How to NOT give up on vocab

Why? Mostly because it is easy to get overwhelmed. Overwhelm leads to frustration, which in turn leads to giving up. Here are some common causes of frustration and overwhelm with vocabulary.

Reasons people give up on vocab 

Learning too many words at once 

Vocabulary acquisition is the process of moving Greek or Hebrew words from your short-term memory to your long-term memory. If you add too many words too quickly, you’ll overwhelm your short-term memory. That is, there are simply too many words to retain in your short-term memory, and you can’t get them into your long-term memory.

Learning too many words too quickly 

It is also possible to learn a small number of words every day, and compound the number of words you learn rapidly. For example, you could learn 10 words a day for two weeks. However, if you’re using spaced repetition for reviewing your vocabulary and your spaced repetition interval increments are small (as they normally are), this can lead to having to review almost all these words every day or every couple of days. This can add up to several hundred words each day, which can take more time than you expect, and make it daunting to add more new words, hindering your long-term progress, since adding new words adds yet more new words to review each day.

Confusing words 

Over time, some words will become confused. This is especially true, in my experience, with compound verbs, which often look very similar or even have a similar meaning. For example, διαπορέω (to be greatly perplexed) and διαταράσσω (to confuse) are two words that I often confuse (no pun intended) thanks to the preposition and the similar meanings. Without a way to identify and focus on these words, we can become frustrated by our forgetfulness.

Review-period inconsistencies 

I recommend reviewing vocabulary consistently about three times a day. This helps ensure that you never have too many words to review at one time. However, if you have a reasonable vocabulary, skipping a single day can result in several hundred words to review. Starting a review when you know you have a long period of review ahead of you can be disheartening, and a major reason to procrastinate starting. Of course, this means even more words are added to the “words due” pile, making the problem worse. Sometimes it seems easier to give up than review at all!

How to avoid problems. 

The simple way to avoid these issues is to add a set number of new words on a schedule. Not necessarily on a schedule determined by a period of time, but based on your progress with your existing vocabulary. This ensures that you don’t learn too many words at once, and that you’re pacing the addition of vocabulary based on your current vocabulary load and habits.

Second, you’ll want to identify words you get wrong regularly or that you confuse with other words and come up with a way of reviewing these more regularly. These words need more practice than other words.

Finally, if you do get to that point where you have too many words to review, you need a way to reduce the number of words currently due. While you can’t roll back time to do the reviews you should have done, you can move the due date of vocabulary forward by a certain amount.

How we solve this 

I’ve been writing a vocabulary app that specifically focuses on learning vocabulary over the long term. BMA’s Tutor includes a vocabulary subscription that is designed to prevent you getting overwhelmed with vocabulary, while helping you to read the Greek New Testament book-by-book starting with the easy words and progressing to the most difficult. We do this by addressing these challenges using the following features:

Proactive Pacing 

Tutor users progress from one lesson to another based on their progress with their vocabulary. Since Tutor tracks the interval of each word you review, we use this number as a “progression threshold” for adding more words. To move to the next lesson, Tutor requires that the average interval of 90% of the words in your most recent lesson is longer than a predetermined length of time. We provide a recommended interval based on the number of words you have learned. If you have a couple of thousand vocabulary words, we recommend an average progression threshold of 3 day, and will show you a progress indicator so you know exactly how you’re progressing toward adding more words and more Greek texts that you can read.

The progression indicator and threshold prevent you from adding too many words, too quickly.

Mastery Points 

We’ve also found that developing a streak, or an unbroken chain of reviewing vocabulary daily ensures you recall words better, and prevents you from having due words start to pile up. Therefore, in Tutor, each day that you clear all your due words, we award you a mastery point. The simple task of maintaining a streak makes the task of reviewing vocabulary far more motivating. This is also an area we’re looking to add additional rewards in over time.

Building a habit, maintaining a streak, and getting small rewards helps maintain momentum and keeps the number of due words low, making it easier to carry on.

Difficult Words 

We also automatically identify words where the ratio of times you mark the word correct drops below 85% (you can change this %). This means you can review these words in their own set to ensure you get them right next time you see them. We also allow you to reset the interval on these words when you review them, which means you can treat them like new words.

This means even the most difficult words can be reviewed more regularly and mastered more easily.

Max Due Threshold (just in case) 

If you skip a day of reviewing vocabulary, we also have a maximum number of due words setting. When your number of due words exceeds this threshold, you’ll be prompted to either reschedule your next due date for each word or review the overdue items. If you choose to update the due date on your vocabulary, Tutor will reduce the number of words due to your predetermined setting (a minimum of 50 words).

No more procrastinating on that big review period.

Putting it all together. 

This is a comprehensive approach to long-term vocabulary acquisition. Tutor prevents you from learning too many words too quickly, pacing you based on your progress. It rewards you for consistency. It helps you review difficult words, and it prevents you from becoming overwhelmed when life gets in the way.

All these settings are configurable.

Tutor uses our exclusive Greek Success Path to help you learn to read the entire Greek New Testament book-by-book starting from the easiest books such as 1 John and progressing to the hardest books based on both lexical difficulty (the number of words to learn in each book) and the syntactical difficult (how hard each book is to read). To give it ago, head to https://bma.to/getstarted.