I have achieved vocabulary success! This might work for you, too.
Speeeeeeeed Reader!
I was always jealous of speed readers who could get through at least a book a day. “Man,” I thought, “why am I so slow?” But then one day I realized something – I had a much higher rate of retention of content.
Speed readers save time, but the trade-off is on how much information they come out with. So if that’s the case for getting through books, I thought it might be the case for vocabulary in a foreign language as well.
Slow down!
This is a technique I’ve been experimenting with lately (with Korean), and the results are fantastic. I’m getting an extremely high rate of retention from having only seen words one time. Here’s my approach:
- Focus on a target term for 10 to 20 seconds. Focus only on that term, and try to “feel” the meaning of the term.
- In the back of your mind, tell yourself, “I’m going to remember this term.” (Don’t let that distract you from focusing on the target term, though!)
- Associate the term with some imagery, and then imagine that you’re hearing it used in a conversation.
- Finally, imagine yourself using the term in a conversation.
This whole process could take anywhere from 20 to 40 seconds, perhaps more if it’s not immediately sticking. It may seem like a slow pace, but you’ll actually find you save time as you won’t need to review.
For example, I went through this process a couple of nights ago while studying Korean. I studied a set of words by focusing on them individually. Half an hour later, I tested them out on my wife to see if they were still in my memory, and what do you know – Still there. But that’s not enough of a confirmation. So two days later, I tested them out again, and I hadn’t forgotten a thing.
When you “power through” a huge list of terms (even within full sentences, as I recommend), just like speed reading, the information is fleeting. Some of the terms might stick, but you’ll generally need to review the terms again, and again, and again, until they’re finally in there.
The approach I outlined above might not work for everyone. Actually, I don’t think it would have worked for me even two years ago. But it’s working now. So give it a try and see if you get something out of it as well.
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{ 8 comments… read them below or add one }
I think japanese is far easier than Korean for speed reading.
hangul is phonetic symbol. so you must read it. i think it takes more time.
in Japanese, it is not need to read kanji. it does not care how to read it.
Well, the approach I outline here works the same for Japanese as it does for Korean. I went through a similar process with Heisig when learning kanji.
it picks up Kanjis mainly because these are the nouns and important verbs in sentence
Hiragana is just supported.
it just glance these kanji like picture in whole a page.
in Japanese sentence, there are kanji hiragana and katakana…
it is easy to distinguish kanji in them to pick kanji up for instant
so is katakana
as for speed reading in Japanese,there is no reading work as emitting the sound in brain.
If all Japanese is written by the hiragana, it is so hard to read
And, it is necessary to do the work that the sound of hiragana will be read. this is a pain to read.
how is hangul? .
just curious
Hangul is really efficient for me to read through, but I’m approaching it as a foreign language. Japanese is easy to read because I know the kanji, even if I don’t know how to pronounce it.
I studied Japanese first, which made learning Korean a much quicker process as all of the 漢字語 are essentially the same (信号 as shingou vs. shin-o, 農場 as noujou vs. nongjang, 便利 as benri vs. byeonli, etc.), and the grammar works in much the same way.
I’m not really arguing anything about speed reading besides that there’s a tradeoff for reading fast in terms of content retention, and I use that as a bridge to describe my vocabulary approach. What I’m saying here is that if you study slower (by focusing on remembering the words the first time you encounter them) it’s much more productive. Well, for me, at least.
for exaple, English is not phonetic symbol
>>>spead reedng is not meant rof stagying new wards in a forgheing ranguage. In taht case your proposed metod is a good one
it is possible to understand
>>Experiences speed readers do not compromise much in their comprehension while reading at very high speeds.
however, hangul is phonetic symbol.
hangul should be convert the sound in there comprehension.
When I was on exchange in Japan, I joined the drama club at the college I was at. I quickly discovered that that was a crazy idea. The first week I was there, we were sight-reading scripts to choose plays to do for the rest of the school year. When sight-reading (in any language), you have to read the script fast enough to say the lines at a normal pace with some emotion. It was a huge challenge, and my reading speed tripled over the course of that week.
That was when I realized that reading a sentence too slowly is detrimental to one’s ability to comprehend it. I’m not saying that speed-reading is the best thing you can do, but reading a sentence at a super slow pace makes it much more difficult to remember the beginning of the sentence when you get to the end of it. Words need context to have real meaning, and to understand the full context and retain a word’s meaning for future use I find that I need to read the whole sentence fairly quickly.
Yeah, I wouldn’t guess that he is saying to read sentences slowing, necessarily. I keep thinking I need to slow down, and yet I don’t. Why is that? Here is how I would do it (and maybe I finally will, absorb some tea with my vocab):
1. Read the page, probably not understanding, but just going through it and marking words you don’t know, maybe picking up bits of meaning here or there.
2. Make a list of the words you don’t know and follow Alex’s suggestions above.
3. Reread the page with your new knowledge.
4. Maybe even reread the page 2 days later.
I’ve found specifically that changing context can be really important. I feel like the Internet can be really handy here, since it is super easy to find the same word in a zillion contexts (which you can also read and make vocab lists to soak in).
Sometimes I just wish I had my whole life to study Japanese.
damn straight.
all i wanna do is study japanese and korean ;A;
korean since my cousins are hilarious and if i can only baby talk to them i’ll kill myself, and japanese since kinoko nasu is one of the most gifted authors i will ever know.