Learn Vocabulary FAST By Being Slow

There’s never been a better time in history to learn a new language. We are so lucky to have the technology we have today. In fact, if certain technology had not been invented, I honestly don’t know if I would have had the patience and perseverance to continue studying Mandarin throughout my life to this day.

Back in 1998 when I took my very first ever Mandarin class in high school, there were no touchscreen cell phones; there weren’t even “palm pilots” in regular use until I attended university. This was significant because if you wanted to learn Mandarin words back then, the process of using a book dictionary was, and is, painstakingly slow, involving steps where you have to flip back and forth and jump from section to section within the book before you can arrive at the character you need. Unlike searching for English words which is based on spelling and is therefore a fairly quick process, using a book dictionary to search for Mandarin words means you have to know the stroke order for a character already (it’s not always as simple as just knowing the spelling and tone of the Pinyin). For a beginner, that could mean there are several roadblocks standing between you and the definition you are looking for and it can really eat up your studying time; you end up feeling like somehow you did a lot of work yet accomplished very little. But now we have super-efficient dictionary apps that allow you to draw a new character on a screen, touch a button, and boom - you’ve got your definition and can carry on with your reading or writing in seconds instead of minutes (or, hours? It sure felt like that sometimes).

It’s funny that “taking the easy road” to accomplish something is often conflated with “laziness”. When it comes to learning Chinese, yes, there may be some understanding-deepening value in learning how to look up words the old way (with book dictionaries) but if doing that means getting stuck part way through reading a passage in Mandarin and running out of time to finish it, how much value can that old method really offer? People used to think using calculators to do math equations was lazy, but sometimes working harder just means getting nowhere slowly. Sometimes going for convenience (like using a graphing calculator for math or a touchscreen dictionary for studying a character-based language) doesn’t lead to a shallower understanding of the subject matter. I would argue that use of the word “convenience” is interchangeable with the word “efficiency”: Employing more convenient methods and tools can lead to expedience, which then spurs your forward-momentum, which in turn leads to success!

Take flashcards as another example. Back in my high school days I used to take paper index cards and cut them in half so they would fit in my palm. I would generate stacks and stacks of them and bind them together using hair elastics, so you can guess it was a struggle to keep them in any sort of systematic order. Deciding to get them out to study could feel overwhelming because I could see all the cards I had coming up in the stack, each one representing a word I may not know yet; it could be very defeating thinking about all I had yet to learn in my new language. Enter the new technology of digital flashcards, and all my problems were solved. Right? Well, yes but also no. Sure, being able to store “cards” inside one tidy little device or within any sort of language software program can solve the organisational issue and maybe ease the tendency toward overwhelm. But digital flashcards aren’t without their flaws. The human mind is impatient, and it is always so tempting to tap the screen and reveal information on the “back” of the flashcard before you really give yourself a chance to test if you know the vocabulary or not. And it has always bothered me that you can’t group words together in an effective way or see multiple words at once to create context around the ones you are struggling to learn. Still, despite the drawbacks of digital flashcards, I would argue that advancements in technology have been vital to my ability to persevere over all these years.

So what I’m going to make the case for next will sound like I am completely contradicting myself: The absolute best way I’ve come up with to learn new vocabulary really quickly is to go analog, and to slow things down.

Back in the spring of 2007 to the spring of 2008 when I was living in Shanghai (the last of my three stays in China so far in my life), I was working as a certified English teacher. Outside of the school I taught in, I was surrounded by my target language nearly everywhere I went. This was thrilling. But it was also daunting: I was trying to speed up my Mandarin acquisition as quickly as possible to take advantage of being there and of course to get by in daily life. At this point I was no longer taking any sort of classes for Mandarin, and I had only myself to rely on - and to answer to - for the progression of my skills. Equipped with my years of professional teaching experience and with previous years of receiving instruction in Mandarin, I set about creating a better system for committing new vocabulary to memory and literally surrounded myself with my target language in my home.

In 2006 I decided to write a bilingual children’s book series as a means of maintaining my Mandarin, and that year saw the true beginning of my uphill-all-the-way trek to publishing my first book. I had no idea that the writing of it would eventually lead to me founding Little Crab Educational Press. Having left classroom teaching in 2014 (I still tutored after that), I also had not foreseen that I would develop such a deep passion for creating learning tools and writing books designed to help others in their own language learning pursuits. I have always believed that foreign language learning fosters inclusivity, exercises perseverance, and adds joy to life, but empowering others with resources to pursue that for themselves was not something I planned on making a career out of. So I hadn’t named the Simplified Chinese vocabulary study system I created all those years ago. Working with my sister now and focusing on what we can do to maximise the experience of our fellow language learners, we knew we needed to share what I had developed: So now, first released to the public in 2023 from the west coast of Canada, but conceptualized in Shanghai, China, all those years ago, the Tortoise Tile Method is here.

What is the Tortoise Tile Method exactly? We’ve made a video to show you.

Again, at first glance, it’s no mystery that Tortoise Tiles are a spinoff of the traditional flashcard concept, but there are some extremely important, key elements in how they are prepared and how they are put to use which make them incredibly effective and, perhaps surprisingly, even way more fun to use than digital or traditional flashcards. The method capitalises on slowing down (like a tortoise) to achieve an ironic result: new words are absorbed into your lexicon more quickly, more deeply, with a longer retention timeline and a quicker recall ability. While I developed this system for studying Mandarin, the beauty is that the method can be used to study nearly any language or vocabulary-heavy discipline.

Another advantage of the Tortoise Tile Method is that the grid layout itself allows for more associations in your mind between the words. For example, sometimes when you are out and about and you think back to a word on your wall, picturing the word that comes before or after it in the grid can trigger the memory of the word you are trying to recall, even if they are unrelated in meaning. Also if, when studying, you decide to skip a word you don’t know, it may come to you a few tiles down the column because the wall format lends itself well to those happy instances - something that is much less likely to be replicated when using traditional or digital cards.

Having that jewel-toned mosaic of colour coded paper on your wall is helpful in keeping you motivated because unlike handheld or digital flashcards, our colourful Tortoise Tiles add a cheerful brightness to a room and naturally attract your eye multiple times a day, almost like a beautiful piece of artwork. You don’t have to choose to study and go get your flashcards out; you simply have to look up.

Like we said in the video, we will continue making many many more vocabulary word set books of Tortoise Tiles. We started with the ABCs of Holiday Series to provide you with some vocabulary content that is evergreen and cross-cultural. We are always brainstorming and researching what is most relevant for people looking to integrate a foreign language into their everyday life. While my focus is, of course, on learning Mandarin (and the products we produce are bilingual English and Mandarin including Pinyin), we are proud to make tools that work for multiple different foreign languages. (One example is our new Teach Myself Chinese Bilingual Boats books which can actually be used for translating other character-based languages as well.) As mentioned earlier, the Tortoise Tile Method is no exception: We have produced our books using Simplified Chinese characters, but the method itself works for any target language. In fact you can use the Tortoise Tile Method for specialized vocabulary in your native language, like for students learning anatomy, for example. We are confident that any tutor, homeschooler or classroom teacher out there reading this is already flooded with ideas for how to utilize this system with their students.

If you are learning or teaching Mandarin or another character-based language and want access to our free templates, or if you are learning an alphabet-based language and want access to the detailed guide for building your own Tortoise Tiles, click here to get it all.

The 8 books in the ABCs of Holiday Series come with double-sided Tortoise Tiles with the outlines of a minimum of 26 themed vocabulary words and phrases (from A-Z) on the front and space to write the English, Pinyin and other information on the back, properly oriented to be readable when flipped up and light enough that the information on the back does not interfere with the character on the front. All Tortoise Tiles books also come with specific, detailed, easy-to-follow written instructions for how to make Tortoise Tiles work for you as well as specific, detailed, easy-to-follow written instructions on how to expand beyond these books with your own word lists.

So, whether you decide to dive in with the books we’ve created or to start building your own word lists with our free templates and guide, I wish you the very best of luck with your studying and look forward to cheering you on.

加油!*,

Rebecca

* jiā yóu! = “Add fuel!” / Step on the gas! / Go for it! / Full speed ahead!