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When can one adopt a native dictionary? | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Learning Techniques, Methods & Strategies | ( Topic Closed) |  |
| 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 49 of 124 20 November 2011 at 7:51pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
I admire your dedication in writing these long posts, s_allard. You write clearly what you mean and that makes it easy to have a fruitful discussion. I wish I had the time or patience to write a suitably long reply to you, but I want to get back to my language learning. I'll do my best to explain my thoughts, however.
I just meant that the goal is to understand the word, not to just read about it. This was followed by my assertion that you'll understand it better if you read about it in your native language than if you read about it in the language you're learning. Sorry if I was unclear.
Absolutely. I'd hesitate to use a dictionary that doesn't provide rich usage examples and collocations with translations. Of course, this is more important for some words than for others. Your example of AIDS seems to me to be pretty straightforward in usage, whereas "regarder" is much more complex. A bilingual dictionary that simply states that "regarder" means "to see" is a crap dictionary and should be replaced. Actually, looking up "SIDA" in a French monodic will possibly leave you with a very incomplete understanding. You'll know "It's some kind of venerial disease" without knowing much more. Looking it up in a bilingual dictionary will tell you it's AIDS and you'll know a whole lot about that already. Now, regarding usage and surrounding vocabulary. I'm as interested as you in expanding my vocabulary; the difference is that I don't use the dictionary for this, but rather reading, listening, watching. I see two usage examples here: 1: I come across the word "SIDA" in my reading (or in a TV series or similar). The word will not show up on its own, but rather in context, and through that context I'll get lots of words for discussing AIDS, since, well, "discussing AIDS" is just what the text does! I don't need my dictionary for this; I'll get my context from the text (and from future texts when I encounter the word again). 2: I want to discuss AIDS and I look it up in my bilingual dictionary. Well, first of all, I can't even do this with a monolingual dictionary, so this isn't really a comparison, as the learner is forced to use the bilingual dictionary here (I do understand you're not advocating using the monodic in isolation). A good bilingual dictionary will give you a bunch of usage examples and these will give you some surrounding vocabulary, much like a monodic does.
Yes, I agree with this. It's a problem one faces as a language learner.
I also like watching television, reading books and newspapers and listening to songs. I believe most learners here do. Please do not equate this with using a monodic. I do all those things and I don't use one. Native usage will rub off through expose, as you say, and this will happen with or without the monolingual dictionary. The extra exposure the dictionary gives you is pretty small, and in my opinion not worth the tradeoff when it comes to a lack of understanding. In brief, I agree with what you're saying here, but it has nothing to do with using a monodic. Now, if you're saying you can use a monodic to look up some stuff and find out related vocab, I can see that this usage would have a point. It's not necessary to do it, as you'll usually get a lot of related vocab both in a good bilingual dictionary and in the context where you found the word from the beginning. But I can't say it's a stupid thing to do. You study the text in the monodic instead of some other text and hey! It's all text in your target language. You'll want to look up those words you find in a good bilingual dictionary, too, though. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| tommus Senior Member CanadaRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5801 days ago 979 posts - 1688 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Dutch, French, Esperanto, German, Spanish | Message 50 of 124 20 November 2011 at 9:34pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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I use a monolingual Dutch Van Dale electronic dictionary with a bilingual Dutch-English
electronic dictionary. By highlighting any word in the monolingual dictionary, I get the bilingual dictionary translation(s). It is very fast and it combines the best of both worlds. 1 person has 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 51 of 124 20 November 2011 at 11:03pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
I'm sorry, but that's a massive leap of logic. No-one here will deny that learning a new phonological system is difficult, and no-one here will deny that learning new grammar is difficult. Almost everyone here accepts that native-language-interference exists. What we challenge is the notion that use of native language in instruction increases the native language interference. I personally believe that the opposite is true: that lack of native-language instruction means a lack of clear and unambiguous descriptions, and that this leads the student to make incorrect generalisations. Good descriptions in the native language can show where the boundary between uses lie. For example, Gaelic has two sets of numbers: numbers for people and numbers for everything else. That's a clear description. Easy. Celtic languages uses verbal nouns a lot where other languages use true verbs. You can't use a pronoun as a direct object to a verbal noun -- you have to use a possessive adjective/determiner. So not "I am shooting him", but "I am at/in his shooting". I watched people try to generalise that from examples without explanation in Welsh, whereas I was explicitly told it was the possessive when I learned Gaelic. They had more problems than me. But of course it only works if done well, like anything. 2 persons have 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 52 of 124 21 November 2011 at 5:09am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
How did this enter into the discussion? Nobody is saying that the use of native language in instruction increases the native language interference. For heaven sake, we're talking about the use of monolingual materials to supplement bilingual materials. 3 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 53 of 124 21 November 2011 at 9:38am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
How did this enter into the discussion? Ari said that he didn't believe the line given by many teachers that bilingual materials lead to translation. You then appeared to counter that by saying that there was plenty of proof that translation was a problem. I assumed you were trying to disagree, because otherwise your was statement was irrelevant to the discussion at hand. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6638 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 54 of 124 21 November 2011 at 10:11am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
Now you lost me! Anybody who really believes in the extreme natural method presumably do so because he/she believes that the use of native language in instruction increases the native language interference. Otherwise it simply wouldn't make sense to exclude good information sources in languages which you actually understand. On the other hand, those who accept "the use of monolingual materials to supplement bilingual materials" clearly don't belong to the extreme natural method camp, so in some form they must believe that you won't be seriously affected by a certain amount of L1 during your studying. Personally I fully agree with Cainntear and others about the usefulness of comprehensible explanations, namely that you can see problems vanish before your very eyes if you just get an explanation you can understand. But I also think that you sometimes need to do extensive reading/listening with minimal L1 interference in order to train your ability to absorb input. It is a question about deciding what you actually are doing at a given moment. 4 persons have 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 55 of 124 21 November 2011 at 2:18pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
For the life of me, I don't know why this discussion is morphing into a debate on the effects on using native-language materials on L1-L2 interference. Who mentioned the "extreme natural method"? Certainly not me. It seems to me that the focus of the thread has been until recently the potential value of using monolingual dictionaries (and, to a lesser degree, monolingual reference works) in the target language. Nobody has suggested throwing out bilingual materials. Nobody has suggested that explanations in the native language are detrimental, useless or increase L1-L2 interference. If I can summarize my position in simple terms, it is this. Monolingual reference works--dictionaries and grammars--add a layer of information and perspective, i.e. explanations and definitions IN the target language than can supplement what is found in bilingual materials. Why is this so hard to understand? If you are learning a language and you have to choose between a bilingual and a monolingual dictionary, you should choose the bilingual one, of course. If you are at a relatively good level and you want start using the target language as a medium of instruction, you should look to monolingual materials TO ADD to your collection of learning materials. Everybody here has a shelf full of learning materials on their target language(s): software, methods, websites, dictionaries, grammar books, audio materials, reading materials, etc. I'm sure most people have some monolingual materials in the target language: a novel, a magazine, a printout from the Internet, etc. Is this a problem? Of course not. All these materials make up your toolbox. Why not add a monolingual dictionary to your toolbox if you feel it can add value to the learning process? I have given a few reasons why I feel monolingual dictionaries and grammars are useful. If you feel that monolingual materials are of little added value, save your money. Edited by s_allard on 21 November 2011 at 8:08pm 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| trance0 Pentaglot Groupie Slovenia Joined 5685 days ago 52 posts - 78 votes Speaks: Slovenian*, English, German, Croatian, Serbian | Message 56 of 124 21 November 2011 at 10:51pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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There is also a problem with the lack of quality bilingual dictionaries for some smaller
languages like my native Slovene. I have yet to find a good enough bilingual dictionary for English and German or something comparable to DWDS, Duden, Cambridge etc. monolingual dictionaries in terms of grammar, context examples, idiomatic expressions, etymology of words etc. I believe we native speakers of 'small languages' are at a disadvantage and often have no other choice but to make use of monolingual dictionaries which are the only ones that contain enough information about proper usage of words, expressions, etc. Edited by trance0 on 21 November 2011 at 11:00pm 3 persons have voted this message useful |
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