> Extensive reading is a better way of building and maintaining vocabulary than anything you can do with flash cards
Eh, I think that this is only true at certain ranges of fluency development.
Note that I am a huge fan of extensive reading, and I don’t think folks use it enough, but…
1. It’s usually prudent to brute force the first few hundred words, maybe up to 1000, depending on one’s access to quality graded readers. The theory says that you want 95-98% lexical coverage for extensive reading to reach its highest potential.
2. To maintain general fluency, extensive reading just can’t be beat.
3. That said, for domain specific vocabulary and/or low frequency vocabulary, cards are almost necessary since the space in between exposure can be incredibly wide. For reference, as a native speaker of English, I still add new words that I run across to a vocab memorization list — recent additions are petard and malapert. Frankly, I’m not sure I will ever run across these words again in a text, but I want to know them and (in the case of malapert) use them. For specialists in a field, knowing things like “nuclear non-proliferaiton treaty” or “bilateral negotiations” might be worthy of flash card study for folks in politics/political science.
> "I still add new words that I run across to a vocab memorization list — recent additions are petard and malapert."
I'm familiar with those only due to Shakespeare. I don't think I've ever heard anyone say "malapert", but have heard definitely heard friends say, "<person> was hoisted with <his/her/their/my> own petard" occasionally while playing board games as a teenager. Those friends must have picked it up from Hamlet. None of us used SRS for vocabulary building back then. We just read a lot.
Eh, I think that this is only true at certain ranges of fluency development.
Note that I am a huge fan of extensive reading, and I don’t think folks use it enough, but…
1. It’s usually prudent to brute force the first few hundred words, maybe up to 1000, depending on one’s access to quality graded readers. The theory says that you want 95-98% lexical coverage for extensive reading to reach its highest potential.
2. To maintain general fluency, extensive reading just can’t be beat.
3. That said, for domain specific vocabulary and/or low frequency vocabulary, cards are almost necessary since the space in between exposure can be incredibly wide. For reference, as a native speaker of English, I still add new words that I run across to a vocab memorization list — recent additions are petard and malapert. Frankly, I’m not sure I will ever run across these words again in a text, but I want to know them and (in the case of malapert) use them. For specialists in a field, knowing things like “nuclear non-proliferaiton treaty” or “bilateral negotiations” might be worthy of flash card study for folks in politics/political science.