|
 |
Extending vocabulary through novels | ||
 Language Learning Forum : Books, Literature & Reading |  | |
| Teango Triglot Winner TAC 2010 & 2012 Senior Member United States teango.wordpress.comRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5547 days ago 2210 posts - 3734 votes  Speaks: English*, German, Russian Studies: Hawaiian, French, Toki Pona | Message 1 of 10 15 February 2011 at 5:13pm | IP Logged |
|
There's a lot of excellent info out there on how to acquire passive vocabulary and get to the level where you can read novels comfortably and consistently. However, what do you do when you reach this point and you'd still like to keep on learning new words?
When we come across something new in our text, the surrounding words and the context of the passage and plot often give us several clues as to its meaning. It reminds me a little bit of a game show that used to be on TV in UK called Catchphrase, where contestants would earn small change on the basis of guessing well-known phrases hidden behind a virtual wall of 3x3 panels. When they answered a question correctly, one of these panels would be removed to reveal another piece of the puzzle picture, and the first contestant who buzzed in with the correct phrase would win that round. In a similar way, each contextual clue in a novel removes part of the overall confusion, but it usually takes quite a lot of pieces to guess the full meaning, and then successive reviews for it all to sink in properly. Part of the problem is that by the time we've reached the stage where we consistently understand 95-98% of the text on average, these new words that pop up are usually rather rare and sparsely scattered. They may even only appear once in that book, making it very difficult to obtain enough contextual clues to guess the full meaning and follow up with natural review. When we start to learn how to read a foreign language, however, we have the opposite problem of being unable to grasp the meaning of enough of the surrounding context to focus and work on the rarer words. And when I think about how I've learned words in my own native language, I can't really say that I've picked up that much new vocabulary from reading fiction either. Fact, yes - especially as a child with pictures and descriptions; fiction, not really. On reflection, much of the rest resulted from thousands of hours of TV or looking up words occasionally in a dictionary whilst studying and writing. This could just be me, of course, and it might work very differently with other people. However, I've come to the conclusion that I could really help the vocabulary extension process along by actively making a note of more frequently occurring new words in the margin and then reviewing them later. Surprisingly, I've never tried this out with books in English before, but I thought why not give it a go from now on with all languages... Naturally, I don't want this to hinder the flow or enjoyment of reading a good novel, so I've decided to only highlight or underline a word when I can positively recall that it's appeared in another paragraph or I've heard or seen it somewhere else already. I won't look up each word there and then, but following the wise example of members like Doviende, I'll wait to review them later in the context of each phrase at the end of the day or session. What I haven't worked out yet is how to best provide ongoing review for these words. And review is really essential in this process to help keep it all from escaping my sieve-like mind! I've used flashcards with spaced repetition in the past for similar tasks, and this is no doubt a great tool for review, but I'm just not a great fan of having to eventually work through toppling stacks of reminders each day nor worry about inputting the phrases. I suppose I could also try to reread a book or sections in the book several times, penciling in translations in the margin, but I think this could prove quite boring after a while, especially shortly after finishing a long story. Perhaps the key is to switch back to factual books, where the meaning of rarer words is often more clearly indicated, or spend more time reading online, where I can use a mouse to hover over the words and discover the meaning. However I really love reading paper-bound novels and physically leafing through the pages in my hands without the glare of a computer screen behind them. Call me old-fashioned. ;) So I'm sure there must be a better way to do this with books...and I'd be interested to hear of any other suggestions you might have for effective but light and enjoyable review of new words that we pick up through literature, be it in our own native language or another we've recently learned? Edited by Teango on 17 February 2011 at 1:48pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | |
| Cainntear Pentaglot Senior Member Scotland linguafrankly.blogsp Joined 6002 days ago 4399 posts - 7687 votes Speaks: Lowland Scots, English*, French, Spanish, Scottish Gaelic Studies: Catalan, Italian, German, Irish, Welsh | Message 2 of 10 15 February 2011 at 6:40pm | IP Logged |
|
I suppose you could always type the words into Google and read random pages with the words on. Or more specifically Google News, so that you get coherent, self-contained texts rather than various bitty forum posts that don't contain enough context.
You could do this with the aid of SRS -- the SRS package gives you a word, you Google it, you read an article containing it, then you go back to the SRS for another word. When words reappear, hopefully your web browser will still remember which links you've already clicked, and you can make sure you read something new. That way you're getting programmed repetition and varied context. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |
| tozick Diglot Groupie Poland Joined 6353 days ago 44 posts - 69 votes Speaks: Polish*, English | Message 3 of 10 15 February 2011 at 8:45pm | IP Logged |
|
Since in both of my languages I'm at 1 of those points where you can't quite benefit from just reading a book, I've been trying to solve this problem myself for a while. I've had a lot of free time so I've experimented a bit with different approaches and while I haven't really discovered anything close to being perfect here's what I do with English.
I try to choose books that I know will contain a good deal of vocab I won't understand. That doesn't necessarily mean picking factual books full of scientific terms, but, for example, at some point i read 3 John Grisham's books because there was quite a lot of law related vocab. I sit with a notebook by my side writing down every single word I don't understand. Afterwards i check their meanings in a dictionary (usually the Oxford online dictionary). Then I usually add the definition and an example sentence taken from that dictionary, and search the word in the Corpus of Contemporary American English which provides thousands of example sentences with context. You can usually see the whole paragraph in which a word was used. Also all the example sentences are divided into 5 categories such as fiction, spoken, newspapers, academic, and magazines which is pretty useful. Edited by tozick on 15 February 2011 at 9:05pm 3 persons have voted this message useful | |
| Andrew C Diglot Senior Member United Kingdom naturalarabic.com Joined 5181 days ago 205 posts - 350 votes Speaks: English*, Arabic (Written) | Message 4 of 10 15 February 2011 at 10:26pm | IP Logged |
|
I think a combination of methods is good - looking up every word in a text (preferably with sound) v not looking up any words.
I sometimes wonder if it is actually impossible to learn words purely from a written context. At any rate it is definitely harder than for say a child learning in a real life setting. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |
| doviende Diglot Senior Member Canada languagefixatio Joined 5977 days ago 533 posts - 1245 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Spanish, Dutch, Mandarin, Esperanto, Hindi, Swedish, Portuguese | Message 5 of 10 16 February 2011 at 12:15am | IP Logged |
|
I think tozick had a good idea there with themed books. I like to read several books from the same author, and they tend to have the same kinds of words in them. When I want a bit of a challenge again, I switch genres and authors, and suddenly there are a bunch of new words.
I also find that it makes a big difference if I'm consciously looking for new words. In German, I can just read and enjoy the story and not really "see" any new words, but once I decide to pay attention and try to look up some of the new words, I find that I just "see" more of them that I'm not totally sure on. Re-reading only really works for me if I really like the book, and I always learn a lot more new words the second time around that I somehow didn't notice the first time (and more story details too), but I can't do this all the time. This is where I like a nice series of several books. If I really wanted to retain a lot more of the words, I'd make more flashcards, but lately I'm more inclined to just spend more time reading. If I'm not as good in that language, then I try to read things that I have a parallel text for, to save lookup time, but otherwise I just try to keep reading a lot more books and I hope that I keep enough of the vocab. It seems to have worked in English, so why not :) 2 persons have voted this message useful | |
| Teango Triglot Winner TAC 2010 & 2012 Senior Member United States teango.wordpress.comRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5547 days ago 2210 posts - 3734 votes Speaks: English*, German, Russian Studies: Hawaiian, French, Toki Pona | Message 6 of 10 17 February 2011 at 2:22pm | IP Logged |
|
Some great ideas there! And I've been meditating a bit more on this issue today...
At first I thought, hey...how about buying one of those fancy pen translators, but I soon knocked that idea on the head when I read up further on the reviews and realised that it probably wouldn't work on my mac nor support many of the languages I'd like to learn. It seems that the Irispen has much better software in this respect, but the hardware is definitely lacking. If only these two companies could get together, and think more about making their products easy to handle and more flexible to extend to other languages, then I'd certainly think about reaching for my wallet. Next I considered using speech recognition software like Dragon Dictate. Perhaps I could call out words to my computer and it would display the translation back to me on the screen. However, I scrapped this idea as well, as soon as I envisioned myself lugging a laptop around or hooking it up whilst I'm in the bath reading a good book. No thanks. So it was back to the drawing board. And then I did something I always tend to do when I hit brick walls...I return my focus to the essentials. So I decided to read through some notes by Kato Lomb's "Polyglot - How I Learn Languages", always a great source of inspiration, and I alighted on an couple of excellent pieces of advice: "In your browsing, do not get obsessed with words you don’t know or structures you don’t understand. Build comprehension on what you already know. Do not automatically reach for the dictionary if you encounter a word or two that you don’t understand. If the expression is important, it will reappear and explain itself; if it is not so important, it is no big loss to gloss over it". and "Do not leave newly learned structures or expressions hanging in the air. Fix them in your memory by fitting them into different, new settings: into your sphere of interest, into the reality of your own life." So after some further thought, I think I'll continue focusing on new words when I can clearly recall that they've popped up somewhere else before, and I'll stick with reviewing my notes at the end of a day or the session. However, I'd like to take Kato Lomb's advice on board too, which means I won't be focusing on what I don't know any more, but rather, making notes in the margin of what I do know or at least can deduce from the context and morphological structure of each word. This way, I won't leave the word hanging in the air until a time when my curiosity has faded, and I make it my own by meditating and and writing about it there and then as my curiosity and interest in the plot overwhelms me. And when I come to review these highlighted words later on that day, I can test myself on the words I've underlined and try to retrieve what I wrote in the margin beforehand. I'm also considering focusing even more on positive reinforcement, by using a clicker to tally up any new words I think I've sussed out at the end of the day, and then adding these totals to my notebook to illustrate ongoing progress and increase my levels of motivation. Edited by Teango on 17 February 2011 at 2:26pm 3 persons have voted this message useful | |
| FuroraCeltica Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 6856 days ago 1187 posts - 1427 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, French | Message 7 of 10 17 February 2011 at 10:11pm | IP Logged |
|
This is a key part of my learning strategy. I use a pencil to circle words I don't recognise, then input them into anki.
2 persons have voted this message useful | |
| William Camden Hexaglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 6263 days ago 1936 posts - 2333 votes Speaks: English*, German, Spanish, Russian, Turkish, French | Message 8 of 10 18 February 2011 at 12:15pm | IP Logged |
|
Depends on the novel. When I started my university course in German, I had to read novels, but they were 19th century ones and much of the vocabulary was not much use in late 20th century Germany.
If I use a novel for vocabulary, I prefer it to be fairly up-to-date. 1 person has voted this message useful |
|  | 
Printable version
|
| Copyright 2024 FX Micheloud - All rights reserved No part of this website may be copied by any means without my written authorization. |
