What vocabulary items are easy to learn and which are harder?

Bonjour,

I would like to conclude for now our discussion on vocabulary learning with the question, “ What vocabulary items are easy to learn and which are harder?”

Starting with the easy vocabulary items we can all agree that the high frequency words are the easiest. This is most likely because we encounter them often and they are essential to any spoken or written message so we fulfill two of the main requirements for being able to keep them in our long term memories. They are also usually short. High frequency words are typically members of a list of some 1000-2000 words or lexical chunks making up 80% of everyday language. So if we analysed a typical conversation or book 80% of the words would be in the high frequency list. One would think that this is going to be a very large number of words but in English in fact 25 words make up a third of all written material, 100 make up about half. (www.janbrett.com/games/high_frequency_word_list_main.htm)

Under the easy to learn category also come words that have strong associations for us as learners or which can be linked to things we already know a lot about. This fulfills the requirement of imaging that we mentioned in the fourth newsletter.
How about words that are hard to learn? For starters words which don’t get much use, or which are hard to connect to something we know about are hard to learn.

Other hard to learn words are those which are easily confused with similar words eg. source and sauce, words which are opposites such as left and right, (we know the words but we confuse the meanings!) and words which are hard to pronounce. Very long words may also be considered hard to learn.

Words which we can make little sense of, the ones where we don’t understand how they may be used or how they are made from other words are particularly hard to learn. Eg. If we were to come across a word such as juxtapose and not see a connection to position (juxtaposition, placed side by side, especially for comparison or contrast) then we have no idea of what the word is about, where it comes from or how to use it. This is a case against learning wordlists which are unconnected to real experiences, or lacking supporting schema.

Learners are thought to generally increase their vocabularies by 1000 new words a year without even thinking about how they do it, imagine if we could become really expert and increase that to 1500! How much faster could we then learn a language.

Chris