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When to introduce affixes | ||
Tags: Morphology | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| TheBiscuit Tetraglot Senior Member Mexico Joined 5925 days ago 532 posts - 619 votes  Speaks: English*, French, Spanish, Italian Studies: German, Croatian | Message 1 of 6 04 February 2010 at 4:56am | IP Logged |
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At what point during your study of a language do you introduce affixes (primarily prefixes and suffixes)? Or is it something that you just pick up naturally through exposure? I know them in Spanish/French but I really can't recall at what point I acquired them. I was thinking it may speed things up with the languages I'm currently learning if I were to introduce them as early as possible, any thoughts?
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| Sprachprofi Nonaglot Senior Member Germany learnlangs.comRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6472 days ago 2608 posts - 4866 votes Speaks: German*, English, French, Esperanto, Greek, Mandarin, Latin, Dutch, Italian Studies: Spanish, Arabic (Written), Swahili, Indonesian, Japanese, Modern Hebrew, Portuguese | Message 2 of 6 04 February 2010 at 9:50am | IP Logged |
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I believe it has to depend on the language. In Spanish and French affixes are not as
common or as useful as in German, and in German they are far less common or useful than in Esperanto. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| The Blaz Senior Member Canada theblazblog.blogspotRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5602 days ago 120 posts - 176 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish, Swahili, French, Sign Language, Esperanto | Message 3 of 6 04 February 2010 at 10:02am | IP Logged |
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I guess I intuitively recognize them in French and Spanish but couldn't list many off. I
picked up The Big Red book of Spanish vocabulary a while ago which does a thorough treatment of affixes, and I looked at them but I guess it never appealed to me to study them. Perhaps I should? 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| QiuJP Triglot Senior Member Singapore Joined 5857 days ago 428 posts - 597 votes Speaks: Mandarin*, EnglishC2, French Studies: Czech, GermanB1, Russian, Japanese | Message 4 of 6 04 February 2010 at 10:03am | IP Logged |
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I think it will be great to introduce them after you have acquired a vocabulary of 2000 words. This is especially true for language such as Russian, where I cannot remember the long words until I sucessfully break the long word into their prefixes, suffixes and the stem.
For example: противоположность (opposition) -ность : noun suffix против- : means opposite ополож(ополоснуть): verb that means to rise Edited by QiuJP on 04 February 2010 at 10:23am 1 person has voted this message useful | |
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6705 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map | Message 5 of 6 04 February 2010 at 10:09am | IP Logged |
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You simply can't avoid affixes in languages like Russian, Greek and German, and then you can just as well start learning them from day 1.
Besides I agree with QiuJP that you to hack long words to pieces in order to learn them, and you can't do that unless you know both endings and affixes.. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Cainntear Pentaglot Senior Member Scotland linguafrankly.blogsp Joined 6013 days ago 4399 posts - 7687 votes Speaks: Lowland Scots, English*, French, Spanish, Scottish Gaelic Studies: Catalan, Italian, German, Irish, Welsh | Message 6 of 6 04 February 2010 at 12:25pm | IP Logged |
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Not only does it depend on the language, it also depends on the affix. At the most basic level, you can't learn to conjugate a verb in a European language without learning the suffixes! Slightly more subtle is the "I am tired" thing. If the language you are learning uses a literal translation, then it makes sense to me to learn that the "-é" in French "je suis fatigué" and the "-ado" in Spanish "estoy cansado" is a literal equivalent of "-ed". Whether it's explained as "the past participle suffix" isn't important, just that it's explained.
Learning semi-irregular verbs is made easier by recognising prefixes too. What do I mean by semi-irregular? I mean the ones where there is an irregular stem, but multiple derived forms that all conjugate the same way. For example comprendre, apprendre, reprendre etc are just prendre with a prefix. If you know that, and you know how to conjugate prendre, you know how to conjugate them all. But there are books that avoid affixes and teach prendre, comprendre and apprendre individually as irregular verbs -- to me, that is mind-boggingly stupid. 3 persons have voted this message useful |
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