How to learn English vocabulary

(Transcribed by TurboScribe.ai. Go Unlimited to remove this message.) Hi, we are the 3 English Experts. I'm Rebecca. I'm Dave. I'm Birgit. And welcome to this episode. 3 English Experts is your English podcast to help you speak better English and create a positive and happy mindset for your English learning journey. So hi and welcome to the next episode. In the last episode, we talked about how to find the time to learn. And today we'd like to move on to actual learning, maybe learning vocabulary. And of course, how tricks and tips, how we advise our students, how they can fit that into their day and how they can do that, maybe what tools they can use as well. And of course, some of the more psychological points that I'm sure Rebecca would also like to introduce to us today. She's got plans to give us. So I'll start off if I can this week with it being the app thing, the app man, if you'd like to call it that way. I can highly recommend Quizlet as a cool way to learn vocabulary and also to gamify the whole thing. So it's a little bit more fun. And the positive thing about Quizlet in particular is you can use it both on your computer and also as an app on your mobile phone, which is maybe what a lot of people would want to use, especially if they're on the go during the day or in a queue somewhere. Because in the last episode, as we said, we talked about how to learn, find the time. And so this is an ideal thing to use when you've got the time just to go onto the app and then start playing with it and learning with it, et cetera, et cetera. So what do I suggest to my students? Pretty much from this 15 minutes that you have maybe every day, 15 minutes, you choose some words that you would like to learn in that particular day, whatever is in your list, maybe 10 to 20, whatever the number suits you or however much practice you want to have. And then once you have your list of vocabulary within the app system, then you go throughout the day, sporadically through maybe at lunchtime or maybe in the afternoon when you've got a short break or maybe when you're stuck in the traffic or maybe when you're on the commute home from work. These are all times that I think you can train a little bit to learn the same vocabulary. And then the next day, of course, you can try the next set of vocabulary. So within a week, you could theoretically learn up to 50 or 100 items of vocabulary, phrases, whatever it might be. So I think that's also something that doesn't necessarily take much time. And I think the most important thing is it's free. So it's totally free for students to use Quizlet and I highly recommend that to my students. In future episodes, I'm sure I can explain a lot more about how to put the vocabulary into it, little tricks and tips on how to do that. But maybe you can ask your trainer also just to tell you a little bit about Quizlet or help you to start off with Quizlet if you wanted to as well. So I thought I'd now hand over to Birgit. Maybe Birgit's got some other ideas on how she then helps her students with the vocabulary thing. Yes. Thank you, Dave. A very good input. And I believe it's a combination is always very good to make it interesting and to stay open for new opportunities, for new devices. Maybe you want to try out one of these apps if you haven't. And yes, open your senses toward learning. So whenever you read something, you hear something, you might ask yourself during the day, so what does that word mean in English? And I recommend my students to keep a notebook. I mean, what I do in my trainings is I make the extra effort and write down new words and send them out after our lessons. So everybody has the individual words. And that's very useful and valuable, I believe, to remember and to repeat what have we spoken about. Maybe an image comes up what the context was, but it's still a good learning process to repeat. I've only discovered myself learning Dutch that I really needed repetition. Sometimes it's not enough just to hear a word once. I do recommend the old-fashioned notebook because I like it to have separate files and then you can take them out again and you exactly know, okay, that was the time when I was learning English or Dutch and your brain usually remembers. Keep it by the side. And also another information for learners might be useful to really recognize there are so many words in the English language. I think it's twice as many as in German to accept. You can't know them all. There's always another way of expressing yourself. So look out for words, look out for options, allow your brain to stay open, not to say, okay, I don't know that one word so I can't say what I want to say. Allow for this fluency and openness to find a different way of expressing yourself. And the last point I want to mention, small steps are good. Small steps are progress. So a lot of many small steps make up a lot of progress. So don't expect too much from you. Say, okay, after a week, so I haven't learned a hundred new words. I'm not making any progress. That might not be true. Next time you listen to a radio station and you find it much easier to follow and then you realize, okay, that's because I've exposed my brain more to English. Yes. So it's about repeating, but I believe there's a term false fluency. Rebecca has mentioned before, and I would like to pass over to her and listen what she's got to say. Sure. There is this phrase false fluency. And basically it means your brain gets bored, basically quite easily. And so if you learn the same words every day, say you've got to learn 20 words for a test next week, and you learn those words every single day, basically after a couple of days, your brain gets bored and your brain goes, oh, I know this. I know this. And it just stops trying to learn them. It doesn't try very hard to learn them. It assumes that I just know these words already. This is where interval learning comes in. You've probably heard of this. It's very common in language learning. Don't learn the same thing every day. So like Dave said, on the next day, learn a different list of words. Interleaving. So like one day, learn your words. And on the next day, maybe just listen to a podcast or watch a video and then learn the words two days later. So there is this theory that when your brain has to try a bit harder to remember something, when it finally does remember, it makes that pathway, that sort of memory pathway in your brain much stronger. It's really neuroscience. It's not just mumbo jumbo. It really is true. So it's actually you have to kind of let yourself forget a little bit, not completely forget a little bit. And then when you do remember it, your brain tries a bit harder and it actually sticks a bit better. The other thing is this recall and repeat. So what's the difference between recalling something and repeating something? Repeating is just you read a word, you repeat it, listen, repeat, listen, repeat. Whereas recall is like you have to actively remember something. And I read somewhere that it says you should spend one third of your time reading something and then two thirds of your time trying to recall it from memory if you're trying to memorize something. So there were experiments, they gave people like a poem to read and said, right, you've got 10 minutes to memorize this poem. And the people who read it for like three minutes and then spent the other nine to whatever, nine minutes trying to recall it rather than just reading it and reading it and reading it, as in they turned it over and they had to recall it, actually had a much better result in the end. Does that make sense? Yeah, definitely. So it's not just repeating. And this is this active vocabulary. Like when you're using Quizlet, if you've got the English and the German, start with the German and force yourself to remember the English word. Don't have the English word. Don't make it easy for your brain. Try and make it a bit more difficult. Can I really recall this English word rather than just repeat, if that kind of makes sense? Yeah, it does. And if I could just say that when you mentioned in Quizlet again, and you will be in the show notes as well, this idea of actually spelling. So this is a way that you can put it into spelling mode when you want to learn words, and the Quizlet will actually speak out the word, pronounce the word in English with a German translation and you have to write in. So to come back to the census perspective, what are you doing? You're listening to the word, you're reading the German translation, and then you have to write the in English. So I think that's also a very cool system to practice the vocab, especially as if you've already, as Rebecca said, you've already tried to learn the words in Quizlet. Let's say you're trying to learn the words. This is more like a kind of recalling and sort of testing yourself. So this would be the next stage that you could do within Quizlet. So I think that ties in very well with what Rebecca says to how to recall the things afterwards. Yes. And I believe that learning in different places can also help in unusual places. So just an example, I was riding in the car and I asked my son of the new keeper of football club. I hadn't heard the name. So he told me obviously. And when I got home 10 minutes later, I had already forgotten. So that was interesting for me to see. So I had to ask again. And that's in a short time memory, exactly. But it's not enough sometimes to hear only once. It's Jonas Omlin for Mönchengladbach. But I never forget the name because then I looked it up and I promised myself I'd never forget that. And I will never forget the situation. I will never forget the face of my son when I asked him the second time he was like Omlin. So he was sort of. And I've done that with learners also. One didn't have the time to be in the office, so we had a phone call while he was driving in the car. So that's a different learning experience. And it's still an exercise for the brain to ask for vocabulary recall. I think that's a good situation. Although when I have clients who want to do their lesson while they're driving the car, it freaks me out. I'm like, oh, are you watching the road? I've had a couple of people doing that. It really freaks me out. I just don't know if it's safe. But in theory, you're right. I think the different environments is absolutely true. And, you know, when things happen, when your brain remembers something, often it does remember where you were when you heard that or when you first saw that. And I always like with the song, like with the song as well, exactly. I wouldn't suggest I wouldn't do that with a very learner from the beginning, so you couldn't spring out a sentence. But with a learner who's capable of learning, that would be OK for me to have a conversation in the car. Yeah. So I guess a Zoom calls out to the question then. No, not yet. Not yet. Who knows? Well, I also wanted to say that what I say to people is you have to make vocabulary sticky. I would say sticky. And it means like we have this easels broker in German. Mnemonic is such a boring word. I hate that word. Not donkey's bridge. But you have to make a word sticky so that it's and there's this theory that is the weirder the connection, the more likely you are to remember it. So I had a client of the day we were talking about the word bench and obviously in German bank, you know, and I was going, it's not a bank, it's a bench. You sit on the bench like in football. You know, he's on the bench. And she said, I don't know why, but I've got a vision of Judi Dench now. I said to her, you will never forget that now. You'll have this vision of Judi Dench sitting on a bench. And that's how to make things sticky. These visual cues or these links. And that is really how, you know, in Japanese, the word for cold is Samui. Right. And I always think, Samui sounds a bit like Samoa, like the really hot country. And so for some reason, I remember that it's like the opposite and that's my brain connection. And it's a bit weird, but that's how you create these hooks, these like ways to remember things. Also, maybe pictures as well. If you can picture things in your mind, visuals. Yeah, absolutely. And it sounds like it takes a long time, but it doesn't really. Your brain is quite smart. The other thing I want to say is learn relevant words. Our brain has an amazing spam filter. If we have so much information going in all the time and the brain has this brilliant spam filter of anything that's not relevant or really important, that could have been why you didn't remember the keeper's name, Birgit from München-Bergabach. Maybe you weren't that interested. It's like, I don't care. I don't care who's the near keeper. Wow. Yeah. It's called in one ear out of the other, guys. In one ear out of the other. But Rebecca, that's exactly what I tell people. If there's loads of material you can get on the internet for free. If you look up like vocabulary for arguing and things, don't learn them all. Only highlight those you find interesting because you can't. You just can't learn, I don't know, millions of words. I mean, I come across new words. It's boring. Yeah. It gets boring. I remember again, going back to my Japanese course, and we had this awful book, Japanisch im Zauberschritt, which was terrible. It was so dry. It was awful. So I was learning Japanese and German, which was even more complicated. And I remember we did this chapter and we were still beginners, real beginners. And we had to do a role play. You are at a train station in Tokyo. You have left your knitted jumper with the picture of a horse on it, with the picture of a horse on it, on the train. As you do. Call the lost and found. And the lost and found had this really weird name. It was this really complicated Japanese office or something. And I was like, why am I learning how to describe a jumper with a horse on it? When am I going to be wearing... In Japanese. In Japanese. When am I going to be wearing a picture? And when am I going to need to know the name of this little office? I mean, who knows, maybe. But it was just immediately, my brain kind of switched off. I was just like, I don't want to learn this. I don't want to learn my third cousin on my mother's side. I don't have any. What's the name for Zauberschritt actually in English? Good question. It's like quick pace, is it? Is it like Zauberschritt is when you're walking quickly, right? Nobody said that in German actually. But Zausen isn't Zausen something else? What does Zausen mean? Zause is a party. Right, exactly. I thought it was something to do with drinking. Zause, like Zause schritt, drunken steps. Not to mistake with Brause. Yes. So as I said, learn vocabulary that is relevant to you, to your job, to your life. Don't spend hours. And this is the problem when you learn other people's lists. I mean, on Quizlet, you can upload lists from other people, which can be useful, but sometimes they're just not relevant. They're just not relevant to what you need. And then it gets boring and it gets too much. And so I think choosing relevant words. In Japanese, I learned how to say another white wine, please, because that's my vocabulary. That's what I need to know. Two more hours of karaoke, please. That's what I need to know. That's also a very good idea. If you've got a list, I mean, I often give my students the list from the sessions and then every month we do sort of like a game of taboo. And if the student is really enthusiastic student, I ask them to make up their own list for the month, maybe the top 20 words or phrases that they think are the most useful for them. And then we have a game of taboo. I mean, not in the normal sense of taboo. They just have to try to explain the word, to describe the word or phrase. And then I have to say, OK, you mean that word or phrase and vice versa. Then they will try to describe or I describe a word and they have to guess the word I mean. So I think that's also a great way of repeating. They maybe don't get the whole vocab. It's recall again. It's recalling. It's a recall. They have to recall, not repeat. They have to think of what that word is. And my other advice is always when I like playing taboo as well with my students. And I think it's this workaround. There will always be times when you can't find the right word, even in your own language. And you have this block and it's everyone's fear. They go, what if I forget the words? What if I'm in a presentation, I forget the words and I go, that's when you have to find a workaround. You've got to find a way of talking around the words or using a different word or a similar description. And that's so taboo, like describing a situation or describing what is really helpful because there will be situations where you need to do that. Well, it's like I always say, it's like a muscle. They're building a muscle. Yeah. Training how to, the word is paraphrase. So you use a different word or different words to explain the word that you're looking for. We call it in English to paraphrase. So yeah, paraphrasing, it's a great way to great method to do that. It's a great skill generally. I play it in taboo. Definitely. Yeah, definitely. And the brain needs exercise, doesn't it? I mean, that's what I say. We can compare that to sport, to action activities. Everybody, everything needs training and that's the brain, the muscle. Yes. Yeah, super. And my other last point, my psychology point, curiosity. I think my clients who I know are curious, who look at words and find words and go, Oh, what does that mean? And they have questions for me. I always say, bring a question. And the people who bring questions, in my experience, are the people who learn quicker because they're the curious ones. They look and they're aware of words around them. They see a word and go, I'm not quite sure how to use that. And they bring it to class. And then we talk about it. Curiosity from a psychology point of view is one of the top characteristics in language learners and successful language learners. We're curious people. We want to know what does that mean and why is it that word and not this word? And how is that similar to my own language? Maybe there's a connection between the German or the Spanish and the, you know what I mean? So curiosity is a great characteristic. So try to be curious. You can't spoon feed people with vocabulary. They have to take it. Yeah, they have to have an interest. Yeah, that's a very good point. Yes. And that's also, I believe, one task of the trainer to sort of arouse this curiosity or to make it interesting and to tell people, OK, it's worth looking out, it's worth asking to find answers and to get progress on the other side. Yes. Yeah, absolutely. So what are we going to talk about in our next episode then? Well, perhaps we should go back to my awful Japanese book and learning irrelevant information. Perhaps we should give some tips on where to find good material, because good material is so important. The right books, the right podcasts, the right videos. So, Dave, what do you think? Do you have some tips for our listeners? Do you think next week about content? Oh, yeah, absolutely. YouTube is absolutely full with content you can use. I'm sure I can come up with some ideas from there or maybe even audible to listen to books or something like that. So I'm sure I'll find something. Perfect. All right. See you next week, guys. Take it easy. See you next time. Bye bye. Bye bye. Thank you so much for pressing play today. If you have any comments, questions or perhaps suggestions for future episodes, feel free to contact us at our website 3englishexperts.com. Have a great day and see you next time.