Vocabulary

The most common mistake when learning vocabulary is to miss the forest for the trees.

Don’t worry much if a word just doesn’t stick. Some words stick better than others, and that is ok.

The important thing is that your vocabulary grows over time at a reasonable pace. Reasonable means that it allows you to reach your learning goals in the estimated time and that you give yourself the chance to use the words you learn before seeking more new words. It is possible to learn many thousands of words without knowing how to use them. Don’t do that. ¹

The second most common mistake is learning words without or with very little context.

There is a whole field of research (pragmatics) dedicated to studying how context affects word meaning. Without context, you might be able to memorize how a word translates to your mother tongue, but it will be very hard to use correctly when the situation comes.

A small isolated phrase represents a very weak context. It’s better than nothing, but not much better. Without the bigger context you are still missing crucial information. See these 2 phrases for an example:

1. I don’t mind.
2. I don’t care.

Depending on the context they can mean the same, or one of them can come across much more aggressively than the other.

Let me add some context:

—Is it ok with you if we try it my way?

Answer A:

—I don’t care, the important thing is that it works! So, up to you!

Answer B:

—I don’t care. You always know better, right? So, you decide.

I don’t care doesn’t convey exactly the same meaning on each case, and either might translate differently to one language or another. As a matter of fact, you can replace I don’t care with I don’t mind in the first answer, but it would’t be so idiomatic in the second.

This might sound too subtle and frivolous, but mistakes like these do impact communication. Your interlocutor might be aware of your difficulties with foreign language and still fail to capture your real intention if what you said has a clear, yet different, intention from their perspective. It will be even worse if you learn the language of a culture with a tendency to supply meaning between lines without explicitly stating key information.²

There are so many shades of meaning in a language that there is no feasible way to learn them by mere study like you would do for instance with verb conjugation. That’s why so important that you have as much context as possible, because when you learn vocabulary this way you will learn it implicitly with that context.³

Image from XKCD, by Randall Munroe. CC BY-NC 2.5

Even better is to find examples of new words in different contexts. If you are lucky, your resources will really help with this. The best graded readers not only expose you to new vocabulary progressively, but they engineer their stories such that new vocabulary appears in different situations.

Also, the more context you have (both in quality and quantity) the easier it will be to encode the information, meaning that you will memorize faster. So don‘t think of context just in terms of a small phrase. Consider the broader story, and try to confront any words you learn with different situations.

You will occasionally find words or idioms that are very important, and very common, but you keep forgetting and forgetting. Or you will find words that you can only recognize within the context where you first encountered them.

In this case, you can use a number of mnemonics to seal them to your long-term memory, once and for all. You can find the most common ones in the book linked below, but one that’s very easy is called mother tongue mirroring and it works like this: instead of memorizing a semantic translation right away, learn the word-by-word translation first and then adapt it so that it makes sense in your L1.

• Quid temporem est? — What time is it?
• Quelle heure est-il? — What hour is it?
• Wie spät ist es? — How late is it?
• Vad är klockan? — What is the clock?