Quote:
Originally Posted by Dagger
When I started playing games with vocabulary totally outside the realm of anything I'd learned in class (e.g. fantasy/sci-fi/historical stuff), I'd create lists of unfamiliar words/compounds/phrases, especially ones that came up repeatedly. This was an interesting exercise, but I never really studied from the lists. Instead, I found that I learned new vocabulary (and quirks of speech/grammar) without making any conscious effort. I didn't play games feeling like I was studying; I didn't try to memorize every new word I came across; I was simply obsessed with getting to the next part of the story. Along the way, because I looked them up over and over, I absorbed the meanings of frequently recurring words. It was a sort of learning by osmosis that felt virtually effortless, because it happened naturally in the process of devoting hours to one of my favorite hobbies (reading). I learned the most frequent--and therefore, the most arguably important--words the fastest.
Eventually, the passive, organic expansion of my vocabulary/comprehension enabled me to stop using text hookers and start reading print novels etc. without having to bother to look up words.
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That's freaky, because I went through the exact same thing myself. I'd create lists of kanjis I had difficulty picking up but came up repeatedly, only to find myself days later having learned said kanjis without referencing to the list at all because I ended up learning them through sheer recurrence. It really is a very "learning-by-osmosis" experience, and was really...fun(?) once I realized it was happening.