Best techniques for learning 50k words vocabulary Finnish

Language Learning
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I’ve been learning Finnish for several years with a reasonable amount of vocab, but honestly its a language that requires a tremendous of skill as well as vocabulary. The reality is that virtually no adult non natives reach fluency, with maybe a few exceptions its almost unheard of. According to some language experts reaching fluency in a more complex language can take 10,15,20 or more years (Prof A Arguelles).

Now, because Finnish is a highly inflected language and its estimated to need about 60k words(Steve Kaughman) to be at operational level, which for example in English even 4000 to 8000 words would serve you quite well.

Acquiring vocabulary is tedious and words are generally very different. Creating memory associations does help but it can be challenging to come up with associations due to such differences.

Taytotila, is an example of an easy one. I imagine Tayto man(famous in Ireland) jumping over a fence to a tiler, with a set of brains underneath. Mindset. Easy win.

Not so easy words like, ominaisuus. It really sounds like nothing that I know of, but it sounds a like its root oma or osa, osallaisuus, or a similar word which keeps tricking me. So I need a rather complex 3 word combo to capture this, and the meaning is also not so easy to imagine. Also nouns and verbs rarely have a 1 to 1 mapping to English and require some new concept or way of thinking about things for example there is no equivalent word to “get”, in the same sense, and theres verbs for “to wind up” but you have to choose which one you use depending on the outcome of the situation.

So its a mixed bag, but I am nonetheless quite happy. I can convert about 10% of words to decent imagery. So thats a big win, and I use this technique. I would hope for bigger gains though if I could push that 10% to 25% that would be HUGE.

Fortunately I am quite familiar with the grammar system and reading text is generally ok, I can get through a lot of texts provided I know the text and that they are not too idiomatic.

I work a lot with Anki and SRS is my main method for learning along with contextual learning from texts. And with those two examples, yes, I look them both up in the dictionary, I study them and look at the roots, and so on. It does serve me well, but its slow and repetitive. But I would love any boost I can get.

I have been looking into the loci methods but I don’t see how this really is going to help or simplify my methods. It seems to just add complexity. I am very open minded however and would like to know if anyone has used this method to somehow learn a MEGA amount of vocabulary in a different language.

I would also be interested to know of any other methods available for learning vocabulary. Or maybe SRS and memory associations as good as it gets, and I just need to get better at these.

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Dr. Metivier is an expert in learning several (?) well enough to lecture at universities in a language that was not his native one.
He learned Chinese to impress the family of his soon to be wife. (that is pressure) He has taught himself several languages… using a memory palace of his adaptation… and he is a member and contributor on this blog (is that what it is?)
contact him through this site with your Finnish language learning questions… He is a congenial sort and quite brilliant.
I am Finnish/American , lived with my Finnish fluent Grandmother who wanted to keep her immigrant origins secret , like a lot of immigrants to the “New World”

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Looking into word origins and connections to other Uralic languages might help you form better associations. Grouping words by themes can reinforce connections, while creating short stories with new words can be more memorable than isolated associations. Understanding Finnish word patterns and affixes can help you guess meanings of unfamiliar words. Try increasing your exposure to Finnish through various media and use new words in writing or speaking as soon as you can. The keyword method, linking Finnish words to similar-sounding words in your native language, can be useful. Visual diagrams and language learning games can make vocabulary acquisition more engaging. It’s best to focus on words relevant to your interests and daily life in Finland. Regarding memory palaces, I’ve found them effective for learning vocabulary, albeit time-consuming, and have devised my own method to memorize vocabulary with this technique. It involves placing people in specific locations in your memory palace, then associating word meanings and spellings with them. For example, with “feeble,” I picture a weak old man in a specific spot, holding money (“fee”) and a telephone (“ble”). I’ve used this for words like miserly, culprit, and blunt, and they’ve stuck without much review. It’s powerful for long-term memory, but for 60,000 Finnish words, you’d need an enormous memory palace.

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Maybe people who describe their experience using memory palaces to learn a vast amount of words can help?
There are several threads on this forum about this, like:

They may be a bit long to read, but I learnt many useful tips from them, persevering and reading them several times.

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Yes I looked at this thread and that got me very interested.

Unfortunately I really don’t understand what this guy is talking about.

Trying to reduce what he is saying:

  1. Create a palace using alphabetic indexing. Similar to library indexing.
  2. Create a separate palace for “connecting words”, do not place these in palace 1, and vice versa.
  3. Somehow using nemoassociations (unclear).

1 and 2…why? I don’t really understand the role of a memory palace in all of this.

  1. I get the mnemoassociations bit (which is useful) but why would a memory palace be any advantage or help learn 50k new words?
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Well let’s say you come across the word “thurgidol” and know that you have learnt it and that it has been encoded in your 50k words memory palace. How are you going to find it?

If you encoded words thematically you’re out of luck, because you have no idea what the word means and to which theme it belongs to, so you don’t know where to go.

But if you’ve encoded words alphabetically, you know to go to the “Thu” section and can find the word there, even without remembering anything about the word itself.

This is not anything new I’m paraphrasing what is in the cited thread, the answers of all your questions are exactly the subject of his first post… I know it’s a bit wordy (and you may need to read it several times to grasp everything) but if you’re genuinely interested, I think it’s worth it.

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No. I still don’t get it. Why would I need to find a word I have learned?

Let me try to clear this up. How I study is, I read and write, listen, repeat and so on.
When I come across a new word I record that word for SRS.
This works. Its slow.

Currently mnemonics can somewhat help in retrieving words. Its cute but its not really a game changer, it might help improve recollection in early stages by 10%.

Now, eventually at some stage realize that I really have no need of the nmemonic nor to do SRS of those words. Once I internalize the word thats that.

So to be clear I have no interest in using these techniques real time, zero use there. Nor I am interested in using it to study the grammar of the language etc etc.

I am purely looking at this as a way of increasing vocabulary, and I want to achieve that by having to do less repetitions through SRS.

I appreciate that guy doesn’t speak English well but I don’t see anything in that guys post that makes a connection between learning lots of words and storing those in a memory palace, and how that really brings anything to the table.

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Paulo’s aim is basically “learn the dictionary so that I can read books” (so huge amount of words in a short amount of time). For my part, using memory palaces for vocabulary is good, because I often I have to put a language on the back burner for a while, and need to reactivate it later. (I have 2 languages that I am actively learning, 2 languages that I am actively maintaining, and 5 languages that I learnt in the past, but are now on hold, because there’s no realistic way I can study all of them at the same time.)

So in both of our cases we are going to forget words. It’s inevitable. When you have a huge amount of material it’s not realistic to expect to be perfect with your reviews (unless it’s a very intense project, for a short amount of time). I only review the cards for the languages I’m actively learning at the moment. I want to spend time actually using the languages I learnt instead of doing reviews.

Speaking from a life-long learning perspective, forgeting is normal (it happens to us even in our mother tongue). When I see one of these words again, my brain is going to say " кро́ме? I don’t remember what it means, but I know I’ve learnt it. Let’s go to the Kaserne where all the word in K are… and there I find the word again and its story and I know it means “except”.

So what’s the advantage of going to look up a forgotten word in a memory palace, instead of looking it up in a dictionary? Because your brain has to do the effort of searching for it, you see if the mnemonic was good or bad and you can improve it if necessary. Doing this, you’re learning it better. Having to retrieve a word like that means reactivating and consolidating the memory for later.

Our brains are really good with spatial memory, so a memory palace takes advantage of that. If it helps, you can simply consider it like a serie of spatial pegs (association between a place and an element you need to remember). Now you can have a journey in your memory palace, or you can arrange the pegs in whatever other way that feels logical to you).

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Right, that makes the purpose a bit clearer.

You are saying that the memory palace serves as an indexing mechanism for storage and retrieval of data gathered from other techniques such as repetition and mnemonics etc. Just as with computer databases, we have keys, tables, schemas, hashing, queries, etc. I find this comparison very useful for understanding.

The downside of techniques such as mnemonics is that it lacks a consistent method for retrieval. You have to go through that whole process and a bit of guesswork and recollection is involved. That is indeed a bit annoying with mnemonics.

This is the way understand it now. The “magic” mechanism or secret sauce of learning lots of words is the SRS part. The mnemonics can augment that process. Now, memory palaces are storage systems that are a totally adjacent yet complementary system for helping keep things organized. And to be clear indeed mnemonics are also required in memory palaces, along with spatial memory, and SRS maintenance in order to function. A well planned memory palace may have some indexing strategies to help optimize things.

In regards to language learning…I suppose it depends on how you like to study a language. I can see in some cases it could be useful. The way I study I don’t really need to look words up too much as once the word is properly learned then that’s that, the mnemonic or SRS or whatever has served its purpose and I move on. My learning is based off reading so no need to really store anything as such. Reading serves many purposes but much less so for revising words or using mnemonics (that tends to be another exercise, perhaps with the aid of Anki).

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The beauty of memory palaces is not only the indexing part, but that it exploits the fact that our brains are extremely good at remembering places (or otherwise said our spatial memory is much better than visual, auditive, etc… even for people like me who have a bad sense of direction :slight_smile: )
Even a dispersed memory palace, which I feel is less strong than a journey memory palace, is much more memorable than random mnemonics.
But then if what you are learning isn’t difficult to remember it may not necessary.
It took me two years knowing about memory palaces before trying it out and I was really surprised how well it works.

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What aspect do you find strongest compared to plain old mnemonics? Recollection speed, accuracy, organization or something else?

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Just that it sticks so much easier.
Sometimes it even happens spontaneously, for example I was walking and listening to a Spanish podcast and I thought “oh this word is very useful I should make a card with it” and whenever I see this word, I keep seeing the street corner I was at when I thought that, although I didn’t really meant for it to be a “locus”.

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Ok thats interesting I shall try to experiment.

I would like to try some more complex information-

I plan to learn noun declension at some point (currently I rely on guesswork).

Every Finnish noun is declined according to its Kotus type, so provided I can identify the parent Kotus type, if I know that table I can decline nouns. Kaino - Kotus-sanalista - Taivutustyypit

Perhaps thats a bit challenging for a first effort as that requires accuracy, and it needs a lot of additional information about stems.

I might try 20, then 100 words instead and see how that stacks up against what I am doing now.

Perhaps this is just a guess or not related, but it connects to what you said. I found mnemonics that I stored with space information most lucid to remember. For example Käskea, I think casket, I unscrew the lid and inside are vertical pieces of an old CD case for Command and Conquer.

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Ok I am now at over 500 words in the todo list. I must admit mnemonic approach has been a flop so far.

It scaled well enough to begin with, and was rather good for the first couple weeks. But now its clear that this approach is not working. Even my favourite pet mnemonics are soon forgotten, with a few exceptions.

I am still using the mnemonics together with Anki for reviewing. But I found that I have had to write the down mnemonic as an extra note in Anki. Which kind of begs the question, why bother at all? Its adding extra time that I may as well use to just review and rely on the SRS to do its thing, slowly but surely.

So as a change of tactics I now have been changing my mnemonics to be more in the form of hints with visuals. The point being if I get stuck, I can at least trigger the recall. Which, in theory strengthens connections (supposedly). Although its not clear if this will work, I am building my first word list to 900, to test out how well this works.

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I’d just like to encourage you that making good mnemonics (like any other skill) is something you’ll become better at with practice.
I’ve certainly had projects that didn’t pan out like I thought and projects that were success. Everytime you learn a bit more “what you brain likes” and how you, personally, learn best.
What would be a true failure would be to stop trying :wink:

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Well ok but, there does not seem any objective way for measuring what works and what does not.

At least 90% of the mnemonics are completely ineffective after a week. Yes some do stick but its as if these are not really “chosen” by me at all. That is my brain has made some imagery and associated that with the word and thats that. The final decision has been made by my brain and it does not matter what.

Or if I invest a huge amount of time and care into one single mnemonic then it seems to have a better chance of succeeding. But whats the point? I may as well just do SRS and spend less time.

Honestly it seems like mnemonics are actually a time burner and ineffective. That is apart from the few that do work (if I only knew the magic formula of what does stick).

I am not giving up just yet, and am moving on to another strategy aiming at improving active recall but I am struggling to see the point of mnemonics as they seem more effort than what they are bringing to the table.

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Yes, that what I meant with finding what kind of things your brain likes. The first associations that came spontaneously to mind usually work best.

I think it’s probably not worth it investing so much time in one mnemonic. Better ten crappy quick spontaneous mnemonics than one super detailed one.

As a personal note, I almost never put the mnemonics into my anki cards. Or only one keyword at most. (Except for really difficult words that are hard to remember somehow AND that I think are really important). I don’t think mnemonics are a waste of time, but spending time on elaborate storytelling is (unless you enjoy the process itself and you have time for it of course).

in which sense do you forget the mnemonics? You can’t find what is on the hook or you do know what’s on the hook but can’t translate it into what you want to remember?

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Yes I agree, the first thing that comes to mind is almost always works the best. But the vast majority of times its just really hard to work to figure out how to create it.

The problems:-
What usually happens is that I plain forget the first hook. I am relying generally on word play in the work to create a keyword.
Example; hätkähdyttävä meaning startling, striking.
I might try to make hat, cat-do, and ignore the last bit because its too complex to work that in.
I then might try a Dr Seuss cat in the hat image from the film, when hes doing something surprising and rude. I’ll sometimes add some extra imagery if I think the connection is not enough on its own.

Then a few days later, I will look at hätkähdyttävä and go hrm…that looks familiar but what key words did I use…cat probably, and then not correctly remember what the other key words are.

Second to that, lets say if I do get the all parts correct and I do recall the keywords then I will remember the cat in the hat, Dr Seuss, but I will really struggle to remember the final piece that connects the meaning. Its just forgotten.

To fix this, I have to go back and repair the mnemonic using something more memorable, hence time consuming.

Thus you can see there is no reliable system for generating keywords. Its just done on a what looks best basis. Of course what looks right changes a lot.

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And why you learn finish? You live there? Is not useful other language more used??

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Yes I live in Finland, hence the motivation. There is virtually no point learning Finnish if you don’t live in Finland. With a mere 5 million native speakers most are concentrated in Finland with also some of the neighbouring countries having smaller communities of speakers, e.g. Sweden, Russia (and as far as Siberia).

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