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Picking up words from the dictionary | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Advice Center |  | |
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6703 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 25 of 60 24 June 2009 at 10:39pm | IP Logged | |||||
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hm.. the first sentence in Lizzern's post could either be extremely ironic or a sign that I'm getting too eager to tell others about my ideas. I will think about a way to become less teacherlike without getting totally invisible.
But Lizzern has raised some important and complicated issues. Let me first warn against believing the meanings you guess when you meet a word or an expression of some kind in a genuine text for the first time, - it can be used in an untypical way, or at least in a way that only represents one of its meanings. And the context will often often not be totally unambiguous. To develop a gut feeling for the meaning of that word you have to meet it again and again, and that is true whether or not you use a wordlist for the first contact with the word. So the issue is just whether you will be better equipped to deal with its ambiguities when you have memorized it with at least its core meaning, and my contention is that that this is in fact the case. The fact that the meanings of a word and of its translation do not correspond in all details is not important when you see it in this perspective. You learn a representative or core meaning, and then you can judge for yourself whether it has this meaning in a concrete context ot not, - if not then you may have to look it up again to find out whether it has other meanings, or whether it has been used in an idiomatic expression (per definition the meaning of idiomatic expression can't be reduced to the meanings of the components). But imagine that this had been your first meetning with the word, - then you would have been in trouble, maybe even without discovering it! However some words are simply too complicated to be learnt solely from wordlists. They may have a very complicated morphology, they may have several core meanings with lots of derived meanings, or their meaning may be totally diffuse. These behaviours are typical for the most common words in a language, and that's one reason for my recommandation to base your first wordlists on the words you meet in genuine texts. After a few hundred pages in a book, where you have looked up just about everything new, you have probably learnt most of these ubiquitous words. The words you learn after that stage will mostly be of the kind with one or maybe two welldefined core meanings, and when you have learnt those core meanings the rest you need to know about them can be learned by context while reading and listening. Edited by Iversen on 24 June 2009 at 10:42pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Recht Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5801 days ago 241 posts - 270 votes Speaks: English*, GermanB1 | Message 26 of 60 24 June 2009 at 10:46pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I find that to have any deep understanding, I need a dictionary translation to help me
out. There is just no way I'm going to discover the small difference between "exactly" and "precisely" on my own. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Bao Diglot Senior Member Germany tinyurl.com/pe4kqe5 Joined 5766 days ago 2256 posts - 4046 votes Speaks: German*, English Studies: French, Spanish, Japanese, Mandarin | Message 27 of 60 24 June 2009 at 11:20pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Iversen, for me words take on shape ... like when you put a coin under a piece of paper and move a pencil over the paper, so that with every stroke you can see more of the picture on the coin.
It doesn't matter if I see a word first in a dictionary or in a text; I still will need more of those strokes to make it visible to me. Recht: Do a google search on both. Take note of the way either word is used in the first hundred search results. That's the way it can work. On the other hand, there are many cases where looking into a dictionary is a nice shortcut. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Recht Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5801 days ago 241 posts - 270 votes Speaks: English*, GermanB1 | Message 28 of 60 24 June 2009 at 11:34pm | IP Logged | |||||
I agree, context is very important, and a dictionary can rarely teach that. But the context method seems more to be polishing, through use of original texts, movies etc rather than the early stages of simply acquiring the words (the stages that are currently relevant to me). 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
 Hencke Tetraglot Moderator Spain Joined 6894 days ago 2340 posts - 2444 votes Speaks: Swedish*, Finnish, EnglishC2, Spanish Studies: Mandarin Personal Language Map | Message 29 of 60 24 June 2009 at 11:41pm | IP Logged | |||||
That is an absolutely brilliant analogy Bao! And it is exactly the way it is. Dictionary lookup, or any kind of memorisation, is just good for putting that coin in place under the paper. After that you need stroke after stroke from the real-life context pencil until the coin starts showing all its delicate features and the word starts feeling like a close and trusted friend. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Lizzern Diglot Senior Member Norway Joined 5909 days ago 791 posts - 1053 votes Speaks: Norwegian*, English Studies: Japanese | Message 30 of 60 25 June 2009 at 12:08am | IP Logged | |||||
Wasn't being snarky! I'm just amazed at your capacity to learn the way you do. I've seen your word count chart. Don't change. Sounds like we've more or less got the same approach to how we can grasp the true meaning of a word, except for how I still can't handle studying wordlists thanks to the German classes I had to take in school (yay). Someday I might... Thanks for all your comments everyone! 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Splog Diglot Senior Member Czech Republic anthonylauder.c Joined 5669 days ago 1062 posts - 3263 votes Speaks: English*, Czech Studies: Mandarin | Message 31 of 60 25 June 2009 at 1:39pm | IP Logged | |||||
Yet sometimes the dictionary can give you the opposite problem. As a near random example, the word "zůstat" in Czech is invariably defined in bi-lingual dictionaries as "to stay" (or, in lesser dictionaries as "to stop"). However, as you encounter the word "zůstat" used in practice, you realize over time that it more often is used to mean "to remain". The difference is subtle, but the difference is certainly there. In cases like this, relying primarily on the dictionary definition can be somewhat misleading, whereas more subtle distinctions (or "deep understanding" in your words) really only come out from seeing the word in real use many times in a wide range of contexts. Edited by Splog on 25 June 2009 at 1:41pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| William Camden Hexaglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 6272 days ago 1936 posts - 2333 votes Speaks: English*, German, Spanish, Russian, Turkish, French | Message 32 of 60 25 June 2009 at 2:17pm | IP Logged | |||||
Collins dictionaries in the late 1970s started a trend towards more clear explanations of word connotations. Before that, you would get a series of different definitions separated by colons or semi-colons, which did not tell you much. Having said that, no dictionary perfectly tells you all about a word. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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