Active vs Passive Vocabulary, What Is The Difference?

When you start learning a language you will often hear people talk about active and passive vocabulary and there are often debates about how important both of these are, but there can also be some confusion about they actually mean.

The difference is basically your ability to either just recognise a word, or to be able to actively recall it from your memory, but I will go into more detail below

This also shouldn’t be confused with Active and Passive Learning, which are two different methods used to learn things. 

What Is Active Vocabulary?

Your active vocabulary consists of all the words you are able to use when you speak or write.

You understand these words but more importantly you can recall them without prompt and use them whenever you want.

These are the words you can actively recall when you need to.

What Is Passive Vocabulary?

Your Passive vocabulary is made up of all the words that you can only recognise and understand in a language.

However, you don’t really know these words all that well. You might not be able to recall them yourself, but if you see them written down you would understand them.

These are usually the obscure words that are not that common, or just ones that you would never really use yourself when you speak.

While you can understand them and recognise them, you wouldn’t be able to recall them yourself if you needed to.

What’s The Difference Between Active and Passive Vocabulary?

The main difference between passive and active vocabulary is basically your ability to either recall, or just recognise words and you will notice this phenomenon all the time when learning a language.

Let’s imagine you are learning German and I ask you what the word for “pineapple” is…

If the word is only in your passive memory, then you will look at me blankly, as you cannot recall this word. You might even feel like you know it, but you just won’t be able to remember it.

However, the second I show you a list of words written down, you will be able to pick out which one means pineapple from the list. It is like you know the word, as you can recognise it… But you don’t really know it too well as you couldn’t say it yourself without being prompted.

The opposite of this would be of course being able to tell me the word from your from memory. If you can do this then that word is in your active vocabulary, which makes sense as you are able to actively use it.

These two scenarios show how the two types of vocabulary differ.

Is It Better To Have Active Or Passive Vocabulary?

The reality is that you are always going to have both an active and a passive vocabulary. It also doesn’t matter what you do, your passive vocabulary will always be bigger. You will always recognise more words than you will be able to actively recall.

You previously may have not even realised you have these two different sets of vocabulary, or that one is bigger than the other, but if you look at  how you actually speak in your native language you will realise that you know a lot more words than you are actually able to use yourself.

A good way to actually see that your passive vocabulary is a lot larger is to just watch TV. You will hear so many words that you would never say yourself, but you understand them no problem.

For example if you were watching a TV show about doctors, the words they use will be very specific medical words, but you still understand them. However, if you where asked before that show to list some medical terms …you definitely wouldn’t have said those words yourself.

You could argue that it’s better to have a really strong passive vocabulary. If you do not have this, you will not be able understand what people are saying to you.

However, you do need also to have some sort of active vocabulary, or you will never be able to reply yourself.

They are both important and both have their roles within your language ability, It is also hard to say which one is better as they often so closely linked. You can’t really affect one, without affecting the other.

(You can read more about – What Is The Best Way To Learn New Vocabulary When Learning A Language)

What Are Your Language Goals?

If you really want to know what one might be better for you to be focusing on, then you need to look at what you want to achieve in the language. Your language goals are going to tell you exactly where your priorities should lie.

If you only want to watch to watch movies and you never really want to interact with people, then you only need to worry about increasing your passive vocabularies ability. This will allow you to sit there and understand everything and enjoy what you are doing.

However, if your goal is to actually speak to people then you will need to make sure that you have a strong active vocabulary, so you can recall words and use them in your conversations.

 …Although, to get a strong active vocabulary, you will need to have a good passive vocabulary too, so you can understand what is being said to you.

As I said before they are interlinked. You can’t have one without the other, so the reality is that you should focus on both and just learn as much as you can. The words you need and use the most will naturally end up in your active vocabulary while the rest will be in your passive.  

How To Increase Your Vocabulary

While the acquisition of vocabulary is subconscious, we can still consciously try and speed up the process and make ourselves remember more words.

I won’t go into detail here, but basically you need to do a lot immersion and this will expose you to a lot of new words. If you want to learn the other techniques that you can use to consciously try and increase your vocabulary you can read about that in my other article – Techniques That Will Increase Your Vocabulary

Also if you are interested in how your brain actually acquires the new vocabulary you can read – How Do We Acquire More Vocabulary? Knowing how this works can really help you understand what is happening and give you confidence that what you are doing is helping.

Conclusion

Now you can tell the difference between your active and passive vocabulary and hopefully you will be able to spot it in action the next time you are studying your language, or even just listening to your native one.

It’s okay if you can only recognise certain words at the moment in your new language, this is a good start. Keep studying and the words you need for conversations will slowly move into your active vocabulary and you will start to be able to use them yourself, while at the same time you will be increasing your comprehension with your passive vocabulary.

(You can read more about – Techniques That Will Increase Your Vocabulary)