I hear what you’re saying about learning words by theme. And that is often how you learn words in textbooks. This definitely has its place, but there are a couple problems. One is that you miss out on a lot of very common (often abstract) words that don’t easily fit into categories. Like “situation”, “possibility”, etc. The other is that many of the words you do learn are not very common, and in a sense you’ve wasted your energy learning a word like “armchair” with your house words or “eyelash” with your body words when you could have learned much more frequently encountered words. (Of course, these are important words to learn later on, but that’s when you’re speaking and reading a lot more and will encounter those words enough to make it worth your while.) For more on this read this very very interesting article: Vocabulary Coverage in Spanish Textbooks: How Representative is It?

But I do believe in learning words in context, and to that end about half of my flashcards (or more) are actually full sentences instead of single words. That way I’m right away using the words in their proper context (I get the sentences from my books) and probably pick up many collocations on the way.

[For the rest of you: A collocation is a combination of words that tend go with each other, like "make a decision" or "set the table". There's no particular reason these words have to go together; they just do. (Proof: In England the corresponding phrases are "take a decision" and "lay the table".)

An idiom, meanwhile, is a collocation whose meaning can't be understood by analyzing the individual words, like "kick the bucket". However usually when people say 'collocation' they mean a collocation that's not an idiom. Got it? For more info see: http://tangra.si.umich.edu/~radev/papers/handbook00.pdf ]

I’m really interested in corpus linguistics– I think I’m going to do my Master’s Report on it. Have you heard of Collocation dictionaries? I’ve been researching those, too– they connect words with all the phrases they’re used in, i.e., “ride– a bike, in a car, a horse” etc. They’re pretty cool.

Also, one note for your flashcards– and you probably already know this from your linguistics studies– but they say that studying words in context is always the best, so maybe you could group your words according to theme, i.e., house words, writing transition words, whatever. This would definitely complicated your system of already-grouped flashcards, but it’s an idea.

By the way this is Rebecca again. I made a WordPress account (I shall soon attempt to lure you into reading my blog, but as of now I have no entries).

Sounds good. I should definitely try this with my Hungarian….