How many words can be memorized in a day

The numbers are on par with other studies. Context is key! Memory functions mostly by association. Learning a word on its own is close to useless. SRS and other reviewing schedules are not a must but they help optimize are efforts and save ourselves a lot of time. Do the conjugated forms count as different words? Different trainings will use different definitions and may lead to a huge gap between one estimate and the next.

Thanks for sharing your insights, Fabien. Personally, since questions like these do smack of click-bait marketing, I tend to agree with the author that, at least more often than not, these are wrong kinds of questions to ask for beginning language learners; maybe when Eric gets some more experience.

Not to draw out the illustration too much, but among other things, Eric, who is probably years old, also has no discipline — perhaps a common trait in the modernized young person — as he tries French then Chinese, then perhaps another later on again, not to beg too much from the illustration. As a side note, discipline seems to be, unfortunately, a taboo word nowadays. And after all, he was studying French, a language closely related to English, and was using textbooks and watching TV alongside deck-study.

But in this illustration it was wrong of Eric to let demotivation in one area of study to affect every area of study, and inevitably that was his downfall. He would also benefit by studying an introductory book on past and current foreign language instruction methodologies and maybe another on second language acquisition.

This would help inoculate him from current trends, fads and methods that all vie for his attention and his wallet. Then he can incorporate all of that into his base method and repeat the process over time as his circumstances and goals dictate. I also have a question — how is memorizing words a form of output? Or perhaps, how can it become a form of output? How about creating things with the words you already know? Getting yourself involved, with much more confidence, in all those approaches I have described, it is, to me, the best way to keep motivated.

But with one difference, you already know all the words and you are only doing this to talk as a native would. Hi Vinicius. I think that ultimately, everybody learns in a different way. You also mentioned that you used a variety of approaches after having memorized a lot of words, which I assume helped to further widen your vocabulary and understand how sentences in the target language are formed and used in real life. I would argue that for most other languages, learning isolated words may not be a very good strategy.

Puts the argument well, shredding the belief that you can memorize your way to learning a language. There may be a few who may believe they did it that way, but I can guarantee they were also learning in other ways that enabled the mastery. Memorization gives the illusion of progress but when the rubber hits the metal and you actually have to conduct a conversation, all those hours spent memorizing soon comes to nought for most people.

As Lingholic says best spend your time learning, what I call, organically so that your vocab develops with your interests and growing control of the language. Develop more interests and you vocab will grow faster! Thanks for your comment Andrew, I think you definitely hit the nail on the head.

We live in an era where people expect instant gratification, and being able to put a finger on the exact number of words that you learned on any given day satisfies that urge, I guess.

I would have never thought anyone would just want to memorize random words. Words that are useless to me, I just forget about them.

People focus too much on memorization rather than exposure to engaging content. I was pretty successful learning French and Spanish while living in countries that spoke those languages. My approach was to systematically rote learn about ten new words each day that I had encountered during the day.

This ensured that the words were relevant to me and likely to recur. In both places I was around other students. Based on your observation of students that fell behind, though, were these students also the kind not to get exposed to large amounts of input in the foreign language they were learning? Also, when rote learning 10 or so new words a day, did you try to have them memorized as part of sentences to give the words some context? Did you feel that you could easily use in conversations the words you had rote memorized?

Thanks for commenting! Great to hear that this tactic has been working well for you Jenny. Do you feel you end up remembering the words that you review through your flashcards for a long period of time? It has been working great for me too.

It helps me to learn new vocabulary and improve my pronunciation. At the end of the day I think the thing that really matters is patience and consistency. Yes, Eric sets a wrong goal. At the same time, I believe his even bigger mistake is committing to it too soon, being unconscious about the learning process itself, and letting automatic negative feedback loops to kick in.

Why am I getting upset? How to make the process more relevant to me? What part of French I like the most? Probably carefully guarding his positive attitude and following what he enjoys and loves doing by blending it with French would be the right thing to do.

Based on the argument made in the article, would you agree that trying to memorize a set amount of words every day is the wrong way to approach language acquisition? If we look at lives of high achievers, many of them have faced a lot of failures and wrong goals, wrong processes, wrong questions, etc. What makes a difference is their mind-set and ability to learn from mistakes. It helps build resilience discipline if you wish and techniques not only coping up with failures but praising them as valuable lessons.

As Jenny mentioned, learning 30 cards a day works for her. Yes, it goes together with reading and creating cards often ignored by beginners.

So, what memorizing means anyway? Learning pre-made cards is probably the least effective tactic. Collecting words from reading active relevant reading , spoken language is more effective because of connections you mentioned and relevance.

It would be actually even fun. I knew about that problem, so I rendered it a non-point. Using Anki makes your brain understand that information is important because you see it over and over until you remember it. Even if you only learn a word in one way by that, I mean only by reading hiragana, or only by reading kanji, or only by recalling in response to an English stimulus , the fact that the word is somehow stored in your mind enables you to more easily learn other aspects of the same word.

Indeed, the more links you can make between already-known information and new information mnemonics, anyone? I need to put that into an Anki deck, too. However, when I struggle to complete a sentence and my Japanese friend suggests a word, I almost always recognize the word, and after just one such instance, it becomes a whole lot easier to remember that word when I want to use it later.

It is a great article. Then I got sick of anki and got studying and became pretty good it was by no means a full time thing. What is the fastest way to memorize a paragraph? How long will it take to memorize words?

How do I memorize faster? Can I learn words a day? Can I learn 50 words a day? Is words enough to speak a language? What is the most used word? What are some everyday words? What is the least used English word? What is the least popular word? What is a rare word? What is the hardest word to say in English?

What are the rarest words? Take a peek on Thursday. And again Friday. Enjoy a weekend off and then after a quick review on Monday, your brain will probably remember the word for a full week without seeing it again, then a month after that.

Maybe, with enough reminders, spread further and further apart, you'll be able to get your brain to remember One of the most important things to keep in mind is that you rarely learn a vocabulary word the first time you see it, or even the first day you see it.

You have to review a word again, and again, and again. What Gullekson calls acquire we at Vocabulary. Mastering a word in our game means you haven't just got a few questions right on that word. It means you have seen questions on it over and over again, throughout the course of actual time. No one, no matter how many hours they play, will be able to master a word in a single day.

Your progress bar does not change from green to gold so easily, which is one of the reasons it feels so good when it does.