Vocabulary You Forget is Still Part of Your Memory
Actually, I was kind of stirring up my reserve.
Hi there, Steve Kaufmann here, and today I wanna continue talking
about the importance of forgetting in learning vocabulary and the
importance of building up a reserve.
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I do appreciate it.
So I did a video about the importance of forgetting.
Not only should we not be frustrated because we forget things because
we're going to forget things, we need to recognize that the, the act of
forgetting is helping us build a reserve.
And I'm reminded of that because I'm giving a talk on Monday
to a group of lawyers in Kiev, Ukraine about language learning.
I was contacted through, uh, LinkedIn probably as a result of the videos
that I did, uh, telling people that, um, Ukrainians have free access
to LingQ, whether they're refugees in other countries or in Ukraine.
By the way, the same offer is available to other refugees.
They could be Afghans, Ethiopians, you name it.
Through that, so I was contacted by this person.
I'm gonna give a talk and I'm gonna talk a bit about my experience
in learning languages, obviously.
And it just so happened that in order to prepare for my talk to
these Ukrainians where I'm gonna speak in both Ukrainian and English,
I decided to refresh my Ukrainian.
And what struck me was that as I was going through my mini stories in
Ukrainian, you know, learning some of the basic, you know, high frequency
verbs and the patterns of Ukrainian triggered the memory of other bits
of Ukrainian, other expressions.
So by working my mini stories, which I have done many, many times, actually,
I was kind of stirring up my reserve.
And so I think it's very important that when we learn a language, and
this is what I said in that previous video, we shouldn't sort of be too
narrowly focused on trying to make sure that we can retrieve things, that
we can remember things that, and, and therefore we get upset if we don't
remember or we can't find the word.
That may not matter that much, at least in the short run or even in the medium term.
What we wanna do is build up our reserve.
And so then I thought about how I use LingQ, and I realized that really
the LingQs that I create, which are my yellow words, is my reserve.
These are words that I have met.
I know I've met them before because they're yellow.
They're no longer blue but they aren't yet white.
A white word is one which I feel I know, at least in a given context.
It doesn't mean that I know all possible, you know, interpretations or uses of that
word, nor which other words that word is used together with, but in a given
context it doesn't give me any trouble.
I understand that word in that context.
I get meaning out of that sentence or that paragraph.
That means it's known.
So that's white.
But the yellow words are words that, I see them and I still don't know them.
So they're the words that I have perhaps certainly have seen, but I've forgotten.
Maybe at one point I knew them and I've moved them back to yellow.
These are words in my reserve.
These are my forgotten words.
The creative forgetting l'oubli créateur as Proust said, and it's
important to have a lot of these words.
So the known words, the white words, the known words, are ones that I
can retrieve at least passively in terms of reading and understanding.
So if I look at my statistics in a language like Ukrainian, where
I benefit from having learned Russian and Czech and so forth.
So I have a lot of known words, almost 60,000 known words.
Not so many yellow words, and many of those yellow words are in fact words that
I know that I haven't yet moved to known.
So there the reserve and the words that I can retrieve are
kind of similar in number.
Uh, if I were to go in French, for example, and if I were to study French
at LingQ, I would find that I would have very, you know, a far smaller number
in the sort of unretrievable reserve.
In other words, yellow words that are still yellow that haven't become white.
On the other hand, if I go to Arabic and Persian, I see a different story.
I see that in Arabic going from memory.
Here I have 60,000 saved LingQs.
My reserve is enormous, but I only know 20,000 of those.
And if I, having left Arabic, maybe that number is even
smaller because the reserve, the forgotten words is even greater.
But eventually I will activate those.
Uh, the words that are in my reserve in Persian, the ratio is also three to one.
I have 30,000 saving LingQs, but only 12,000 or so known words.
Bearing in mind that these, the status here can change.
You can have something that's known that then goes back to
unknown and goes back to known.
But the idea is that when you are at the stage where I am in Arabic and
Persian I have the, my reserve is three times larger than the words that I can
at least understand and that's fine.
And I think the big message that I wanna sort of put across here
is don't worry about forgetting, considering consider forgetting to
be an important part of learning.
You are building up your reserve.
You need a large reserve so that eventually you can activate these words
and have a, a functioning, you know, a large functioning vocabulary so that
you can understand movies, you can have intelligent conversations with people,
you can move in the direction of fluency.
So forgetting and building up your reserve is an important
part of moving towards fluency.
And I'll leave you with a couple of videos that I've done in the past
about memory and remembering and how that effects uh, language learning.
So thank you very much for listening.
Bye for now.