The Universal Vocabulary Acquisition Method™

Me and my buds Bernhard Karlgren and Herbert Giles constructing the UVAM

™

It's a story that should be familiar to anyone learning Chinese: one day you're sitting there reading, say, Harry Potter and things are going pretty smoothly when BAM! you're hit in the face with four idioms, two of which you have never seen before and another two you vaguely remember cramming for an exam two years ago. You bravely keep on reading, convinced that what matters is the context and not each individual word, but your valiant effort is doomed to failure as adjectives and verbs pile onto each other and you eventually give up, heading over to Beijing Sounds to read about what a two-year-old child said once while eating some baked buns.

But fear not, help is on the way and it comes in the form of my Universal Vocabulary Acquisition Method™ (UVAM™ for short), which was conjured up in the Forge of Linguistic Excellence, deep underground, along with the ghost of sinologists past.

The UVAM™ is divided into two parts: a technique for short-term vocab acquisition, essentially an efficient way to cram vocab for a specific purpose (such as a test, or a class), and a long-term solution based on flashcards for learning and retaining vocabulary over a longer time period.

Note: I'm really serious about defending my intellectual property rights, for legal inquiries about the UVAM™ you may contact my lawyer Jay Oak.

Things you will need

The central idea behind the UVAM™ is to spread a large amount of vocabulary over a long time period. To achieve this, you will need a spaced repetition program like Anki, and a small notebook, which will serve as your primary buffer. The buffer is where you store vocabulary items you have picked up but haven't gotten around to learning yet. You should also consider investing in Wenlin or another pinyin-based dictionary.

Finding vocabulary

It's crucial that you don't look anything up unless you absolutely need to. If you have a vague idea what a certain word or expression means in context, write it down in your notebook and leave it for later. Using the dictionary interrupts your flow of reading or listening and worst case might eventually lead to compulsive lookup disorder.

As noted above, the notebook serves as your buffer, a temporary storage unit for vocabulary items you have come across while reading or listening. Pick a number of items each day, somewhere between 10-20 should be good, and look these up with a dictionary. Write down their definitions, and then find a usage example using Jukuu or Nciku. Finally, add all these to a flashcard in your SRS program (more on this below). All this should take you about 30 minutes each day. Strike out the items you have finished to help you remember your progress.

If you are listening to a podcast (or watching TV), write down everything you do not immediately understand with pinyin (or zhuyin) in your notebook, and then look it up with Wenlin, Nciku or another pinyin-searchable dictionary.

Short-term

Often, you will find yourself needing to learn a certain amount of vocab for a specific purpose, such as a test or maybe an interpreting gig. For short-term cramming purposes you might use a normal flashcard program (or the cramming function in Anki), or the UVAM™ method which is more work-intensive but also much more effective.

The short-term method described here is based on the principle of memory strength, i.e that your lexicon, the place in your brain where all non-grammatical information is stored, has a certain amount of words and expressions which you are more or less efficiently able to recall based on how many times you have done so.

Say you want to cram the five words below. Using the UVAM™ method, you do this by first writing plunder on a piece of paper; the definition in English (or in my case, Norwegian) is the hint you will use to recall the information later on. Then, while making sure not to look at the Chinese expression, say “sōuguā” to yourself while looking at plunder to start forming the association.

搜刮 sōuguā - plunder
幾可亂真 jǐkěluànzhēn – good enough to pass for genuine
兀鷹 wùyīng - vulture
詭譎 guǐjué – cunning, treacherous (wr.)
兩全其美 liǎngquánqíměi – satisfy both sides

Repeat this for the second item, writing the English definition below plunder, ending up with something like this:

1. plunder
   
2. good enough to pass for genuine
   

Now, say “jǐkěluànzhēn” and “sōuguā” to yourself, while again taking care not to look at the Chinese expressions. Now do the same for 兀鷹, 詭譎 and 兩全其美, each time repeating the items preceding them. Finally, write the answers out by hand next to the definition to test yourself. If you don't feel familiar enough with a certain character to write it by hand, try “writing” it in your head each time you repeat an item, until you feel comfortable enough to do it by hand. 

1. plunder 搜刮
   
2. good enough to pass for genuine 幾可亂真
   
3. vulture 兀鷹
   
4. treacherous 詭譎
   
5. satisfy both sides 兩全其美
   

The method works better the more items you do with each session (100 or so seems to be ideal). A session ends when you do the test at the end. Do the items in blocks of five, going through the four preceding items with each new one, until you get to the bottom of the page. When you do, repeat all items on that page and start over on a new page. Doing more items also gets around a design flaw with the method; that the last items will always get repeated less than the first.

There are several advantages to cramming like this: first of all you are forced to retain the information longer and recall it many more times than you would with flashcards (strengthening the memory imprint). It also helps you learn how to write characters since the answers are written by hand. If you do it correctly, it should enable almost instant recall of most of the items you do in a session for days, if not weeks afterwards.

Long-term

The key to successfully retaining information over a long time period, however, is to use a Spaced Repetition System, which is a flashcard application that automatically schedules cards you have answered to a later point in time based on how well you are able to answer them. In my opinion the best program available for this is Anki, but another program I have heard good things about is Mnenosyne. Both of these are available as free downloads.

When building a deck of flashcards, you first have to decide on a model, i.e what information is to be contained within each fact, the database entry which you use to make different cards. Some people prefer to have simple entries with only expressions (what you want to learn in your target language) and definitions (its equivalent in your native tongue). In Anki, you change a model by first going into Settings > Deck Properties, choosing a model from the list and then clicking “Edit”.

You can choose to have only production cards, “production” here meaning the recall of an expression using the definition as your clue, or you can also make recognition cards where you recall the definition based on the expression. The expressions/definitions can be as short as a character or as long as several sentences.

I suggest a hybrid word/sentence model, which contains the expression, definition, pronunciation and an example sentence in Chinese and your native language to add context. For example, my facts look like this (I've changed the entries in Norwegian to English for my non-Norwegian readers, which is probably all of you):

Next you choose a setup for your production and/or recognition cards. In Anki you do this by selecting the “Card Templates” flag in the same window as where you edit your model. My production cards are set up like this:

Question:
Definition
Example sentence (Norwegian)

Answer:
Expression
Example sentence (Chinese)
Pronunciation

For typing in the answer (see under “options” in the same window) I have the cards set to compare with field “Expression”. The recognition cards, on the other hand, are set up like this, with the type-in box being set to “Example sentence (Chinese)”, to avoid going through the cards too quickly:

Question:
Expression
Example sentence (Chinese)

Answer:
Pronunciation
Definition
Example sentence (Norwegian)

Starting out:

Once you have your deck properly set up, you start to add facts. As noted earlier in the post, my example sentences are mostly mined from Jukuu and Nciku. My suggestion is you use Jukuu for idioms and expressions, and Nciku for everything else.

Once you have made a few cards, you can start out reviewing. Under the Settings > Study Options menu you can choose the number of new cards to review each day, I suggest about 20-30 a day to start out. If you have set everything up as I said, you should get a textbox prompting you to write in the answer. Your production cards should look like this*:

And this is what the recognition cards should look like:

*custom fonts and colors can be set under Settings > Fonts & Colors

Combining the short- and long-term methods

The UVAM™ really starts to shine once you combine the long- and short-term techniques. Cram the words you add to your Anki deck each day to get familiar with them, and let the information consolidate itself by repeating it over weeks and months using the SRS program. For typing pīnyīn I recommend Imron's excellent Pīnyīnput.

Personally, I've had great experiences using these two methods, and I'm happy to finally be sharing them with the Blogosphere™. If you decide to try it out, let me know what you think about the UVAM™ by leaving me a comment!