Words are the bricks you need to build your house. But you shouldn't just get random bricks from wherever you find them. That would give a rather shaky house. It's better to focus on learning the right words which are usually words taken from the texts and audio you work with or short: learning words from and in their natural context.

That means if you learned random words like you would on Memrise or Anki, but worked with my course e.g. you'd mostly learn words that might or might not appear during your studies. That can't be optimal.

Why flashcards are not ideal

In the past I was recommending working with flashcard apps like Memrise, Anki, Readlang or ideally my own flashcard tool. That has changed as of Dec 2023. Flashcards do the job but they are boring as hell and when not used within a narrow context they are not the most effiicent way of acquiring vocab. My vocab tool’s built-in flashcard tool was better than the commercial ones for the reason that you’d only be exposed to words that are 100% relevant and urgent as they were words that allowed you to progress with your course on SG.

But even that isn’t ideal.

What is ideal though is having a tool that allows you to easily and instantly look up words when reading a new text without opening a new window. THAT is the most beneficial feature of my own vocab tool and that will remain available of course. And so will the flashcard functionality be because old habits die hard and some people enjoy this kind of arduous work.

BUT I’ll add more and more alternative exercises that are much better suited to acquire vocab. More reading and more reading related exercises as well as other listening exercises using most of the words of that same lesson. THAT is the way to learn vocab in a way that is not only sustainable but also enjoyable.

I honestly don’t know why I fell for the marketing of these apps after all these years. I even remember that I have never really used Flashcards in analogue or digital form for longer than 2-3 weeks in total and I’ve studied 16 diff. languages over the last 30 years. I always got instantly bored by Memrise and don’t even mention Duolingo - which is basically just a fancy flashcard program. Takes 2 mins and I’m bored out of my mind.

Until you find those extra exercises simply re-read the lesson’s text and re-listen to the audio at the end of the lesson. It might feel that you know most words by heart by then but that’s normal and welcome. You’ll also do that every five lessons in the review section of your course.

What will Change?

If you don’t want any change, nothing will change. The extra exercises will be marked as optional. You can stick to using the built in vocab tool (I’ll add it back to B2 and C1 soon). Memrise is dead though as they have made it almost impossible to find my courses there so you’ll have to work with Readlang if you want to stick to the flashcard approach.

One Problem With Readlang

Readlang has only one downside and that is that it won’t work on the Reading-Comprehension lectures as it clashes with my tool. But you can use it on the Reading-Warm Up lectures AFTER AFTER AFTER you have done the reading warm up. DO NOT LOOK UP WORDS while warming up. The structure of my courses is as it is for a reason. This is just a temporary workaround and ideally you use the built-in vocab tool which does an excellent job for free.

How Much Vocab Should I learn?

You might find people no the internet throwing around numbers like 20 words per day or even more. I recommend you don't bother with counting and stick to reading and re-reading and listening and re-listening.

Like when eating food you should not be worried about the amount of vitamin C (or any vitamins for that matter) you need to take in daily. Simply eat a balanced diet and you'll be fine.

And today I stumbled across a video by Steve Kaufmann who has been around the language learning sphere a bit longer than me and he puts it nicely into words what I have found as well independently from him: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NQZYL39JEFo Enjoy. You can watch more of his videos but he’ll 99% of the times tell you what I tell you anyhow in my courses ;) And in case you wonder, I don’t think Steve’s software LingQ is a good standalone course. It’s a nice reading tool for language learners, especially if you want to study other languages than German but Readlang is a lot cheaper and more efficient as you can use it on other websites as well. Not sure about LingQ.