A Quick Way to Improve Your Vocabulary - Subtitled Videos

One of the problems that we usually face when learning English is how to learn new vocabulary. At school we are usually taught new vocabulary by learning by heart big lists of words in English with their corresponding translation.

I personally think that this method is of limited value for several reasons:

• It’s not a natural way of teaching but a “brute force” method.
• It’s not useful to memorize a word and then never use it again; you’ll surely forget it in less than a week.
• When you learn a word from a list you only learn how to write it but not how to pronounce or how to use it in context (in a sentence).

However, there is no doubt that the process of learning new vocabulary is a process of repetition where memory has vital importance. The better your memory, the fewer the number of times you’ll have to repeat a word in order to learn it.

I believe that you learn a word in English when you know how to pronounce it properly, write it and use it (in a sentence).

I’m going to describe below a method that I’ve used to learn new vocabulary. The idea is to use subtitled videos in English (in this case videos from TED mentioned in this post). You choose a video that you like and then through watching it several times you see the evolution in its understanding and learning of new words.

Subtitled videos are an excellent tool because they allow you to see the word (you learn how to write it), listen to it (how to pronounce it) and you see in which situations it’s used (its context).

Videos from TED are made by people that speak fluent English therefore they are recommended for people with an upper-intermediate or advanced level. Nevertheless, if you wish don’t hesitate to use this technique. You can also use it with other videos that are more appropriate for your level of English.

What does this method to learn new vocabulary consist of?

First thing you have to do is choose a video. In my case I chose the video which talks about the mathematics of war.



Link to the video

Then try to watch the video without subtitles and estimate how much you understood. In my case I understood 80%.

Watch the video a second time (without subtitles) and estimate your understanding again. In my case 85%.

Now a third time but turn on the subtitles in English. I understood 90%.

A fourth time with the subtitles again. I understood 90%.

In my case the improvement between the third and the fourth time is zero. This is because I wasn’t able to understand more words on account of the context; plus the words that I didn’t know I needed to look up in a dictionary.

I got down to work and I created the following table with four columns (Word, Meaning, Form and Example of use).

I watched the video again, stopping at those words that I didn’t know and filling in the following table:

Note: You might have to adapt the Meaning column to your native language.

Table 1: New Vocabulary from the Video

Word	Meaning	Form	Example of use
Naive	Ingenuo	Adjective	As a naive New Zealander I thought, well, I’ll go to thePentagon.
Stream	Canal	Noun	If we can get enough of these streams of information together.
Raw	Sin tratar, sin filtrar	Adjective	We brought this raw data in and we filtered it
Pull out	Sacar, extraer	Verb	It’s all in the streams of information we consume daily; we just have to know how to pull it out.
Plot	Trazar, marcar	Verb	We plot data for sample on this (in a graph window).
Blew my mind	Me rompió los esquemas, me dejó “flipando”	Verb	… of theway attacks are ordered in this conflict, and this blew our minds.
Clustered	Apiñarse, agruparse	Verb	The slope of these lines clustered around this value of Alpha equals 2.5.
Slope	Pendiente (término matemático)	Noun	Negative Alpha is the slope of that line I showed you before.
Coalescence	Coalescencia – propiedad de las cosas de unirse o fundirse.	Noun	So we look at a process of group dynamics coalescence and fragmentation.
Seemingly	Aparentemente	Adverb	Why should these different, seemingly different conflicts have the same patterns?
Surge	Levantamiento	Noun	The system gets perturbed, it moves upwards to a fragmented state and this is when the surge happens.

A week later I reviewed the learned vocabulary and I watched the video one more time (without subtitles). I understood 98% - 99%.

Is it that simple?

Well, the way of learning depends a lot on everyone. If you want to optimize this particular method you’ll have to adapt to the way you learn and have regard to your own personal qualities. In my case I have a normal memory and thus it’s necessary for me to REPEAT things several times. If you have a good memory (which is really good to learn languages) you’ll probably be ok if you watch the video a couple of times.

Visit TED’s website and put this method into practise! :)

You have read this article Advanced - C1 / Videos / Vocabulary with the title . You can bookmark this page URL https://apostolosmakrides.blogspot.com/2009/06/a-quick-way-to-improve-your-vocabulary.html. Thanks!

Let’s fight against 24000 daily deaths - campaign against hunger

Did you know that every 7 seconds a child starves to death?And that the total of people who die every day because of hunger is greater than 24000? These figures are terrifying but unfortunately they don’t have much impact on the media.

If we compare these figures with the number of deaths due to Swine or H1N1 flu, the contrast could not be more stark. Hunger causes more than 24000 deaths every day and Swine flu has killed 125 people (up to today) since it was known about some months ago.

This is not a criticism but something that I think we all should consider.

And what can we do to reduce hunger in the World? That’s something that politicians should do, shouldn’t they? No, that’s a matter of EVERYONE and there are hundreds of things that can be done to help, from taking part into some organization, donating money, going as a volunteer to a country in need … to visiting a website (freerice.com) and answering different questions in a way that for every right answer 10 grains of rice, that will help to reduce hunger in the World, will be donated.

With freerice.com you’ll help reduce hunger in the World and also, as the questions are in English, you’ll improve your level while you play. There are also questions related to other subjects (Art, Chemistry, Geography, Language Learning and Math). If you have played the “Brain Training “game you’ll surely like freerice.com. Try to reach the maximum level in all the subjects!

You can see below the official video about freerice.com in YouTube. Please notice that in the video it is mentioned that 20 grains of rice are donated with each right answer. However, currently it is 10 grains of rice for each right answer:



Link to the video

I like the idea, can I participate?
Sure, everyone is welcome. The more the better.

What do I need?
A computer, a connection to the Internet and then visit the website freerice.com.

But this is a campaign, isn’t?
Yes, that’s why we are asking you that if you have a Web page, blog, radio, TV channel or any other media stream talk about this campaign to fight the hunger. If not, you can also make the campaign known by mentioning it to your friends.

Ok, do you have a banner that I can use?
Yes, we have made some of different sizes and languages (in English and Spanish) that you can use.

And how are you going to check the participants and the total of rice donated?
Every person or organization who participates can send an e-mail to aprenderinglesonline@gmail.com or learnenglishfromhome@gmail.com with their name, alias, Web page, Blog name or any other identification and the total amount of grains of rice that they have donated. Everybody will be responsible for keeping track of their own total of grains donated and can be informed anytime they wish.

Participants will be added in this document.

When is it the campaign going to finish?
Well, the World Food Day is the 16th of October but it is a bit far ahead in time so we are going to say one month so the 6th of July the campaign will close and the total amount of rice donated will be counted.

Is there any goal in the number of grains to donate?
Yes, what about 100 millions? It takes approximately 5 minutes to donate 200 grains if all the answers are right so go on, we can make it.

Is there a prize for the person or organizations that donate more grains?
No, there are no prizes; the idea is to be generous and spend 5 minutes or more of our day to alleviate this truly human hunger pandemic in the World. We all win and especially those people that don’t even have a small dish to eat – they’ll be able to enjoy for once of something that should be a right and not a privilege.

Are you joining us?

You have read this article General / Solidarity with the title . You can bookmark this page URL https://apostolosmakrides.blogspot.com/2009/06/lets-fight-against-24000-daily-deaths.html. Thanks!