2025-05-16
10 分钟To be in a conversation where you can't understand what the other person is saying is much worse than not being able to find the right word.
I can read, I can understand when I listen, but I can't speak.
Or I can't speak as well as I would like.
I hear this all the time.
This can be described as the conundrum of how do I activate my passive vocabulary.
There is this distinction between obviously the much larger number of words that we know,
that we understand in a context with a whole bunch of other words and our ability to retrieve the words that we need when we're in a conversation.
So there's a lot of research that has been done on...
how to teach vocabulary, how to learn vocabulary.
And in there, you'll find a lot of advice on how to activate your passive vocabulary.
And I'm going to share some of these with you, and I'm going to refer to them.
But first,
I want to talk about some principles that I have about this whole issue of active versus passive vocabulary.
So let me start by saying that I think the problem is overstated.
It's exaggerated.
To me...
There is no clear division between active and passive vocabulary.
We never know when we'll be able to retrieve a word that we know passively from our memory reserve.
We might even forget a word or we see it in a context where the surrounding words help us identify or infer the meaning of that word that we maybe know imperfectly or have seen a few times.
It's a very fuzzy sort of process whereby we acquire even our passive vocabulary.