Welcome to the Listening Time Podcast.
I'm Connor from polyglossa.com and you're listening to episode 14 of the Listening Time Podcast.
If this is your first time with us, welcome.
I hope this podcast will be a good tool for you to help you practice your listening skills.
In each episode of Listening Time, I talk about one or two topics that are interesting for me, and I speak in a natural way.
I don't read any script.
I'm not speaking as I'm reading anything.
I'm just speaking naturally as the words come to my mind.
So I speak naturally, but I speak a little bit more slowly and a little bit more clearly than the average native speaker.
In this way, you can understand me more easily than you can understand native speakers when they speak at normal speed.
And you can use this podcast to help train your ears so that you can eventually understand native normal, native speech that people speak at normal speed.
So hopefully this podcast will be a good tool for you to reach that level.
So today I'm gonna talk about a topic that I really like because it's related to language learning.
Today we're going to talk about how to learn vocabulary.
What are the best ways to learn and remember vocabulary when you're learning another language?
So before we start, remember that the transcript is available for this episode and every episode.
Also, please share this podcast with everyone. anyone who might find it useful.
And please give it a rating, a like, a comment, if you can, to help this podcast grow and help more people find it.
So let's get started.
Are your ears ready?
You know what time it is.
It's listening time.
Alright, so let's talk about vocabulary.
This is a very important topic, and I'm sure it's an important topic for all of you, because you're all learning a foreign language.
You're here because you're learning English, I imagine.
So there are many ideas and theories about how we learn and memorize and remember vocabulary.
And people will definitely tell you a lot of different things about when it comes to this subject.
And, to be honest, some things might work better for one learner and other things might work better for a different learner.
So I'm not saying that all of what I'm going to say is true for everyone.
But I think that, in my opinion, these things will help you and will give you some tips to improve your acquisition of vocabulary.
When I use the word acquisition, I'm saying that you acquire something.
When you acquire it, you obtain it.
It becomes yours.
So if you acquire a language, this is saying that you learn a language to a good level, so that it becomes yours, so to say.
So we like to talk about language acquisition.
This is a popular phrase in the language learning world.
So, first let's talk about some of the bad ways to learn vocabulary.
And then we'll talk about some good techniques.
And then I'll tell you about my preferred way to learn vocabulary.
So, first let's talk about the bad ways to learn vocabulary.
I think that the way that many people try to learn words is to make tons of lists.
By the way, when I say tons of, I'm just saying many, a lot of.
If I say tons of people, I mean a lot of people.
So, people make tons of lists, and usually these lists are kind of random.
Random means that there's no logical order or reason behind the lists.
You're just writing down all the new words that you hear or read.
This is not a good technique in my opinion.
I'll tell you why.
I used to do this.
I used to make a lot of lists and try to memorize vocabulary words online. from these lists.
But the bad thing about this is that you have no context with the vocabulary words.
So you're learning the meaning of each word, but you don't really have the context in which the word is used.
So what happens is that Maybe your brain can remember the exact translation of the word in your language, but it's not really remembering the real meaning and usage of the word.
And I noticed this when I used to make lists in the past is that I would memorize these words and my brain would remember them for a certain amount of time.
But then when I encountered these words in real situations, I oftentimes wouldn't understand them.
By the way, when I say the word encounter, I'm saying that you...
You come into the presence of this word.
You see it.
You experience it in real life.
You encounter something.
If I encounter a situation, it means that I face this situation.
I experience this situation.
So if you learn these words in a list and then encounter them in real situations, sometimes your brain doesn't register that that is the word that you learned.
Because you haven't really acquired it very well.
You just try to memorize the word and hope it stays in your brain.
And many times it doesn't.
And many times it doesn't really make sense to you when you actually hear the word in a real situation.
I encountered this situation a lot when I used this technique.
And so I don't think making random lists is very helpful.
Sometimes lists are helpful, but you have to have more purpose with these lists.
They shouldn't be random and you shouldn't rely on them all the time.
The word rely just means depend.
So you shouldn't rely or depend on lists as your primary way of learning vocabulary.
And one other thing that I think, One other technique that I think is not good in learning vocabulary, specifically with phrasal verbs.
Okay, let's talk about this a little bit.
A phrasal verb is a phrase in English that consists of verb and a preposition, like go up, go down, go around, etc.
These phrasal verbs are very difficult for students because in most other languages phrasal verbs don't exist and we have thousands of them in English, And the bad technique that students use to try to learn phrasal verbs in English is that they divide the verb and the preposition and they try to learn them as like a combination of words.
They write the word go on one side of the paper and And then they write all the different prepositions that could possibly go with the word go on the other side of the paper.
So they'll write go on the left side and then write up down around across etc.
On the right side.
And they'll try to memorize the meaning of each combination of go plus the preposition.
This is a horrible way of learning phrasal verbs, in my opinion, because if you do this, you'll start to associate these different phrasal verbs with each other.
You'll think that go up and go through and go around are all similar in meaning.
Or you'll think get across, get over, get down.
You'll think that those phrasal verbs are all related.
And this is simply not true.
Each phrasal verb is its own word and is not related to other phrasal verbs that share the same verb or the same preposition.
They should be treated as completely different words.
And you should think of them as just a normal vocabulary word.
You shouldn't think of them as two words in a combination.
You should just treat phrasal verbs the way you would treat normal verbs.
Okay?
So that's another bad thing that students do when they're learning vocabulary in English.
Now let's talk about a couple good things you can do, a couple techniques that many language learners like to use when learning vocabulary.
So one of these methods is the SRS system.
SRS stands for Spaced Repetition System.
So this type of system means that you repeat or review a vocabulary word or a phrase or a sentence in a strategic amount of time or with a strategic time interval between each repetition.
An interval just refers to a period of time between two times.
So if I say a two-day interval, I'm saying that every two days you repeat something.
So with this SRS system, you can review words or phrases.
In a way that is most beneficial for your brain.
So this system is designed to help your brain review these words right before you are going to forget them.
So there is a certain formula, a certain formula, a certain pattern of how your brain forgets information that it learns.
So with this system, you can try to review these new words before your brain forgets them, And the system has very specific time intervals so that you can review these words in the optimum way.
So you can review them with perfect time intervals.
So many language learners like using these types of systems.
I think the most famous one would be Anki, A-N-K-I.
This is a flashcard app.
Flashcards are cards that have one piece of information on one side and another piece of information on the other side.
So many people use flashcards to learn vocabulary.
So the Anki app uses flashcards and it uses this SRS system so that you review these flashcards at the perfect time to help your brain remember these words before it forgets them.
Of course, sometimes your brain does forget these words.
And that's okay.
That's also part of the system as well.
It helps you relearn words that you already forgot.
So that's one good technique that many people use.
I personally don't use it.
Not because I don't like it.
I think it's good.
But for me, it's not very fun.
And I find that if I use this technique, if I use these apps...
And it's not very fun for me.
And I don't spend a lot of time doing other things that are more fun for me, which include reading or watching videos in my target language.
So I prefer to do activities that are more interesting for me.
And because if you like what you're doing, you usually learn more, you remember more.
So I personally don't use this system.
But many people do.
And I'm sure Some of you could benefit from using apps like Anki or other SRS apps.
So one other good technique you can use to help you remember vocabulary words is to use these words in conversation.
Once you use a word in your own original sentence and you use it correctly and a native speaker confirms that your usage was correct, this is very powerful for your brain.
This helps you remember that word and remember words. the context that you used to use that word.
So I think that if you have conversations with native speakers, this can help you and give you a good opportunity to try to utilize new vocabulary words and, And afterwards you'll actually remember these words if you used them correctly in your own sentences.
So now let me just close out by talking about my preferred way of learning vocabulary.
So what I normally do is I learn vocabulary from reading and from listening.
So when I read, I highlight words that I want to remember.
And so what happens is I read a section of a book and then I reread that same section again and I see those highlighted words again.
By the way, the word highlight means that you put the word in another color so that it stands out.
You can see it very clearly.
So I highlight these vocabulary words.
And then when I reread the section of the book, I see these vocabulary words again.
And many times I don't remember them, but sometimes I do.
And it doesn't really matter.
The key here is that I re-read the section of the book, the same section, multiple times.
I usually read the same section like five times, maybe.
And after rereading this section five times, I find that I can remember and identify all these new vocabulary words.
I read them in context in a natural sentence.
And this is very powerful for my brain.
It helps my brain remember the meaning of the new word.
Right?
The whole sentence makes sense for me and my brain just captures and retains that new word in the sentence.
Right?
When I say the word retain, I'm saying that my brain keeps it there.
It doesn't let it go.
It keeps it.
It retains it.
So I do this with reading, and I also do it with listening.
I listen to dialogues or videos in my target language and then I re-listen to the same thing like five times or ten times, many times, and then those new words that I identified the first time they stick in my brain.
I retain them because of the context around these words.
So I advocate for repetition.
I think that repetition in reading and repetition in listening is the best way for me to learn new words.
I find that I learn words very easily using this technique.
So it might be a little bit boring for you at first to re-read or re-listen to something many times.
But if you're reading or listening to something interesting, it makes the process easier, right?
You don't get bored as easily and you retain all these new words that you highlighted.
So I love using this method to learn vocabulary.
And the cool thing is that this technique is integrated into my normal language learning activities like reading and listening.
I don't have to do a separate activity for vocabulary.
It comes from my reading and my listening.
So I really like doing this and I encourage you to do this.
And lastly, one tip I want to give you is don't be afraid of forgetting new words.
Many English learners hate forgetting the words that they already learned.
This is normal.
This is something that happens to all of us.
And it's actually something that can help your brain.
When you forget a word and then you learn it again after you forget it.
This can actually strengthen your brain's understanding of the word or your brain's memorization of the word.
So forgetting is actually an important part of learning things.
So don't be afraid of forgetting vocabulary, okay?
You'll eventually learn it very well.
So hopefully this episode was interesting for you and hopefully it gave you some helpful tips to help you learn vocabulary and hopefully it was good practice for your ears.
I hope that you enjoyed it.
And please remember to share this podcast with anyone that might find it useful.
And please give it a like, a rating, a comment if you can.
And remember to join our 1 listening practice seminars at polyglossacom if you need more practice for your listening skills.
So thank you for listening to this episode and I hope you'll come back for episode 15 of the Listening Time podcast.
