I’ve been studying for 6 years. I would like to be a translator and was wondering if there’s a set amount of words I should read a day to help me improve memory retention. I’m at the learning stage where I know 70 percent of the words on paper but sometimes I forget words that I know I’ve studied ages ago. I try to get like 2,000 words a day minimum. Should I be getting more words in?
\*Edit\* \[I copy and paste all of the words I read for the day and dump them into an app (although it’s probably not accurate) that shows me how many words I read. Sorry if it seemed like I was saying I study 2000 words a day, that would be insanity lol\]
4 comments
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I would like to first congratulate you on the progress so far, it takes dedication and real character to be consistently putting in so much effort and thought in this. You have more years and I respect you as my senpai! I only do monthly studying sometimes weekly, you have inspired me to be more consistent.
coming back to your question, I feel like it would be necessary to ask yourself a few more questions to accompany the original one:
1. What is your objective current level? It helps if you have an objective assessment of all 4 departments (besides reading, also listening, speaking, writing), and if that record is recent (within 6 months). These stats might provide insight for what is the best study method tailored for you. Additionally I’d like you to think in 逆算思考, you cannot determine how much you should do daily unless you have a clear definable & measurable goal, and measurable current stats (to calculate the Gap) For these reasons, “I guess I’m a xxx level”, or “I know 70% of text” are not the best stats to work off of.
2. What is your specific and realistic expectations of “memory retention”? It is normal to forget words even in your native language, I’ve looked at SAT and GRE papers and said wow I can’t believe I used to be able to read that.
3. For any hypothesis, like this one “getting more words in can boost retention”, you can always conduct experiment. Think of metrics to measure current level (e.g. motivation, retention rate, test scores, etc.) Pick a month and do 3k words everyday, and test out that hypothesis yourself.
4. Evaluate how helpful you think keeping track of word count is doing to your goal. If it’s helpful, find out why it’s helpful. If the benefit was purely motivational, I doubt it will have any linear relationship with your motivation if you plot it — doubling your word count to 4K might result in a small boost but definitely not doubling the motivation. If the benefit is your tested statistic that it’s efficient, and it beats all other methods and best serves the purpose, then great. Actually for anything you currently do, it doesn’t hurt to pause and think, “I thought doing A helps achieving B. Why does A work?”
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Let me know what you think!
70% on paper is what Core 2K level? I use SRS to absorb words instead of encountering them in the wild. Personally I feel that the amount of words read does not make a good measure if you are both a beginner or advanced – it says nothing of how hard or easy the material is to consume. It would be like reading in your native language. That said reading a lot is a great way to remember and enjoy the language – but reading for the sake of reading to retain is a bit odd. SRS is a great way to put them into your long term memory and I do this because my reading retention is so low by comparison.
If you want to be a good translator you will be devouring pretty much everything so being well-read is a good thing. It can be quite a difficult job.
Reading amount is quite vague indicator. Basically it determines quantity, but not quality, and two people reading the same amount would get two different results. When we talk about quality of learning, it’s basically how many unknown words we see, how accurately we know it’s definitions and how much we try to memorize it. Look at such extreme case, person with 3k vocabulary reads 200 words, ~30 of these are unknown and he spends ~half a minute trying to memorize each. Rather small amount of words with a strong learning focus usually means a decent retention rate. The opposite example are people who don’t use a dictionary to translate unknown words, or people who don’t look at how unknown words look like, or how it’s pronounced and only check it’s translation. In these cases learning quality is lower.
As a rule of thumb, I would say reading for 1-2 hours is around the minimal you should aim at. It’s not so much about vocabulary, but rather overall fluency, because it takes quite a lot of time to improve.