Digital Learning V: Vocabulary

Vocabulary learning works especially well when it is interactive and synesthetic — that is, when it engages multiple forms of perception. That’s why learning with a vocabulary notebook during school was particularly dreadful.

The only interactive part was copying the vocabulary and their meanings from the textbook into a two-column table.

Afterwards, you’d cover one column and try to memorize the translation. After ten minutes, the word would be in your short-term memory; after two hours, it was forgotten.

In Latin, I remembered vocabulary best when I had to look it up during a translation or when it appeared repeatedly in the same text.

In English, I built my active vocabulary by watching American series and movies. English is quite forgiving in that sense, since its grammar is relatively simple and it shares many similarities with German, making the learning curve fairly gentle.

French, as a Romance language, was more challenging — although the familiar word roots were helpful. It was during French that I had another very positive experience with a language learning tool: the French trainer by Langenscheidt.

Slavic languages, however, are in a completely different league. My personal experience is limited to Russian. But due to its unfamiliar phonetics, partially different alphabet, and very few shared roots with German, I assume the learning curve for other Slavic languages is similarly steep.

In Russian, one occasionally encounters the influence of German culture in the form of corresponding loanwords. However, Slavic languages never had the same influence on German (or European) culture as Latin, French, or — today — English.

All of this contributes to the relative unpopularity of Slavic languages — and to the lack of sufficient learning materials.