Words are like friends — the best way to learn vocabulary in English

The language-talent myth busted — cognitive linguistic perspectives on learning words

Words are like friends is my favourite analogy for the best way to learn vocabulary in English.

Just as we can’t meet a person once and expect to magically become friends, we can’t encounter a word once and expect, somehow magically, to learn it. We must cultivate and nurture that friendship with patience, over numerous meetings, and interactions in different contexts, to know that person in all their multifaceted aspects of character. In the same way, with words we must reguarly meet them, and in differing contexts, to know the word in all its varying senses.

In my experience as a teacher, it’s a minority of learners of foreign languages, and a small minority at that, who are able to learn words off by heart on a first encounter. Most people, including myself, simply don’t have this ability. Most students, young and old, simply can’t learn new words in this way. I argue that this is the language-talent myth.

Yet, very often when we look at language learning, particularly at schools, on language courses, for exam preparation, or for language certification, we are led to believe that if we can’t remember the words we encountered during a lesson, then perhaps we’re not talented language learners. Because of course, as we have been made to believe, there are those mysterious people who are talented language learners. We’ve all come across these people at school, or on language courses. They’re usually the person who's quickest to answer the teachers question to an exercise. They seem magically to pick up new words, while we’re still trying to learn how to read the word. And they seem to remember everything from the previous lesson in a way that only fills us with that strange mix of admiration and envy. Not to mention the fact that they always do better than us on their homework.

It’s undeniable that such people exist, as at some point most of us have come across them. The question is, what's really going on with their ability to learn new words? And what does this say about our ability?

The cognitive insights to language processing

Thanks to the wonderful work of cognitive scientists and cognitive linguists, including Dirk Geeraerts, George Lakoff, Gilles Fauconnier, Len Talmy, Raymond Gibbs, Ronald Langacker…whose work greatly informs my work, thinking, and articles, we now understand language processing far better than we once did. One astounding discovery has been that our language capacity is structured on preexisting cognitive abilities. These are domain-general abilities, such as visual, auditory, and spatial perception, general pattern finding abilities, and our capacity for joint-attentional frames in communication.

It follows from this insightful work that much of our language capacity is dependent on these cognitive abilities. These general cross-domain abilities, meaning cross sensory domains, visual, auditory, spatial domains, have a lot to do with our facility to acquire language. For instance, in the visual domain thanks, to our pattern finding capacity, we are able to detect similarity, difference, complex relations, and much more. If this capacity is highly pronounced, coupled with other neurophysiological advantages, it is likely that an individual will have superior cognitive functions, for say non-verbal logic, reasoning, and memory. These cognitive skills alone can make all the difference between being a good language learner or just an average run-of-the-mill one. For example, for others, in the domains of auditory stimuli, their auditory cognitive processing can be highly acute, allowing them to switfly, and efficiently, distinguish, recognise, and categorise sounds in language. We can easily imagine the advantage this gives in language acquisition, detecting, distinguishing, and memorising phonemes (the smallest unit of sound), to whole words, whole lexical items, phrases, expressions, and sentence structure.

For most of us mere mortals though, we fall within a standard distribution of these abilities. In the way most of us also fall into the standard distribution of height, between 160 and 170 something centimetres, with people below 150 or above 180 being diminishingly lower in a given population. The same goes for language ability. It is exceedingly rare for a teacher to come across a class where the distribution of language ability is exceptional for 80 percent of the individuals in the group. Rather, what we see is that 80 percent or more of a group, generally speaking, performing at an average standard of ability. We can learn a language, we’re not terrible at it, but we don’t perform as those in the top 1 to 5 percent range of exceptionality — no one is envious of our ability.

The language talent myth: false endeavours and expectations

Now coming back to the question of the language-talent myth. In light of the above, what we are really seeing here are exceptional language learners having exceptional cognitive functions. It’s extremely rare to find exceptional language learners who are also below average in other areas of intelligence, both academic and intellectual — this rarely seems to be the case. Again, this adds further weight to the idea that the ability of talented language learners is founded on their domain-general cognitive abilities. The myth here is twofold, one that there is a unique language talent, rather it's a talent of domain-general cognitive abilites, and two that language talent is necessary for becoming a good language learner, or fluent in a given language.

So this is not bad news for the rest of us per se. More to the point, it reinforces what most of us already suspect, that for us, being good at a language while not having raw natural ability, can be greatly compensated for by sacrifice, will power, and consistency.

An average language learner who is strong willed, ready to make sacrifices, and is consistent, will generally outperform a talented language learner who isn’t any of those things. And the price we must pay is a proportionally larger amount of our energy, time, and emotional resources. We must modulate our endevours in light of more realistic expectations. We won't be as great as the 1 or 5 percent. Rather, we'll be more easily frustrated and disheartened, and more easily experience dents to our pride and ego. That’s all emotional cost that sets back our learning. But we'll never make progress in learning a language if we don’t accept that it will require more of our time and energy and overall sacrifice, than say someone who has more favourable cognitive abilities. These are just aspects of psychological behaviour that govern most aspects of life. They’re not unique to language learning.

Once we modify our expectations accordingly, we'll see our ability for what it is, and it maybe much better than we ever expected, and certianly far better than a teacher might have once predicted, when saying, or at least implicitly suggesting, that perhaps we had no talent for languages.

Friends for life: never forgetting words

Getting back to the main strand of this article, once we accept that for most people learning a language requires will power, sacrifice, and consistency, then we can really use the methods and tools available to us. Without this realisation, most of us would just use the available methods and tools in an ad hoc and undisciplined manner. Discipline of approach is certainly the key here.

As we just mentioned above, when we encounter words, we have to have moderate expectations, and we have to accept our initial attempts being met with failure as being inevitable.

The first step to learning a word, is like making that friend. First we have the encounter and initial interaction with a word, just as we would with a novel, intriguing person. We can encounter words in this way with varying degrees of frequency depending on where we are in our language acquisition cycle. Only then can we progress to really knowing what that word is about, by understanding its prototypical meaning (the meaning and use of that word found to be most primary and common) and contextual use. And finally, whether it has multiple meanings, which English words very often do, something we call ‘polysemy’.

So our second step, is to identify the most prototypical meaning for that word. To understand this from a cognitive linguistic perspective, we could say the word ‘rifle’ is to some extent prototypical, it defines objects of a particular kind. ‘Gun’ is even more prototypical, as it categorises all objects of that kind including rifles, hand guns, machine guns etc.

But let’s stick with ‘rifle’, as it's an interesting case. It’s prototypical, as it’s the most basic type of rifle, more subordinate types (more specialised rifles) would be an assault rifle, a bolt-action rifle, semi-automatic rifle, and so on. One way our brain processes the prototypical word rifle, is through the associated motor movements for interacting with one. This is a pattern of interactional motor movement common to handling all rifles, that helps the human brain categorise prototypical words in our first language from a young age. So when we think 'rifle', we think of a long device, requiring two hands to handle and operate, a butt for resting against the shoulder, some sort of long cocking action, and a trigger firing mechanism similar to most guns. The cognitive linguistic trick here, is that whenever possible, when we learn literal words and their actions, we should visualise the object and it's associated actions — how we interact with it. This facilitates our embodied comprehension and memory.

Thirdly, and finally, we can focus on the polysemous nature of the word. The word ‘rifle’ is not the most polysemous word in English, but it has a surprising second sense as a verb ‘to rifle’. This means to search through something quickly, often to steal, hence “He rifled through my drawers, and stole my money.” This can also be a double entendre. But let's not get into that now - no pun intended. For the first sense, you can also visualise someone 'rifling through drawers', and this visualisation will serve to facilitate memory. And a bit like saying don't think of a 'red elephant, you may also not be able to help yourself from visualising the double entendre sense.

Book and pool

Let’s take a few more examples, and lay out the importance of polysemy to learning words deeply.

Remember, our aim in all this is to get to know words deeply, and commit them to our longterm memory, by having them as a functional part of our working vocabulary. This is the part of our vocabulary containing words that we are able to use through natural recall in dialogue and conversation.

For example, the word book (a noun) we most commonly associate with the physical object that we find in libraries and read. We can easily visualise our embodied motor interactions with books, how we pick them up, hold them, open them, flick through their pages, and so on. However, another meaning of ‘book’ is as a verb (to book). But this sense is more abstract, as we don’t have all those physical characteristics we associate with the word. And in this sense, the meaning of ‘book’ is to reserve a place somewhere, for example at a restaurant, performance, or tickets for travelling. It’s an abstraction from the first meaning, because historically when you booked something, or made a reservation, it would have been noted in a physical registry book. In this sense, you booked something. By learning the word's origin and etymological sense, this can facilitate our understanding and commit that sense of the word ‘book’ to memory.

A more complex example is the word ‘pool’. If we apply the same principle from above, we can think of its most basic, prototypical, meaning as a physical thing or object. As a noun, most people know this word to refer to a swimming pool, in which you can swim, or another small body of water, like a pool in a stream, where you can bathe. And you can visualise the motor movements of interacting with ‘pools’ in this sense, jumping in, swimming across them, diving down, getting wet, splashing around, and so on. Another common meaning of the noun is the game played on a green or blue table, similar to snooker, and once again we can associate many motor movements with this sport, holding the cue, standing in a specific stance, leaning on the table, coordinating our eye movement with the cue, balls, and pockets, and striking the cue ball.

However, there is a lesser known meaning of ‘pool’, as a verb (to pool). In this sense, we can refer to fluids pooling in particular place, for example: ‘The water pooled in the middle of the floor’. We can probably understand this to mean the water created a small pool in the middle of the floor, a bit like a puddle.

Another sense in which we can use the same verb, is an abstraction of this first meaning of the verb. To pool your resources. For example, ‘We all pooled our money to buy a new TV for the dorm’. Here again we can probably catch the meaning from the physical sense of ‘to pool’. Thus, we probably understand that pooling your money is to put your money together for a common purpose, so it is all gathered togther, like how the water gathers togther to create a pool.

And then, from this second meaning of the verb ‘to pool’, a new noun has also emerged in recent years, especially in American English, ‘carpool’. This is a special lane on American highways that can only be used by people who share their car with passengers. But the concept is the same. The idea is that people are pooling, bringing together their resources i.e. their car, cost of petrol, parking etc.

Most people also probably know ‘carpool’ as in ‘carpool karaoke’ from The Late Late Show with James Corden, in which he picks up stars on his drive to work (of course so he can use the carpool lane) and so they can sing their most famous songs together.

We can see in all of the above that polysemy is an attribute of word's nature, which can be essential to learning words and expanding our vocabulary as language learners in real terms, and most importantly our working vocabularies.

A parting note

If you think of words in this way, you will develop a much deeper understanding of them.

So always try to think of the most fundamental meaning of a word, the meaning referring to a physical thing or physical characteristics, or actions, it’s prototypical meaning. Determine also, the most common contexts for that word. And then from there, establish the word’s more abstract meaning, if it has one. And finally, determine the multiple meanings a word has. Of course, you can do this exercise just as well in your first language. But doing it in a second language you’re learning, like English, will mean you will need to check for words in an online dictionary particularly for their polysemous nature, like the word 'rifle, 'book', 'pool'. Of course, all of this is much easier under the guidance of a teacher. Even so, you just need to apply the same steps.

In my article, Never watch Netflix with subtitles, I explain how more diligient learners may make notes of new words, expressions, and phrases. A key tip here for learning vocabulary, is that it's best practice to transfer such notes to a small pocket sized notebook. This way you can conveniently carry around your notes and peek at them while waiting in a queue, or in odd moments where you are at a loss what to do with your idle time.

Most people don’t do these things mentioned above when learning words in English. And for that reason, words fail to be their friends. They have a tough time developing that deeper relationship that helps them to remember and use words with ease.

Implent the principlces and tips above and you'll soon be making friends for life with words.

Good luck!