Afraid of learning to memorize words?

First of all, thank you to all the readers who chose my topic. This is my first time sharing on GitChat. I hope that my sharing can bring something interesting and useful. If there are fallacies and shortcomings, I hope you can give me some guidance in the following discussion.

When it comes to learning English and memorizing words, there are a lot of books on the market. As a programmer and an amateur English learner, the method I want to share is based on some of my experiences in learning English. Organized.

However, my experience is somewhat overgeneralized. Because I am a programmer, my topic is "Programmers Quickly Memorize English Words". The content I share is mainly to give me background. Provide a reference for those who have experienced similar experiences.

If your current vocabulary is between 3000 and 4000, or around the level of CET-3 or CET-4, then your starting point is similar to the starting point of my English learning at that time. If you are far below or above this level, maybe my experience can only give you some reference.

If you are not sure about your vocabulary, you can go to any website such as Scallop.com, Momo Beiwu, and Hujiang.com to take a test. This usually takes 5 minutes.

With this vocabulary, you can probably guess and understand the college entrance examination reading comprehension articles without using a dictionary, but the time required is several times longer than reading the same Chinese materials.

You can barely get the information you need by reading those English documents with fixed sentence patterns. However, you can't do anything about articles or technical books in unfamiliar fields. Only by reading junior high school textbooks or reading comprehension in the high school entrance examination can you reach a level that is comfortable and effortless and close to the native language.

My current vocabulary is around 12,000~15,000. At this level, you can read ordinary original English books fluently and comfortably. The feeling of reading TOFEL reading comprehension is equivalent to the feeling of reading the college entrance examination reading comprehension, or the former is slightly easier.

As a rough estimate, the vocabulary required for the college entrance examination is about 2,500~3,000, while the TOFEL requirement is 8,000~10,000. In other words, your vocabulary has just reached the vocabulary required for the exam. In fact, your reading level is at this test level. The article is in a critical state between what is possible and what is not.

This is also in line with the characteristics of the exam, which emphasizes distinction and allows the candidates' abilities to be reflected in the exam as much as possible (everyone can do it or everyone can't reflect the purpose of the exam). To read smoothly, you need 1.5 times the vocabulary, and to read comfortably and fluently, you need 2 times the vocabulary.

As you continue to accumulate vocabulary, you will find that the articles you can read will become more and more difficult until you reach the level you need. 3000~4000 vocabulary reading junior high school level articles with 1500 vocabulary, just enough to achieve fluency. The level of CET-4 and CET-6 is basically the critical level required for general scientific articles.

Some linguists say that if you don’t understand the vocabulary, you can’t understand anything. If you only understand the vocabulary, you can’t understand everything. Therefore, memorizing words is a must-experience and the most effective method for people with relatively low English proficiency. Some training institutions will emphasize that memorizing words alone is useless.

There is a certain truth to this, but if you have the vocabulary, it will be very easy for you to learn other things. You won't be able to "memorize words alone", and the word vocabulary is too small, which will cause difficulties in conversation, communication and reading. In addition to memorizing words, other methods are actually impractical.

In the process of memorizing words, you will actually make continuous progress. However, to reach a certain practical level, it is necessary to accumulate quantitative changes to cause qualitative changes.

After you have spent a week memorizing hundreds of words, you excitedly want to find an English book to read, but you will immediately fall into depression and seem to have no effect. Even if you work hard for a month, you still can't understand the English book. However, you will find that some of the new words you have memorized will appear frequently in this English book.

The two most important things to memorize English words are the desire for the goal and the confidence in the process. How do you build this confidence and believe that you are always making progress? Three word memorizing websites are given above. It is recommended to add them to your favorites and test them once a week.

Actually, if you really start to memorize words, sometimes you will test it every day. Just like when you buy a new computer, you always want to optimize it, and then run a score to see if there is any improvement. These tests have a certain degree of randomness, and there is no need to test every day, otherwise you will not see obvious effects. But if you continue to memorize words, you will definitely see progress every week in addition to the test error itself.

There are also some vocabulary tests, such as the famous Testyourvocab. Do not take the test frequently. This is because the samples used in these tests are "memory".

This means that the test words given to people of the same level are similar, and you will "make substantial progress" because you are familiar with the same test cases. However, this lacks objectivity. You can try this kind of test occasionally when you reach a certain stage of learning.

My goal is to reach 8,000 vocabulary words by purely memorizing words. According to the above analysis, the vocabulary of 8000 is just enough to get started with reading ordinary English articles - not fluent but can be read.

Before reaching this vocabulary, if you want to accumulate vocabulary naturally through reading, you have to read teaching materials specially customized by English educators for language learners. These articles will carefully control the vocabulary and difficulty. This is also what some language learners have proposed, not just reciting words, but accumulating the theoretical basis of words in reading. However, by reading these articles, you are only learning English, and you have to spend more time and delay your work. This is the reason why many people give up learning English.

However, before 8000 vocabulary words, memorizing words in the shortest time has achieved a goal. You can learn English without learning English. Because your vocabulary at this time can already read real English technical articles, questions and answers on Quora, and English news.

Then you don’t have to spend time specifically to learn English. Your learning English and your work and recreation are actually doing the same thing. Then you can't stop even if you want to. With learning at this time, your vocabulary will gradually increase until it is about 10,000 to 20,000.

It is impossible to grow indefinitely, because you will not encounter low-frequency words no matter how many articles you read. If English majors or even native speakers want to improve their vocabulary, they have to memorize words all over again. This is not mentioned here, and I guess most people are not interested in this.

This article only introduces the process of purely memorizing words. I roughly divide it into three stages: violent recitation stage, analyzing words through word formation + violent recitation, reciting words through root words.

If you insist on 1~1.5 hours a day, each stage will take about 4~6 weeks, and the total will take about 4 months. It can increase your vocabulary from 3000~4000 to about 8000.

The first stage

The first stage is violent recitation. At this time, your vocabulary is very small. When you read English books, you will see new words everywhere. However, the lower your level, the greater your benefits from memorizing words. It's like picking apples in an orchard. No one has picked them yet. There are apples everywhere that you can easily reach. Pick them one by one.

At this stage, don’t worry about whether you have memorized a certain word. Memorize each word one by one. Our goal is to improve your score in the vocabulary test, not to memorize all the words in the vocabulary book you want to memorize. In short, it is better to memorize 10 new words than to spend a lot of time on one difficult word.

What vocabulary book should I choose at this stage? I think depending on your level, find a vocabulary book with about 30~40% new words. For example, if you have 3,000 vocabulary words, you can memorize CET-4 vocabulary. If you have 4,000 vocabulary words, you can memorize CET-6 vocabulary. The book you choose must be accompanied by MP3 reading aloud (either online download or paired with a disk).

One more point, our goal is to memorize more words per unit of time, not to memorize all the words in the book. A threshold is that if you have completed memorizing the entire book and memorized 90% of it, then that’s it. The remaining 10% doesn’t matter, there are still further learning steps.

Why do we need a new word rate of 30%~40%?

Because this is the best choice to balance your efficiency. If it is too simple, it will waste time. Too many new words will make recitation very difficult, which in turn will affect efficiency. As mentioned before, the vocabulary book must be equipped with MP3. Copy the MP3 to your mobile phone and listen to it repeatedly with Bluetooth headphones during commuting time.

When listening, don’t try to remember it immediately, but try to associate everything that can be associated with the word.

Here we recommend Yu Minhong’s Vocabulary Red Book series, but this is not the only choice. You can go to the bookstore/library to find one that suits you.

Tell a joke, and the first word in many vocabulary books (in alphabetical order) is abandon. The meaning is to give up. Maybe this is the reason why many people stop learning English from getting started to giving up. You can think of it casually, such as "a bench", so why did the bench give up? Because the person who gives up is given a bench to sit on, and the others continue to work.

Of course you can also think elsewhere. Another example is ambulance. If you are seriously ill and think "I can't die", what should you do? Call an ambulance. You can also associate it with other English words. For example, hose means water pipe. You can associate it with the trunk of an elephant, and then think of nose.

When you hear this word again, first think about what it means. Pass it when you remember it and listen to the next one. If you can't remember, when you hear the meaning of a word, try to recall what did you think of the last time you heard the word? If you can think of it, best, otherwise think of something else.

After you encounter it for the third time, I guess even if you can't remember the word, you can still think of the things you associate with it, and then try to think about the relationship between the associated content and the meaning of the word. After listening to it over and over again, I can always remember many words.

Now you know why the new word rate is 30%~40%. Because you often think of it, the next few words will have a bye in this round. If your new words only account for 1/3.

Then it is very likely that you already know the following words, and you will not be anxious about missing them. Because you are constantly memorizing some words, the probability of being missed by words you don't know is getting lower and lower, and you can memorize them again and again.

I think if you can listen to a vocabulary list of dozens of words more than a dozen times on the subway or bus, then you have reached the level of 90% to 95% I said you can remember. Then spend some time reading and listening to MP3s to connect the pronunciation and meaning of the words.

For the words you know, take a brief look at them. Note that some words have very different meanings. These meanings may not be mentioned in the MP3, so remember them. For example, everyone knows the word fine, but it has a meaning, fine. Another example is that well has the meaning of water well, etc. Take it with you in mind.

Before listening to the new vocabulary list the next day, review yesterday's list. If you can basically remember it, or if you have forgotten what you didn't remember yesterday, but you remember a few more today, then listen again. New vocabulary.

If you spend 1 hour listening to MP3 during your daily commute, then spend another half hour reading a book. You can effectively memorize a Wordlist in a red book, about 1/3 of the 100 words (1/3 are things you don’t know), about 30 to 40 words. There are usually 20~30 wordlists in the entire book, so a month is enough.

At this time, if you add 1,000 new words, you may forget 10%, but you have activated the original words that you think you have remembered but have not. So the total can reach 1000. If you really don't remember or forget it, just ignore it. If your vocabulary reaches 5000, then the first stage is complete.

If you choose another word book instead of the Little Red Book, the Wordlist of the word book will be longer or shorter. To make it short, just put two Wordlists in one playlist and listen to them. If it is long, use a 2-day cycle, listen 5 times on the first day, and listen 5 times on the second day.

If your foundation is slightly lower and your vocabulary has not reached 5,000 after studying a vocabulary book, then repeat this method with another book. When changing books, depending on your vocabulary at that time, choose one with a vocabulary rate of 30% to 40%.

Please pay special attention to one issue. Because you are memorizing by rote, the difficulty of rote memorization has nothing to do with the difficulty of an English word itself. Although the probability of Level 6 vocabulary appearing in the corpus is low, it does not Level 6 vocabulary is more difficult to remember.

Second Stage

The next stage is called word analysis + violent recitation stage.

Perhaps you discovered during the first stage of reciting that some "new words" are actually repeated. For example, there may be curious in the level 4 vocabulary, and curiosity in the level 6 vocabulary.

There is respect in level 4 vocabulary and respectively in level 6 vocabulary. The characteristic of these words is that their roots are the same, but the word list divides them into different words. The recitation method at this stage is similar to the first stage.

The only difference is that in the first stage, the way of remembering words relies on pure association without any rules. At this stage, try to associate the new word with an already learned word and its meaning. For example, respectively, split into respect-ive-ly.

Special attention is that as the word changes, the pronunciation of the word will change. This change may seem puzzling at first, but it is easy to find the pattern. For example, curious becomes curi-osity, and the stress is placed later. However, splitting according to meaning and splitting according to pronunciation are different.

Let’s list a few more rules: major and ma-jority, param and pa-rameter, element and ele-mentary. In addition to changes in stress position, long vowels tend to become shorter. The simplest write and writen. When the number of consonants increases and the number of syllables increases, it becomes more complicated to read a word, and foreigners will think of being lazy. The lazy way is to shorten the vowels.

For example, LINQ is the abbreviation of language built-in query in .NET, but how to pronounce its I? This depends on the Q at the end, which is a consonant letter, so it is simplified. The pronunciation of LINQ is similar to LINK. In contrast, LINE, because it ends with the silent vowel e, has a long sound. Understand these rules, and when you hear a new word (usually a long one), you can easily deduce the shorter one using the opposite rules. And you know most of the short words.

At this stage, the efficiency of memorizing words through word formation and root words is about 50% higher than rote memorization. Therefore, it takes about 1 to 1 and a half months to learn 1500 to 2000 words, reaching 6500 to 7000. Sometimes you can recite the vocabulary for the postgraduate entrance examination or level 6.

The third stage

The third stage recites words through their roots. This stage uses root words as the basis to systematically expand the vocabulary. The way to expand is to use familiar roots to learn words with this root. and learning new roots from words with that root.

Take android as an example. The word means robot. Literally translated as "human-like" in English. It contains two roots, andr, person, and oid, similar. We can expand this word in two dimensions and associate all the words you have learned before that contain these two roots.

For example, paranoid, asteroid, ellipsoid, andrology, anthropotomy, etc. In paranoid, para is another root word, which means a pair (close). It can also be thought of parallel.

When you learn more and more root words, you will be able to understand the original meaning of English words. For example, Picture, Photo and Image are all pictures. But pict means to depict, so Picture means a painted picture.

Photo means light, and the camera records photos by sensing light. Photosynthesis, the word means photosynthesis, Photo= light, Synthe= synthesis.

Image means mirror, which is an exact copy, so it can also represent an image. Another example is that Version and Edition are both versions. What is the difference between them?

If you look at it from the root of the word, it’s easy to understand. Version's ver represents change. Software 1.0, 2.0, and 3.0 are constantly being improved, so they are Versions.

And Edition comes from Edit. Editing is the process of organizing existing content, deleting unnecessary content, and adding necessary content.

So the same product is divided into Professional, Enterprise, Home, Developer and other versions with different functions, which are Editions.

After understanding the root words, words that are easily confused in violent memory will be easily separated. Such as Comply and Compile. Very and Wary. Prospective and Perspective.

For example, Compile is com-pile. The former means common and the latter means stacking. Therefore, the word compilation should actually be translated as compilation. This also explains why some disc burning software calls burning burn compilation. Obviously there is no "translation" here.

In addition to root words, affixes can be used to expand words.

For example, in, dis, un, etc. represent negation, pre represents previous, com, co represents public, etc. As you come into contact with more and more words, you will also find word formation rules that match your vocabulary. Thereby constructing new vocabulary that conforms to the rules of English word formation. For example, "sharing bicycles" is a new thing, so how to express it in English?

is bikesharing, which is a typical way of constructing new nouns using noun + verb + ing. You can also draw inferences, such as cloud computing, cloud computing, etc. Another example is that wise means "press...". In the vocabulary book, there are clockwise and otherwise. Then you can apply inferences to computers, such as bitwise, bitwise. In C++, symbol & is bit wise and.

Whenever you encounter a compound word composed of two words, you can look for and discover the rules of word formation.

There are a large number of abbreviations in English. For example, as a programmer, you often see UML, AJAX, FIFO, ORM, CASE... many abbreviations. Query the abbreviation phrases represented by these words, and compare them with those already Correspondence memory of learned English words. It will be easier to remember many vocabulary words that are not closely related to technical terms.

I recommend a book and an electronic dictionary software, both of which can be found online. The recommended software is called Longman Exams Coach, and the recommended book is "English Roots and Words Explained".

When you encounter an unfamiliar or unclear word, this Longman dictionary will provide an analysis of the etymology and word itself. The latter not only lists common root words that can be recited directly, but also provides a lot of useful information on word formation.

For example, you will learn the rules of assimilation of consonants and letters. For example, everyone knows that in represents negation, but in words such as irrational and irrelevant, n will be assimilated by the consonants of the following root words. Similarly, aggregate and accumulate come from the same prefix ac, but the former is assimilated. When you master this According to the rules, reciting the root words will be more efficient.

You can find some word lists based on root words to recite to quickly expand your vocabulary. You can also discover new vocabulary with the help of the synonyms and antonyms list.

In this way, you will accidentally learn a lot of uncommon words. From the perspective of root words, these words are easy to understand and remember, but from the perspective of actual use of English, they are relatively rare. It is not found in word books or even relatively small dictionaries.

You can learn 3 or 4 groups of root words every day. There are only about 1 or 2 hundred common root words in English, so you can use this method to learn 1 or 2 hundred root words in about a month. Thousands of words below. So your vocabulary will definitely exceed 8000 at this time.

Finally, I would like to emphasize that no matter what stage of memorizing words, the number of words memorized is better than memorizing a specific word. Don't worry about missing some common words. Because in English, common words appear more frequently, and the human brain instinctively remembers words that appear more frequently.

I hope these experiences can help students who plan to start learning English.

Purely memorizing words cannot effectively cover high-frequency words in specific scenarios. For example, even if your vocabulary reaches 8,000, you will still encounter many unfamiliar words on the menu of an Italian restaurant. These words are often foreign words and do not follow the word formation methods of root words and affixes.