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Must I Memorize A Billion Phrases? | ||
Tags: Idiom | Vocabulary learning | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| fsc Senior Member United States Joined 6331 days ago 100 posts - 117 votes  Studies: French | Message 1 of 43 23 January 2010 at 8:48am | IP Logged | ||
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I have been studying French for 2 1/2 years. My vocabulary is around 4000 words and I am gradually understanding more spoken French. I thought that if I eventually increased my vocabulary to 20,000 words, things would start falling into place.
However, I am finding in my studies that when I am presented with an English phrase or sentence that must be translated into French, the way I translate it is no where close to what the correct translation is. Once I have learned or memorized what the correct translation is, I can pick up on it instantly and understand it when I hear it on a TV show or radio podcast. So here is my question. Since there are an infinite number of phrases, sentences, and ways to say things, and since the way I think things should be translated are so far off from what the actual translation is, must I learn a billion phrases or sentences in order to be able to understand the spoken language with any degree of fluency? Thanks for any replies. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| TixhiiDon Tetraglot Senior Member Japan Joined 5466 days ago 772 posts - 1474 votes Speaks: English*, Japanese, German, Russian Studies: Georgian | Message 2 of 43 23 January 2010 at 9:15am | IP Logged | ||
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The answer is no. What you need to learn is how French people really speak French. If you are just learning words and phrases, you will never be able to produce anything other than word-for-word translations. With French and English being relatively close, these literal translations will sometimes be correct, or at least understandable, but will more often be strange, funny, or even incomprehensible to a native speaker.
You need to be reading native materials. You don't need to make and memorize lists. If you read enough, the same phrases and words will occur over and over again, and you'll eventually get the hang of how they are used in the context of real, everyday French. You also need to speak to native speakers. You will hear them use certain phrases, and often you will think "Ah, so that's how you really say blah blah blah". Then you either forget it until you hear it a few times and it sinks in, or you remember it and use it at the next opportunity. I have no idea whatsoever how many words I know in any of my foreign languages. I have never even attempted to keep count. You need to be aiming for quality rather than quantity. 9 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Kinan Diglot Senior Member Syrian Arab Republic Joined 5568 days ago 234 posts - 279 votes Speaks: Arabic (Written)*, English Studies: Russian, Spanish | Message 3 of 43 23 January 2010 at 9:18am | IP Logged | ||
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Learning phrases and sentences are very important and you found out by yourself that knowing all the vocabulary in the language won't be enough for you to speak it properly.
You ofcourse don't have to memorize all the phrases which is impossible ofcourse, but what you can do is understand and know the structure of the sentences, and so you can translate or form any sentence using the structure of similiar sentence you heard before, so it's like knowing the samples. 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 4 of 43 23 January 2010 at 11:16am | IP Logged | ||
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FSC,
It sounds to me that you are trying to translate words rather than meaning. You probably already know that in French "I'm hungry" is "j'ai faim", and to you I expect that's just a phrase that you have memorised. Don't think of it as a phrase -- it's really an example of a little tiny rule: to the French, "hunger" and "thirst" are like diseases. (Edit: ignore that. Bad example. In that it's wrong.) So ignore people who say "learn phrases" or "learn vocabulary". What you need to do is learn the principles of the language, because that's where the meaning lies. Anything else is just translation, and you'll never be able to speak quickly if you translate all the time. Edited by Cainntear on 23 January 2010 at 10:47pm 4 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Charleston Newbie Switzerland Joined 5430 days ago 6 posts - 11 votes Speaks: French* | Message 5 of 43 23 January 2010 at 10:18pm | IP Logged | ||
What tiny little rule? Making up little rules is all very well, as long as they make sense. Do you really also say J'ai rhume, j'ai toux, j'ai grippe? Diseases in French are expressed using nouns, just like in English, but always with an article: j'ai le rhume, la toux, la grippe. Phrases are usually just a way of expressing the same idea differently in different languages: You say "I am hungry, thirsty, hot, cold" We say "I have hunger, thirst, hot, cold "(in this case chaud and froid are nouns, not adjectives), we "have" those bodily sensations. Forget about tiny rules. just learn phrases always comparing your own language structure to theirs. It is much easier to remember other people's funny ways of saying things once you've understood and tried out their way in English. The sillier a phrase or structure sounds to you in English, the readier you are to understand that your way must sound just as silly to them, in their language. And who wants to sound silly? That is why using our mother tongue to understand how a foreign language works is very, very helpful indeed, whatever adepts of a purely "direct" method might think. 4 persons have 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 43 23 January 2010 at 10:47pm | IP Logged | ||
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Thanks for the correction.
2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Splog Diglot Senior Member Czech Republic anthonylauder.c Joined 5671 days ago 1062 posts - 3263 votes Speaks: English*, Czech Studies: Mandarin | Message 7 of 43 23 January 2010 at 10:53pm | IP Logged | ||
I have to disagree with that. The "principles of the language" that you talk about are generalised patterns of the real language in use. Those rules can give you a good head start, but at the end of the day the real hard slog of learning a language is the follow-on stage of picking up the thousands of idioms that people use in real life. This is why the "intermediate stage" in language learning lasts so long; noticing and then internalising all the idiomatic phrases people use ("that's just the way we say it!") is a mammoth and long term task that cannot be leapfrogged by learning abstract principles. So, in reply to the original post, I believe that - yes - ultimately you will have to keep learning masses of words and phrases - but not all at once, and also with the expectation that it will indeed be almost endless. Edited by Splog on 23 January 2010 at 10:55pm 6 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| fsc Senior Member United States Joined 6331 days ago 100 posts - 117 votes Studies: French | Message 8 of 43 25 January 2010 at 1:16pm | IP Logged | ||
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Thanks for all the replies. It is interesting how some are so opposite of others. My experience indicates that Charleston and Splog are correct. As I mentioned, when I hear a phrase or sentence that I have learned, I instantly know it's meaning. No translating or trying to figure anything out. If an entire discussion, movie, or podcast was made up of these phrases and sentences that I know, I would be able to understand it all. I think as children learning our native language, we mimic what we hear. We aren't trying to learn the principles of the language.
Thanks Splog for the information and for giving me the facts. Had you told me it was easy, I would give up thinking I was just not capable of learning. Now that I know it is a mammoth and long term task that cannot be leapfrogged (it fits with what I am experiencing) I realize it is not my inability to learn. It amazes that so many people can speak and write English so well as a second language. I wondered how they learned it so well and if they had to just learn lots and lots of phrases and words. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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