Studying vocabulary?

I was going to write something about studying vocabulary the old fashion way, as in how to tackle a list of words that you probably will forget in a day or two.
Then I realized it wasn’t helpful, because, you can learn a list of 2000 words, but in my experience, it won’t get you very far. You’ll know a whole bunch of words but never have seen them in their context and you will be forever unsure about whether or not you are using them in the right contexts.
Ok, granted, this may not be the case for words such as school or table. They pretty much mean exactly what they mean and are pretty see-through. But there are a lot of words that are more ambiguous than that.

When it comes to vocabulary, I have to admit that I myself have never been good at memorizing a list of words. And when I did manage to memorize them they were gone in no time. And so along the way I discovered that learning vocabulary does not come down to endless lists of words to just memorize.
What I noticed is that a lot of people split up learning a language into two things, vocabulary on one side and grammar on the other. And while there is some truth to that, I rarely see these two parts of a language come together until the learner is trying to make a conversation. It is at that moment they realize that they have a lot of vocabulary and know the grammar but they just can’t seem to put two and two together, and so they struggle to say something.

Once I overcame my fear of speaking a language that I was learning from day one, I found that it was much easier to combine learning grammar and vocabulary rather than to see them as two separate things. On top of that, I also changed my ways of studying from academic to casual.   

Instead of sitting behind my desk trying to get 2000 words of Finnish in my head I just spoke to native speaker. I admit, at first I was just sitting there with a dictionary looking up every word they said. But that’s ok, you’ve got to start somewhere. I noticed I was learning vocabulary quickly without even trying. I was picking up words from conversations as I go. And I was picking up grammar and figuring it out myself as well. Think about it, the people that have Finnish as a native language aren’t constantly reflecting what case they have to use. They apply grammar without even thinking about it, in fact, they probably don’t even know they are doing it and when you ask them they won’t even know exactly why it is what it is.

I learned Portuguese as a second native language, and when I went to university I noticed that I knew zip about the grammar, but somehow, I instinctively knew how to apply it even though the rules we were being given were immensely complex. I realized right there and then that learning a language was much more about communicating than actually studying.

A lot of people don’t actually speak a language when they are learning it. They see learning and speaking as two different processes, first you learn, then you speak. However, this is not the case. In order to learn you have to speak. And when you speak, you will pick up vocabulary more quickly because you have a context to tie it to.

It’s also important to realize that you’re never starting from zero, a lot of words are very international and resemble words in the language you are learning. Without realizing it, you already have thousands of words in your passive knowledge of whatever foreign language you are learning. By communicating in this language you can change your passive knowledge into active knowledge and acquire more passive knowledge to in its turn be turned into active knowledge as well.

This all is way more effective than learning a list of words you will inevitably forget in a day or so.