|
 |
Reading a Dictionary | ||
Share with:
| ||
 Language Learning Forum : Learning Techniques, Methods & Strategies |  | |
| Shibo77 Tetraglot Newbie China Joined 6839 days ago 5 posts - 6 votes Speaks: Mandarin*, Esperanto, EnglishC2, FrenchB2 Studies: German, Spanish, Russian, Arabic (Written) | Message 9 of 22 06 March 2006 at 1:23pm | IP Logged | |||||
|
Well you generalize correctly, I did indeed memorise a dictionary, as did my parent when they learnt English. I read the dictionary like the Bible/Qu'ran. I know it is a bad method, but it sets me in the feel/mood of the language, not to mention many obscure words that just happen to be headwords on a page, and also I feel that every little bit helps. There are many random obscure words you would probably never learn simply by reading a newspaper, but are quite catchy to learn and memorise. They may seem boring, but to me any vocabulary learning is much better than grammar learning, which is basically conforming your brain to a specific logic.To me learning vocabulary, is registering new sounds in your brain and linking them to an already existing group of sounds(phonemes). You may only know "flower" connected with the meaning of a colourful thing atop a plant. Learn a new word "fleur", "flor", "Blume", and your databank of phonemes representing the idea of a colourful thing atop a plant increases, which is exciting to me. Then again, I'm a rather unexciting person...
I also think that learning a lot of vocabulary, even if you don't know how to use it in context, it conveys much more than a person who knows a lot of grammar and not much vocabulary. "flower" conveys much more than "the thing which grows atop a plant" In the end, the challenge of learning a language lies in its huge vocabulary. I have a friend who memorised a German dictionary of 35000 headwords, and got the Sprachdiplom. Consequently, he forgot a lot of the words, but he still knows a lot more than most, and is near native fluency. Memorising words is very intensive and compact, and doesn't take a lot of time as you would memorising about 20 after each lesson, or memorising one at a time reading a book or a newspaper. However I wouldn't recommend it unless you really have to cram for a test, has great memory, or you really like learning vocabulary. -Shibo77 Edited by Shibo77 on 06 March 2006 at 1:29pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Kubelek Tetraglot Senior Member Switzerland chomikuj.pl/Kuba_wal Joined 6851 days ago 415 posts - 528 votes  Speaks: Polish*, EnglishC2, French, Spanish Studies: German | Message 10 of 22 06 March 2006 at 4:18pm | IP Logged | |||||
|
phew, I though I'm the only one who does that. I've never gone too far trying to read it cover to cover (letter C, i think). However, I end up reading few pages every time I look up a word.
I don't mind long lists of words - that's how I learned most of my English vocabulary. It's the similarity of words in the dictionary that sometimes puts me off. The whole page of words may be similar. I get better results by memorizing lists of totally unconnected vocabulary from self-made lists (I know it's not the best method :) ) Now I make the first attempt to get used to index cards. Once more, I cover it with 15 words on each side, because I don't want to run out cards too soon (which kills the purpose, but it works) 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| maxb Diglot Senior Member Sweden Joined 7182 days ago 536 posts - 589 votes 7 sounds Speaks: Swedish*, English Studies: Mandarin | Message 11 of 22 07 March 2006 at 2:28am | IP Logged | |||||
Well nouns like flower, satellite, bus, megahertz, headphones you could learn from a dictionary without much problem. The problem is with words which may have different meanings in different contexts. Furthermore languages don't map directly to one another. I cannot take an English sentence and translate it word for word into chinese (while adjusting the grammar to chinese of course) and expect it to sound anything like colloquial chinese. Example: "We will not be able to send it you before next week". If your translate this directly it will be something like : "我们不会能下个 星期之前奇给你 的。" This sentence doesn't make much sense to me. I would translate it as: "我们下个星期才 能奇给你" or "我们 不 能 下 个星 期之前奇给你" In order to learn these things you just have to observe the language as it apperas in books and movies. Things are simply said differently in different languages and this cannot be learnt by simply memorizing grammar rules and dicitionaries. Edited by maxb on 07 March 2006 at 4:47am 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
 Hencke Tetraglot Moderator Spain Joined 6893 days ago 2340 posts - 2444 votes Speaks: Swedish*, Finnish, EnglishC2, Spanish Studies: Mandarin Personal Language Map | Message 12 of 22 07 March 2006 at 4:13am | IP Logged | |||||
I have had this happen too. Putting a space between each character helped. But I can't see anything weird above in your text. As seen at this end, the two last sentences both end in 给 你 gei3 ni3 (for you). Perhaps it is the two before that, that are neng2 xia4 ? (I only know the neng2 one, the next one I haven't learned yet - EDIT: Please ignore this last bit. The fourth from the end is 前qian2, not neng2 - I mixed them up.) Edited by Hencke on 07 March 2006 at 4:49am 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| maxb Diglot Senior Member Sweden Joined 7182 days ago 536 posts - 589 votes 7 sounds Speaks: Swedish*, English Studies: Mandarin | Message 13 of 22 07 March 2006 at 4:46am | IP Logged | |||||
Oops, sorry I managed to fix the weirdness but forgot to remove the comment. I'll edit the post now. Edited by maxb on 07 March 2006 at 4:48am 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| andee Tetraglot Senior Member Japan Joined 7076 days ago 681 posts - 724 votes 3 sounds Speaks: English*, German, Korean, French | Message 14 of 22 08 March 2006 at 2:30am | IP Logged | |||||
|
Some Koreans learning English tend to not only read a dictionary, but they fully 'digest' what they have learnt.
Yes, they tear the page out after memorising it and eat it.. This apparently internalises the words. One of my Korean lecturers told us about this, and it's actually evident in the Korean movie JSA - although only briefly, so you have to be on the lookout; I did laugh when I saw it though. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Linas Octoglot Senior Member Lithuania Joined 6911 days ago 253 posts - 279 votes 5 sounds Speaks: Lithuanian*, Russian, Latvian, French, English, German, Spanish, Polish Studies: Slovenian, Greek, Hungarian, Arabic (Written), Portuguese | Message 15 of 22 09 March 2006 at 4:39am | IP Logged | |||||
|
There are some dictionaries who are more useful for that purpose than other, eg. which give abundant usage examples or model sentences for every or the most of its entries. But a dictionary is definetely is less useful if it is a mere wordlist(and it is both for translatiuon and for learning words). One could use, of course, even such dictionary for committing words to memory, but this activity must be abundantly suplemented by reading texts.
Anyway, I do not think that it is possible to properly learn language without learning words from dictionary, because the number of words that you meet while reading is necessarily very limited in relation to the entire vocabulary. If you merely learn what you meet in booiks you vocabulary will necessarily remain very limited, except in the case you consume books of very varied genres by hundreds. And I do not believe that you should need only some 3000 words in order to understand the 95% of the sense. This is true in relation to the active vocabulary of the spoken colloquial language only, but if you try to read serious books you have to know at least 10000 words in order to read without too frequent use of dictionary. It is especially true if you learn such language which is not very transparent, eg. if you know english and try to learn thai, mandarin or arabic If you have to use dictionary too frequently, reading soon becomes a very boring and unpleasant activity. Some people say that you shall try to guess the unknown words you meet, but as far as I am concerned in the most cases when I try such guess it is just wrong, or very unprecise and approximative in the best case. I have often tried to verify such guess by the help of dictionary, so I know what I say. In this way you can only learn many wrong meaning for words. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| maxb Diglot Senior Member Sweden Joined 7182 days ago 536 posts - 589 votes 7 sounds Speaks: Swedish*, English Studies: Mandarin | Message 16 of 22 09 March 2006 at 11:58am | IP Logged | |||||
Doesn't that depend on what books you read? I have heard for instance that the Swedish author "August Strindberg" used over 100000 different words in his work. So I guess if you were studying Swedish and learnt all of those words you would have a pretty decent vocabulary (Better than mine probably) :-). I'm working with a couple of chinese books now and I think the amount of words you can learn from books is amazing. For instance here are some of the chinese words I have picked up from my reading "megahertz, FM, wireless microphone, solder, scratch an itch, gamble, pond, thigh, curtain, headphones, grammophone, communications satellite, nuclear submarine, ridge between fields, ladle". Many of these are definetely useful I think. My main problem with reading the dictionary (except that is mind numbingly boring) is that I don't know which words to learn and which to skip. I could be wasting a lot of effort learning words which most native chinese speakers don't even know. Whereas if I learn words which occur in modern literature written for native chinese speakers those words are likely to be rather useful. 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. |
