Don't Try to "Swallow" a Dictionary!

 

The Breakthrough on Netflix

A few days ago, I started watching a Swedish series called The Breakthrough on Netflix. It’s a short series based on an actual murder case in Sweden in 2004. It’s made up of four episodes, each of which is around 40 minutes long. Despite its Swedish origin, I decided to watch this show purely for the purpose of learning French, because it happens to have both French audio and subtitles, and its level of French vocabulary is suitable for my current proficiency level.

I love it that Netflix offers countless movies and series from numerous countries and make them available with audio tracks and subtitles in multiple languages. As my current focus is learning French, I plan to mainly watch productions with French audio and subtitles regardless of their countries of origin—as long as the dialog is clearly pronounced and the subtitles match the actual words being spoken.

In fact, I even prefer productions from countries other than France but dubbed into French compared to productions from France itself, because the former’s pronunciation tends to be clearer than the latter, and they use more basic French vocabulary while avoiding excessive use of slang and colloquialisms—they can be Danish, Spanish, or Korean productions for all I care. 

When I play each episode, I normally leave it running all the way through without stopping. While watching, I make notes of the words and phrases I don’t know. When I reach the end of the episode, I look them up using the dictionary and ChatGPT and create their Anki flashcards. After studying those flashcards, I watch the same episode again for review, usually on the next day. Whenever I can, I also try to mimic the French dialogue using the shadowing technique.

Luckily, since I’ve already acquired most of the basic French vocabulary, I don’t come across unknown words and phrases too often, so I don’t feel the need to stop the video to look them up and interrupt the flow. Unlike those exceptionally gifted language learners, I don’t have the patience to pause the video dozens of times to get through each episode, so I’m glad I’ve laid a good foundation in vocabulary beforehand.

Granted, having to watch the same episode twice to study a foreign language still feels like a bit of a grind, but it’s far less excruciating than stopping the video frequently to look up unknown words, so I’m quite happy with my current learning method.

While I’m convinced that watching native content is an effective way to become fluent in a foreign language, I still believe that intentional study of vocabulary using non audio-visual material—mainly through word lists and dictionaries—is required at some point in one’s learning journey.

The problem with grinding one’s way through a dictionary is that most people cannot complete the whole process due to the sheer number of words and phrases contained inside. If you try to study each and every item, you’ll likely give up before you reach the 10 percent mark—and that is if you’re lucky.

As someone with extensive experience in vocabulary acquisition, if there is one piece of advice I can give to those attempting to study an entire dictionary, I’d tell them flat out that it’s pointless to try to “swallow” a dictionary, because they’ll end up forgetting more than 90 percent of what they learn. Instead, I would suggest that they pick only one or two most essential words out of each page to study and memorize, and work their way forward without hesitation.

That way, when you reach the end of the dictionary, you will have mastered the most essential words in your target language, easily covering more than 80 percent of the vocabulary commonly used by native speakers. As to how to decide which word is the most essential one out of each page, you can largely rely on your gut feeling—if you see a translation that sounds essential in your native language, that word is most likely important in your target language as well.

I’ve been learning French off and on over a span of two decades. Throughout my French learning journey I’ve had my share of successes and setbacks and experienced numerous plateaus, but I’ve been through enough to know that keeping at it consistently is the only sure-fire method to achieve fluency. I will not give up in my quest for mastery of this beautiful language.

Shift in My French Learning Strategy

(Picture from my Japanese blog)

This past Monday, I resumed using the flashcard app Anki to memorize French words and phrases, after years of not using it. The reason why I decided to use it again is that I’ve watched several videos of successful language learners on YouTube, who almost universally recommended the use of Anki because of its automated spaced repetition system.

For a long time, I was of the opinion that creating flashcards was too time-consuming and therefore counterproductive for vocabulary acquisition, but those language-learning influencers still seem convinced that using Anki to memorize words is essential for developing their fluency in a foreign language, chipping away at my previously held conviction regarding flashcarding as I kept watching their videos religiously—until I finally caved and decided to give Anki a go one more time.

As a matter of fact, I used to be a diehard believer of flashcarding. I started using flashcards to memorize English words and phrases back in high school in preparation for the college entrance exam. The method was instantly effective and I was able to pass the exam with flying colors. During the first two years of college, I wanted to deepen my understanding of English and doubled down on flashcarding, learning close to 20,000 entries. This enabled me to understand English novels and movies without feeling the need to look up words in the dictionary.

However, around 10 years ago, I began to doubt the efficacy of the flashcarding method as it’s extremely labor-intensive and time-consuming, whether it’s done manually with physical cards or digitally with Anki. I was working full-time and no longer had the luxury of devoting eight hours a day to creating and memorizing flashcards, so something needed to change in my methodology—hence I decided to relinquish flashcarding and switched to simply reading through several pages of dictionary entries multiple times for memorization.

Although the latter strategy has allowed me to progress through the pages in my dictionary much faster, my memory of the words I’ve learned has been precarious at best, making me forget most of the items after a few months. Now that I’ve resumed using Anki, I hope it can help me retain French words more securely in my head, leading to faster development of my vocabulary in the final analysis.

Aside from this revelation about vocabulary learning, another takeaway from those YouTube videos by high-achieving language learners is that they largely focus on spoken language—by watching numerous movies and shows and engaging in tremendous amounts of conversation practice—as compared to written language, i.e., reading and writing.

One aspect of my French that I’m not happy about is my nearly nonexistent ability to speak the language. Throughout my on-again, off-again French-learning journey spanning over two decades, I’ve always told myself that I should never rush myself into speaking until I have acquired sufficient vocabulary to understand native content, including books, movies, and shows.

Looking back, I can’t help but think that I probably might have been too cautious in my approach, because—let’s face it—there will never come a day when I feel truly comfortable with the size of my vocabulary, especially if I only focus on reading books in French. On the other hand, if I develop my speaking ability robustly enough, it can certainly help me grow my vocabulary in a practical way, enabling me to breeze through most contemporary French books.

In this regard, I will probably shift my focus to conversational French rather than written language. I will watch more French shows on Netflix and engage a private tutor online to do conversation practice in earnest. It remains to be seen whether my new strategy works, but I’m fired up anyway about my French study and will keep working in pursuit of my dream of becoming fluent in the Language of Love one day.