how do you word?

Ahh, toothpastefordinner.com ...providing me with cartoons to illustrate my point when words won't do. (IRONY!! THIS IS ACTUALLY IRONY!! I DID IT! I RECOGNISED IRONY IN A SITUATION.)

Previously in my blog, I wrote about vocabulary explosions. Today, because I want to, I'm going to write about how I'm learning new vocabulary in Welsh.

The main thing I like to do is to read the BBC news in Welsh . The BBC have a really cute app on their site that allows you to hover over words that are highlighted in yellow to get a quick translation. I like to do this in the morning while I drink tea and look out at my balcony with the dead plants because I'm posh like that.

I pick four or five words from an article, and plug them into my Anki SRS flashcard app on my phone. (My phone is quickly becoming a language learning dream. More on that later, perhaps.) SRS stands for Spaced Repetition System, by the way - it's intended to make sure that you only practice a word "right before" you're about to forget it, but that's debatable - I think of it as basically a way of practising hard words more frequently and easier words less frequently.

I try and go through my flashcards every day, and it only takes about five minutes, so no biggie there.

Anki also helps me remember what words I want to remember, if that makes sense - I'm reminded to use some of this new vocab. Well, that's the idea anyway, though I usually don't use a word straight away, unless I'm very deliberately going to be talking about a particular topic. What I've found instead is that I start using a new word after I hear someone else say it  - maybe that's the last bit of the learning process that cements the word.

I also get new vocab from skyping in Welsh - usually by the end of a conversation I'll have at least half a dozen new words that I've asked to have spelt for me, and I put them in the Anki app as well. I've started downloading some Welsh flashcards for my Memrise app, but I'm not sure about that yet.

I don't get much vocab from listening to Radio Cymru, to be honest - usually because I listen to it in the car and then I forget the word before I have time to look it up.

....and this is an awkward end to a blog post.

on vocabulary explosions

As we aaaaall know, toddlers are linguistic geniuses who learn like 3000 new words every day whereas adults are veritable cretins who can't string two words together in another language to order a cup of coffee. (There were extenuating circumstances; I didn't know it was culturally weird to order a takeaway coffee in Italy; it all went downhill from there.)

Thing is, I don't think this is entirely true. Okay, yeah, most kids have the kind of capacity to pick up language subconsciously that makes the slow, laborous task of adult language learning seem, well, slow and laborous - except that actually I think we get a few breaks along the way.

I've been thinking about how much easier (easier? really? am I allowed to say that? it's a relative term; it's staying) it is for me to pick up Welsh vocabulary now than when I first started learning the language.

(People like to complain about Welsh mutations (treigladau), and sure, they're fun, but I just wish every word in the Welsh dictionary didn't start with a 'c'.)

As a totally unscientific observation, the more vocabulary I learn, the quicker I pick up new vocabulary. I have a few ideas why this might be so:

• Words are related. When you can start to pull words apart - with prefixes and suffixes and the like - and you can see how those parts are put back together, suddenly it's not so hard to remember that anghyfreithlon means 'illegal' when you've seen the 'freith' bit in other words relating to law, and the 'ang' bit in other negative words, and the 'lon' bit in adjectives or whatever they're called
• Improved memory capacity/capability. Just throwing it out there. Right? I'm sure you improve your ability to remember things the more you use it. I read that somewhere, I just can't remember where. (ha ha.) But seriously, they (whoever "they" are) talk about neuroplasticity as something that continues throughout your lifetime and is not just the magical elixir of screaming three year olds so probably right now I am forcing my brain to make new neural pathways that are better able to retain new vocabulary - albeit at a slower rate than when I was a kid.
• More accessible grammatical structures within which to put your new vocab. Legit. What I mean is that through practising other language stuff, like grammatical structure, I get better at those things which means that when I'm speaking Welsh, I use less mental resources on trying to put a sentence together which frees up some room in my brain to dig up some new vocab.

Is adult vocabulary explosion a real phenomenon? If so, what other reasons might there be for it? How do we optimise it and stuff?