How do Americans remember so many English words?

So I thought I'd make a video talking about my language journey, and also share some tips and techniques for learning a language as an adult without any language environment.

Especially if you struggle with memorizing words, this is going to be really helpful.

So make sure to stick around to the end.

I've been learning Chinese for about six years now, and a lot of people have asked how I was able to reach a relatively fluent level, and honestly being in the classroom environment really helped me a lot in the beginning.

It was really helpful to have a teacher teach me the basics and give me a foundation in this language, but a lot of the work for me also came from outside of the classroom.

Especially in situations where you don't have a language environment, and you're not surrounded by this language every day, and you can't practice these basic daily conversations.

So it's really important to try to make the environment for yourself and put in the extra effort.

Outside of class, I would surround myself with as much Chinese as I possibly could.

So I would constantly watch TV shows, movies, and I would listen to Chinese music while I was and really anything to help me listen to more Chinese and get more input.

I would constantly take note of the new words and phrases that I heard and write them down, and I have so many notebooks just filled with me repeating the same things over and over, and writing everything I heard down.

But most importantly is that I would talk to myself in my head using Chinese.

For example, if we learned a new word or phrase or even sentence structure in class, then I would try my best to really incorporate that into my inner monologue.

So even though nobody would be there to practice with me, I could still practice with myself.

And this is really important because if you honestly want to improve in any language, then the key is practice and spending time to really say all these words, phrases, and structures that you encounter.

And another key point is not just focusing on one single word or phrase, but putting it into a sentence and understanding how it's really used in real life.

Because if you spend a lot of time just repeating one word over and over and over, you might be able to remember it, but it's gonna take a lot of extra effort and brain power, and it's not really applicable if you don't know how to use the word properly.

So instead, I would recommend finding some more examples of how to use this word.

And this way, you can really understand and deeply feel the meaning of this word, and you'll be able to use it naturally, and when other people use it, you'll be able to understand what they're trying to say.

This is also important because in real life conversations, or when we're reading a paper or a book or something like that, these words are never really isolated.

They're never just alone.

They always have some context, and we can use this to figure out what they mean.

The use of context clues is actually how a lot of native speakers learn a language, no matter what the language is.

For example, if your native language is Chinese, how did you learn it?

Your parents and the people around you would constantly be speaking this language, so as a baby, you just start to pick up on the sounds and the words, and you eventually start to speak it on your own.

And this is the natural way of learning any language.

We connect words to real life objects, and we learn new words based on how other people use them in different contexts.

Even native speakers make mistakes when learning their native language, but each mistake is just a step closer to fluency.

And we can use these methods when we're learning a foreign language as well.

I've had a lot of people ask how Americans learn English.

Like, do we have to memorize a lot of words too?

Or do we have English classes?

Or what do we do when we encounter a word that we don't know?

We learn English the same way that anyone else would learn a native language.

But in order to go past a very basic level of English, native English speakers also have to spend time studying English in school.

For example, when we're younger, we have to do a lot of spelling tests and memorize the spelling of new and longer words.

As we get older, we also have to learn how to analyze English writing, and we have to learn how to write an English paper.

And we spend a lot of time learning about English literature and also history as well.

So English is a big part of our curriculum.

English is a very wordy language, so naturally there are a lot of words that we might not know the exact meaning of.

And even as native English speakers, we have to spend time learning these new words.

There are a few different methods of learning these new words, but I'm going to share one common method that is going to be very helpful.

We'll call this method the context clues method.

It's also used a lot for learning English when it's not your native language, and I've summarized three main steps for you to follow.

But just keep in mind, this method does require a little bit of a basic English understanding to use it.

When we see a new word that we don't know in a sentence, first we need to figure out the basic and general meaning of the overall sentence.

Like, what's the tone?

Or what other words could we put in place of this new word and still have the whole sentence make sense?

And this is the core of using context clues.

Second, we use context clues or the information surrounding this word to make an educated guess on what this new word really means.

And then the third step is to finally use a dictionary to confirm our educated guess.

And doing this also reinforces this word in your brain and helps with memorization.

This is really important because if you see a new word and you just immediately go to the dictionary or you immediately translate this word to understand what it means and then quickly move on without even understanding the context of how to use this word, it's actually going to be really hard to remember the word and understand how it's really used.

So checking with the dictionary is important, but it should be the last step.

Using your brain to understand the use and meaning behind these new words is actually going to give you a deeper impression and help you understand the practical use of the words.

And eventually this will make things a lot easier in the long run.

I also used this method when I was learning Chinese and I think it's part of the reason why I was able to pick up on things so quickly.

While I was listening to these TV shows and movies and anything like that in Chinese, if I saw something new that I wasn't sure of exactly what it meant, instead of just directly translating it, I would look for it in other contexts and slowly start to understand the meaning and how it's used.

And honestly, when you rely too much on direct translation of words and phrases, then a lot of the times you'll start to lose the nuance and the feeling of a language.

It's also really important to remember that learning a language, no matter what the language is, takes a lot of time and persistence.

It's taken me about six years to learn Chinese without knowing anything about the language previously, but only in the past year have I started to really kind of connect the dots and become a little bit more fluent in the language.

I spent years just understanding the sounds of Chinese and memorizing sentences and words and phrases and talking to myself a lot.

All of these steps were needed for me to get to where I am today.

So my biggest piece of advice is don't give up.

I hope this video was somewhat motivational for you, no matter what language you want to learn, and I hope that this technique is going to help you a lot in your studies.

So let me know if you have any other questions about language learning, and I'll see you guys next time.

Bye-bye!