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How to choose vocabulary to study | ||
Tags: Vocabulary learning | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Advice Center |  | |
| ihoop Newbie United States Joined 4601 days ago 29 posts - 66 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish, Mandarin | Message 1 of 2 07 December 2013 at 1:42pm | IP Logged | ||
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Hey all,
I have been thinking about this question a lot lately and wanted to get some opinions from other members. I have been studying Mandarin for a little over a year now. I am quite happy with my progress, but I still find that my vocabulary is not large enough to really express myself. So, I am trying to make a big push to increase my vocabulary and give myself more expressive ability. My question to everyone is this.... How do you choose the vocab that you will study? I know that there are many different beliefs about this type of thing......Some people really like to study verbs or possibly adjectives, others will study frequency lists, others may just study vocab that they find they lack when having a conversation in their target language, etc. One interesting thing that I came across was this article. https://linguistics.stanford.edu/research/linguistic-fieldwo rk/advice-for-undertaking- fieldwork/ It is advice for linguists who will soon be undertaking field work. The vocabulary section of the article seemed to make a lot of sense. It is recommended to first learn vocab related to humans, animals, occupations, natural phenomena, etc. Anyway, I would love to hear some opinions! Thanks for reading. -Ian 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
 emk Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5523 days ago 2615 posts - 8806 votes Speaks: English*, FrenchB2 Studies: Spanish, Ancient Egyptian Personal Language Map | Message 2 of 2 07 December 2013 at 2:25pm | IP Logged | ||
Personally, I choose my vocabulary from two sources: 1. Things I read, watch and hear. If I encounter an unknown word, and it seems potentially useful, then I try to save it. I consider a word to be "useful" if I know I've heard it a couple of times before, or if I might want to use it myself. And I usually only save words if I can easily grab their entire context, either by using the highlight function of my e-reader, or by simply remembering something that I hear. 2. Things I try to write or say. When I hit an annoying hole in my vocabulary, I go over to Linguee and look up several natural ways to express it in French. But the vocabulary that I consciously learn makes up only about 20% of the words that I know. The rest are due to either easy cognates, compound words derived from simpler French words, and words I figured out from context. I have to give Khatzumoto (the AJATT guy) a lot of credit here: The combination of huge amounts of reading and listening with a moderate amount of Anki sentence cards / easy cloze deletions has made an enormous difference for me. Edited by emk on 07 December 2013 at 2:28pm 3 persons have voted this message useful |
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