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When can one adopt a native dictionary? | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Learning Techniques, Methods & Strategies | ( Topic Closed) |  |
| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5365 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes  Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 17 of 124 16 November 2011 at 5:48am | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||
Why should you start using a grammar book in the native language? The number one reason, as I mentioned, is that if you want to use the language from a native perspective you have to use the tools that natives use. A learner's grammar in your native language of course is fine to start with, but at some point you want to starting using the language to acquire knowledge of the target language in the target language. Really, it's basically the same reason why, after taking classes on your target language, you should take classes on other subjects but in your target language. For example, take a course in your professional field in the target language. Then the language is no longer an object of study per se but a medium of study. I want to take particular exception to this statement: "A native grammar aims at teaching grammar awareness, i.e. showing the native speaker what they already know instinctively, as well as pointing out dialectal deviations to help them consciously write in a more standard way." What grammar books is Cainntear referring to? This is blatantly wrong. There are different types of grammar books of course. Some are purely descriptive and are reference works. For example, the classic reference work in French is Maurice Grevisse's Le bon usage. The aim of this book has nothing to do with what Cainntear has just said. As the title implies, it is a guide to proper modern French grammar based on observations of the usage of trustworthy authors of French literature. It is the authority in matters of usage. If you have a question or a doubt about a particular point of French grammar, then you turn to Grevisse. For example, if you want to know if the subjunctive mood is used after "je veux bien que...", you look it up and you'll see a description of the rule and examples illustrating the various usages. Other grammars are academic works that cater to scientific interests. For example, I have in front of me Longman's Grammar of Spoken And Written English. This is a fabulous work, but not really aimed a general audience. Still other grammar books are more pedagogical in orientation and are meant more for teaching. So, they will have exercises and a formal learning sequence. I find it is useful to learn the terminology of grammar of grammar of the target language if you ever have to talk about grammar with native speakers. You want to be able to talk about things like subordinate clauses and the various tenses when necessary. And it's also interesting to see the difficulties that native speakers face. French for example has a long tradition of dictionaries of difficulties that a very useful. I would strong recommend that people here disregard that completely irrelevant statement by Cainntear and consider acquiring native grammar reference works as soon as the feel they can handle it. I just want to remind people that the number one difficulty we have in learning a foreign language as adults is that we inevitably try to speak the language "through" our native language. This is because we are translating from L1 to L2. You want to avoid this kind of translating as much as possible and start acquiring a native-like perspective. And what better way than to use the tools that the natives use. This is not for beginners of course, but the sooner the better. Edited by s_allard on 16 November 2011 at 5:51am 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||||||||
| Ari Heptaglot Senior Member Norway Joined 6517 days ago 2314 posts - 5695 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Mandarin, Cantonese Studies: Czech, Latin, German | Message 18 of 124 16 November 2011 at 7:38am | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||
People at HTLAL is hardly a representative sample, of course. But yeah, I don't have a monodic (emphasis on the first 'o', so different from the other word "monodic", though spelled the same) in Swedish, nor in English. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||||||||
| Tamise Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom jllrr.wordpress.com/ Joined 5178 days ago 115 posts - 161 votes Speaks: English*, German, Dutch Studies: French, Japanese, Spanish | Message 19 of 124 16 November 2011 at 7:53am | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||
Thanks for the reference to this. My current bilingual Dutch-English dictionary is from the Dutch publisher Prisma, and has no definite articles anywhere. I suppose it makes perfect sense, as a Dutch speaker doesn't need to care about de and het when speaking English. I've been using WikiWoordenboek to get genders, but a paper book's always good for when the internet goes down! I studied German at university - in first year we were required to get a large bilingual dictionary, but in final year we were required to got a monolingual dictionary. I used it more than I expected to get nuances of words, and to look up some words that just weren't in the monolingual. (And for checking spelling, but that's because the bilingual book was pre-spelling reform.) 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||||||||
| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5365 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 20 of 124 16 November 2011 at 2:08pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||
If most native speakers of a language don't have or consult dictionaries of their own language, I wonder why publishers bother producing them. The situation must be different in Sweden. Most secretaries and offices that I have seen have a dictionary handy. I can hardly imagine a law office without a dictionary. I guess the question is really whether native speakers ever have the need to consult such reference works. Obviously, if one knows all the words and their proper usage in the language, there is no need for a dictionary. Let me give an example of where a dictionary comes in handy. About a month ago, I had the following exchange with Iversen over his use of the adverb "herostratically."
How many people here have ever seen this word? No English-French dictionary contained an entry for this word. Even my old compact Oxford Dictionary of the English Language did not contain it. I did eventually find it in some online monolingual dictionaries. Now, the interesting thing here is the comparison of the definition in the dictionaries that all said the same thing with Iversen's usage. Just what exactly makes Scandinavian tour guides herostratically famous? Here is the answer:
It turns out that Iversen is referring to the fact that the tour guides insert words from the other Scandinavian languages when speaking to mixed-language groups. I personally would have said something like, "notably famous" or "widely famous" or simply "notorious", but I think that Iversen's usage was probably tongue in cheek or meant to be ironic. In cases like this, that monolingual dictionary is very useful. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||||||||
| aloysius Triglot Winner TAC 2010 & 2012 Senior Member SwedenRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6175 days ago 226 posts - 291 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English, German Studies: French, Greek, Italian, Russian | Message 21 of 124 16 November 2011 at 5:35pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||
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My bilingual English-Swedish dictionary has no entry for herostratically but in
the other direction I find the translations make oneself notorious [for ones wicked deeds] and achieve unenviable notoriety for bli herostratiskt ryktbar (literally become herostratically famous). I'm definitely familiar with the Swedish expression but unsure of the usage of its English verbatim equivalent. And yes, I have paper and electronic monodics for Swedish, German and English but I seldom use them. Maybe it's because I'm always curious of how things in L2 are expressed in L1. Granted, it might hurt my fluency but I've always been fond of a comparative approach and it has the positive side-effect of strengthening my L1. /aloysius 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||||||||
| Ari Heptaglot Senior Member Norway Joined 6517 days ago 2314 posts - 5695 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Mandarin, Cantonese Studies: Czech, Latin, German | Message 22 of 124 16 November 2011 at 6:27pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||
Hang on, are you actually suggesting that a book is only worth producing if at least half the native speakers will buy it?
I don't think it is. I don't know if most people have a dictionary at home, but I do know there are lots of people who don't. Most people I know will, if they encounter a word they're unfamiliar with, shrug their shoulders and keep reading. If there's someone nearby, they might go "Hey Jenny! What's 'herostratically' mean?". Hell, my girlfriend would be pretty hard pressed to even find a monodic for her native language Cantonese, and yet she is an educated and fluent native speaker who uses her language in speech and in writing every single day. This is of course a different issue altogether. I believe Caintear's point was that most people don't learn the meaning of the vast majority of the words they know through looking them up in a dictionary, so we can't claim that we should look them up in a monodic in order to mimic the native experience. Because that's not the native experience in the vast majority of cases. It IS the way natives will learn the meaning of complicated and rare words after they have become perfectly fluent and aqcuired an already vast vocabulary, but that's hardly what happens when a second language learner uses a monodic. I'm suspicious of any claim that comes from the "you shouldn't translate" mindset if it's not supported by evidence, and in this case we're not mimicking the native experience, even if we did have a reason to want to do so. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||||||||
| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5365 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 23 of 124 16 November 2011 at 7:07pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||
Thanks for clarifying what Cainntear meant because I certainly didn't understand what he had written. My argument essentially is simply that learning definitions in the target language is conducive to thinking and speaking in the that language, plus you get a lot of other useful information in monolingual dictionaries. It's not more complicated than that. Other people here say the same thing. Nobody is saying that the only way natives acquire vocabulary is through dictionaries. Now, if your bilingual dictionaries provide everything you need, that's fine too. Edited by s_allard on 16 November 2011 at 7:08pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||||||||
| Cainntear Pentaglot Senior Member Scotland linguafrankly.blogsp Joined 5946 days ago 4399 posts - 7687 votes Speaks: Lowland Scots, English*, French, Spanish, Scottish Gaelic Studies: Catalan, Italian, German, Irish, Welsh | Message 24 of 124 16 November 2011 at 7:31pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||
I know even fewer people who have grammar books in their own language than people who have a dictionary in their own language.
Why? If we disregard the spurious argument of "native perspective" (because the native learns his language through exposure and usage, not through study), what reason do we have left?
Grevisse is a prescriptive work. Maybe the latest edition is better, but it comes from a tradition of grammars written by people who think they know better than the average speaker -- people who are happy to declare that normal usage is wrong. We've had this in English -- people have tried to tell me not to "split my infinitives" or to "end a sentence with a preposition", for example. This isn't what a learner wants.
I can't argue with that. However, you don't need a grammar to be entirely in the target language in order to learn the terminology.
Funnily enough, I would also strongly recommend that they ignore your advice -- you can take that as given, seeing as we disagree. I don't know why you take so much pleasure in pointing out that you don't understand me, or why you need to state so explicitly that you disagree. Everyone disagrees, but most people don't make such a big thing of it. I mean, seriously, you just responded twice to one of my messages, stating that I'm categorically wrong, but giving the same assertions that you always give. But you offer no proof for your assertions. How can you have the sheer brass neck to stand there and shout down my arguments as wrong if you're not even willing to argue against them, but simply restate what you've already said and pick at a few minor points in my post?
You keep saying this, I keep disagreeing, you keep telling me I'm wrong. But you don't give a mechanism. I have seen no proof whatsoever that using a different language for explanations leads to "translating", and I see no logical argument for it. I have seen evidence of people translating even in monolingual classrooms. I don't "translate" from a word or a structure to the "explanation/definition" in L1->L1, or L2->L2, (ie if I look up Filibuster in the English dictionary, I don't recall the entire dictionary definition in order to use the word) so why would I do so for L1->L2? Feel free to debate this point, but if you haven't got a more sophisticated argument than "Cainntear is wrong", let's just accept that we've both stated our points of view and leave it at that, OK? 1 person has voted this message useful |
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