my brain probably however a good number of them do get repeated So that is a great thing because when you hear a word repeated again in a different context, it really helps solidify that word in your brain. when something is solidified that means that it is made solid it's made uh stronger okay so again many of these words uh aren't going to be repeated in the next few videos but if you consume a lot of content like i do if you do a lot of listening practice then eventually you'll hear a lot of these words repeated in a future video from that same person or maybe even from another YouTuber or another podcaster.
But again, like I said, I like to focus most of my attention on just one person at a time, and you'll hear a lot of these words repeated.
So that is part of the strategy behind this list.
Another way that you can use this list of words from this specific person more strategically is to review them at night before you go to bed.
So I've seen this that studies show that when you review some information before you sleep, you can actually remember it better when you wake up.
So I think they did a study on it might have been Duolingo or another type of app that They saw that the people who did some revision before they went to bed at night they had a better performance the next day.
So when you have vocabulary that you want to learn, like for me with these different strategic lists that I have, I find that if I review them before I go to bed I remember them better in the morning.
Like I said, I'll review them two or three times usually, but one of those times needs to be before I go to bed.
And another thing I want to mention that I do with these lists is I delete, I erase words on this list all the time, even if I haven't been able to hear that word again in another video.
So I limit my list to a certain size so that it doesn't become too long with too many words.
And this can be hard, because you might feel like you want to keep this word on the list and review it more, because you want to make sure that you know it before you erase it.
But I just kind of erase words even if...
I might not have them super solidified in my brain.
I know that I'll forget a lot of them, but I know that if I continue listening, I'll eventually hear them again.
And when you forget a word and then you hear it again and you say, Oh, I know that word.
Wow, what does it mean?
And then you look it up and then you see the definition.
That actually really helps you to remember the word when you forget it and then you learn it again.
This has happened to me many times, where I see a word and I say I know that I learned that word before, but I can't remember it.
And then I look it up.
And then now when I see what it means, it stays in my head much, much longer.
So that is part of my strategy with this list.
This strategic list is I don't want to keep the words there forever.
I am okay with forgetting some of these words, because I don't want to have a list of a thousand words that I need to review.
I only want to review these words for like five minutes a day, so I have to keep this list short.
When I add new words to this list, I'll often delete some other words from the list.
And so I'll forget some of them.
But eventually I'll hear them again and they will be familiar enough to me that I recognize.
Oh yeah, I've heard that before.
I used to know that.
What does it mean?
And then I'll look it up and then I'll remember it after that.
It will be more solidified in my brain.
So I like making that type of strategic list.
And another thing I do is I'll also take some words from these lists and I'll write my own sentences with those words.
So maybe I'll take two words and I'll put them together into a sentence.
So this is actually giving me some writing practice.
That's great.
And it allows me to use these new words in my own sentences.
And I've found that when I do that, I remember the word much better afterwards.
I want you to try this.
Take a new word that you want to learn and come up with your own sentence and use that word in the sentence and maybe review that sentence a few times over the next few days and And you'll probably find that you can remember that word a lot better than if you just tried to memorize the word by itself.
So that has helped me learn a good number of words by writing them in my own sentences.
So that's been really useful for me.
And so you can see that I'm actually starting to include more output in my vocabulary learning.
I'm a big fan of input, meaning listening and reading.
But I've found that writing sentences with these words and using these words while I'm speaking has actually really helped me retain them.
Retain means to keep something in your mind.
I've been able to retain them much better by including some output, by using these words in my writing and in my speech.
I don't think I've really given this advice before, but I want to give it now because I'm always evolving as a language learner and I'm finding new things that work for me.
And so, even though I might not have talked about this before in my other episodes, I want to talk about it now because it's kind of a new thing I've discovered.
And I'm a learner just like you are.
And I'm learning different ways to improve my practice.
And this is one of them.
I've used new vocabulary words in written sentences, sentences that I write.
And like I said, that's really helped me learn some new words.
And I've tried to use some of these words that I'm trying to learn while I'm speaking to my French tutors.
So I have said this before that you shouldn't try to force words into your speech that you don't really know very well, that are really not that familiar to you yet.
I don't think we should try to do that because This often leads to awkward usages of words.
I've heard many students say things that sound very strange, because they really want to fit this word into their sentence, but they don't really know how to use it well yet.
Given the opportunity, it's really helpful to use some of the words that you're learning and try to say them in your sentences if they feel right to use.
So don't be afraid to try using these words if they feel correct.
If you're just forcing them in there, then that's different.
But if you're learning a word and you're talking and you say hmm, this sounds like a good opportunity to say this, i think it sounds right in this sentence, then Go for it.
Say it.
And then ask the tutor that you're talking to or the person that you're talking to, if you used it correctly.
That's what I do.
I'll use these words in my speech and then I'll ask my tutor if my sentence was correct or if that was a good usage of that word.
And oftentimes...
It is, and I'm happy that I was able to use that new word.
So that's something I've been doing.
And one other thing I've been doing is I write down the words and phrases that I wanted to say during my conversation but i couldn't i didn't have them in my brain uh i didn't know how to say them and so when that happens i'll ask my tutor for help and they'll tell me how to say that thing and then i'll write that down i'm not satisfied with just uh the tutor writing them down i'm I write them down as well on my own document, and then I review these words and these phrases after the conversation and before my next conversation with that tutor.
So this is a great way to fill in the gaps in your speech.
A gap refers to a hole.
So we all have gaps in our speech, things that we don't know how to say correctly.
And this is one of the best ways to fill these gaps speak, have a conversation and when you don't know how to say something, ask the person how to say it and then write that down and review it, because if you tried to say it this last time, it probably means you'll have the opportunity to say it again in a future conversation.
I've already seen that happen, where i didn't know how to say something, the tutor helped me say it, i wrote it down, reviewed it and then in the next conversation i said that thing that i learned.
This is a really powerful way to actually learn new words and phrases.
So, as you can see, I'm experimenting a little bit.
I'm doing things beyond just input, beyond just reading and listening.
I'm doing some things that are helping me remember words, learn words.
And these things are more related to output, to writing and speaking.
So I know that's a little bit of a change of direction from how I normally talk about learning vocabulary and language learning in general.
But, like I said, I'm evolving as a language learner and I want to tell you what I'm doing.
That's new, that's helping me, even if this is something that seems to be a little different from some of the things I've mentioned before.
So I really hope that this episode was helpful for you and that it gives you some ideas about how to learn vocabulary more effectively.
If there are other techniques that I develop in the future, of course, I'll talk about those in a future episode as well, but these things that I mentioned have been working for me recently, so I'm happy about that.
And I want to encourage you to use my advanced episodes.
Start practicing with real English.
This is really important.
It's a necessary step that you'll need to take.
So if you want to check that out, the link is down below.
And also check out my U.S.
Conversations podcast.
You can use that to start practicing listening to two people talking and not just one.
That's another necessary step that you'll need to take at some point.
So you can use that U.S.
Conversations podcast to help you with that as well.
The link to sign up is down below.
All right.
Thank you so much for listening to this episode.
And I'll talk to you on the next episode of Listening Time.
