Best Way to Learn Vocabulary as a Beginner
There are mainly 2 ways I acquire vocabulary: through immersive exposure to a language; and through revising spaced repetition system (SRS) flashcards. In this post, I’ll explain why spaced repetition is the best way to learn vocabulary as a beginner.
To be honest, immersion is my preferred way of learning. Memorizing long lists of words without any actual context is about as fun as learning calculus (come @ me, math bros). However, as a complete beginner, there are a few reasons why you shouldn’t jump into immersion immediately. A few points are specific to Japanese, but most are applicable to language learning in general.
Lack of content
Immersion isn’t very effective if you have to look up every word in a sentence. By the time you check the last word, you’ll have already forgotten half the sentence. Reading like this gets overwhelming quickly.
Thus, as a beginner, you’ll be limited to content meant for small kids and language learners that you can mostly understand. I personally find most such content to be not very interesting because it feels irrelevant.
However, once you’ve learnt even just a few hundred words, your sphere of understanding expands substantially. You can read actual news stories (written in simple language) as well as watch cartoons that have more intellectual depth than “Panda eats grass 🐼. Panda sleeps 💤. Panda is happy 😊.”
SRS is more efficient
Memory gradually declines with the passage of time. However, each time you review something, it sticks with you for longer. Spaced Repetition System (SRS) algorithms exploit this fact: a word is revised at the precise moment you’re about to forget it. Most language learning platforms such as Duolingo and Memrise use SRS for revising words.
SRS is clearly planned and calculated in its approach. Contrast that to the serendipity of randomly coming across the same word multiple times. Using SRS to learn vocabulary is much more efficient because it maximizes the utility of the memory retention curve.
Recall skills = communication skills
Recall and recognition are two sides of the same coin of vocabulary acquisition. Recognition means to be able to understand a word when you read or hear it. Recall is the ability to remember a word and use it to communicate.
Learning to recognize a word through immersion doesn’t take very long. You’ll come to understand a word after seeing it in use and looking it up a few times. Recall, however, takes much longer to develop this way. You’ll have frustrating moments when you “know” a word but can’t remember it.
Through immersion, your ability to read and understand will be far ahead of your ability to speak and communicate. This is alright once you’re at an advanced level in a language since most new words won’t be practical enough to be worth memorizing anyway. However, as a beginner, your ability to communicate will be painfully underdeveloped. You won’t be able to show off how you’re learning a foreign language to friends and family or impress native speakers with your efforts. If you love the sound of your own voice like me (that’s basically why this blog exists), you’ll want to pick up some basic vocabulary asap.
SRS flashcards supercharge the learning process. They can be used to train both recognition and recall rapidly. If you have a practical need to speak your target language, such as being in the country its spoken, you’ll want to learn the basics needed to get around as soon as possible.
Japanese Specific Reasons
Double effort
Most words in Japanese are written with kanji characters. After following the Heisig method, you’ll be knowing a bunch of kanji with no idea about how to read or pronounce them. By extension, you won’t know how to read words unless they have furigana (reading written above word) attached or you look them up. This means each time you come across an unknown word, you’ll have the double task of learning its reading along with its meaning.
This slows down the pace of learning through immersion and is another reason why SRS is preferred. After memorizing a few hundred words, you’ll start developing an intuitive understanding of the readings of several characters.
Looking up is hard
Following the previous point, Japanese words are extremely difficult to look up if you don’t know their reading. If you’re unable to copy the word (such as from Manga, videos or pictures), your only recourse is to draw it and rely on handwriting recognition; or use text recognition on images and screenshots.
Just revising words through spaced repetition obviously won’t help with these instances, but it’ll reduce the number of times you come across unknown vocabulary this way.
The Final Touch
Context is king
Having a bunch words memorized is great but you won’t completely understand the meaning and usage of a word until you see it being in used in context a few times. Different contexts add depth to a word’s meaning and reinforce its memory. Each time you see a word in use, its image becomes clearer than simply revising the same flashcard over and over.
I liken the process of learning words to the analogy of making a stream. Memorizing vocabulary through spaced repetition is like digging the channel, but the stream is only complete when water flows through it. In this case, it's the words being used in context that flow through the channels you created through memorization.
Conclusion
Vocabulary acquisition follows the law of diminishing returns. With respect to English, only 800 of the most frequently used words are required to understand 75% of ordinary spoken communication. This rings true for other languages as well and means that you need a vocabulary of just a few hundred words to get started with consuming content. Thus, in my opinion, the best approach is to learn some basic vocabulary through spaced repetition and then start with immersive learning.
I continued using flashcards long after graduating from the basics because I had specific reasons to reach a high level of proficiency as rapidly as possible. However, these days I find myself getting lazy with flashcard reviews and rely on them less.
How to Get Started
Japanese learners can check out my guide on How to Learn Japanese Vocabulary as a Beginner to learn how to implement these principles of vocabulary acquisition in practice with the right tools and resources.
For most languages, apps like Memrise and Duolingo do a decent job of teaching vocabulary. You could also try looking for shared Anki decks. If you want to make your own flashcards, you can start by searching for a frequency list of words in your target language.
However, in either case, you’re going to encounter many words that are abstract or grammatical in nature. These aren’t very easy to learn through flashcards. In comparison, the word list at the end of this page has 625 concrete physical words (eg. dog 🐕, fire 🔥, etc.) that you can get started with. I used it when I first started learning Japanese by translating the words from the free English list. You can buy paid lists for your target language if you’re less ghetto than me.
If you indeed decide to make your own flashcards, Anki is the most versatile platform to do so. You can also download shared decks of cards created by other users. However, Anki can also be a bit challenging for beginners to understand which is why I wrote this beginner’s guide to Anki.
