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Extending vocabulary through novels | ||
 Language Learning Forum : Books, Literature & Reading |  | |
| Romanist Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 5273 days ago 261 posts - 366 votes  Studies: Italian | Message 9 of 10 18 February 2011 at 1:17pm | IP Logged | ||
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When I'm reading German novels with my Sony eReader, whenever I come across a word that I don't know, I just tap on the word on the screen to bring up its dictionary entry. (My model of eReader has excellent university level dictionaries for English-German, English-French, English-Spanish and English-Italian - plus a very decent English-Dutch dictionary.)
If I decide that the word in question is something really worth learning, then I save it. The whole thing can be done easily in seconds! Later on I can review the whole list of saved words - quickly and easily going right back to the page where the word was found if context is required. These saved words could also be added to Anki, or made into traditional flash cards, etc. Of course this approach probably wouldn't work very well for intermediate learners, because there would just be too much looking up to be done. But if one is at a level where literature can be read fluently (i.e. where more than 95% of the words are already known) then the eReader is an extremely powerful tool for learning those rare or specialist words which aren't 100% clear from the context. 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 10 of 10 18 February 2011 at 2:42pm | IP Logged | ||
I don't agree with that exactly. I'd put it more like this: Don't get obsessed with things you don't know, and reach for the dictionary with every new word. Is the word essential to understanding the sentence? Yes - Look it up. No - Ignore it for now. Unless it's a word that's come up a few times before, in which case you might as well look it up now: there's a high probability it'll come up again, so you'll benefit from knowing what it means. In reading novels, looking up nothing is a mistake -- there are certain words that are crucial to the plot, and reading without understanding the plot is no fun. A murder mystery wouldn't be the same if you weren't aware of any of the everyday objects that might be the murder weapon. 4 persons have voted this message useful |
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