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Picking up words from the dictionary | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Advice Center |  | |
| Toufik18 Bilingual Tetraglot Senior Member Algeria Joined 5748 days ago 188 posts - 202 votes  Speaks: Arabic (Written)*, Arabic (classical)*, French, English | Message 1 of 60 20 June 2009 at 6:01pm | IP Logged |
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Hey there :)
I set a goal for my French (basic fluency) to take to the next level by learning 20000 vocabulary in a year and a half. I reckon that the only source you can find this amount of words is obviosly the dictionary, but I am having problems considering that I am learning words alphabetically, which make me tend to mix the learnt words, for instence : words starting with aba××××× ,there are about 30 words starting like that, which mixes up the words in my mind.My question is, is it best to learn words alphabetically or you just pick random words each time? and what's the best way to gain words other then a dictio, because I don't have the time to watch or get words from the internet untile I reach 20000, it's insane and it'd take me forever. Thank you Toufik from Algeria 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Dario8015 Diglot Newbie United Kingdom Joined 6005 days ago 37 posts - 43 votes Speaks: English*, Italian Studies: Russian, Swedish | Message 2 of 60 20 June 2009 at 8:40pm | IP Logged |
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I have to say that I think this is a futile exercise - learning words alphabetically from a dictionary? Apart from the sheer tedium of such an exercise, I really can't see it working - words are learned by being set in a context - not by being 'learned' mechanically from a list.........
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| Toufik18 Bilingual Tetraglot Senior Member Algeria Joined 5748 days ago 188 posts - 202 votes Speaks: Arabic (Written)*, Arabic (classical)*, French, English | Message 3 of 60 21 June 2009 at 12:35am | IP Logged |
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True and I strongly agree, however, you can't pick 20000 vocabulary from movies or even literature !it takes an insanly long time to do that ! So for me the dictionary is indispensable, but if you have a better, quicker, and less tedious source of vocabulary, I would love to hear about it please. You see, the only way I am using this technique is because I don't want to learn 10 words a day, but like 100 words a day, and instead of wasting time picking them up from various sources, I have a well orginized 20000 essential vocabulary, so I'd rather chose that.
Thank you though for you input . 2 persons have voted this message useful | |
| Metamucil Groupie United States Joined 5879 days ago 43 posts - 51 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German | Message 4 of 60 21 June 2009 at 3:36am | IP Logged |
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one of the things I do is if I hear a word I don't know or think would be useful then I look it up and *always* write it down on a legal pad. I keep these papers and will review from time to time. We learn best in small increments over time so review often.
I believe there are books or resources out there that spell out the top xxxx number of words/verbs in a given foreign language. Maybe that's the solution , so you know for sure these words are important to the language. I'm kind of a grammer nut and would always love to look new words up, it gets boring to always use the same words so I feel looking new ones up it fun and enjoyable. bon chance! 1 person has voted this message useful | |
 Hencke Tetraglot Moderator Spain Joined 6898 days ago 2340 posts - 2444 votes Speaks: Swedish*, Finnish, EnglishC2, Spanish Studies: Mandarin Personal Language Map | Message 5 of 60 21 June 2009 at 5:57am | IP Logged |
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Where the words come from is not the main issue here. Bear in mind that memorising is not the same as internalising.
Memorising means you can parrot a translation when prompted from a list. Internalised means that the word actually has "meaning" to you, directly and on its own: you hear "horse" and the image of a horse appears in your consciousness directly, without having to flip through a mental list and provide a translation. Or you think of a horse and the word "horse" pops up by itself without taking a detour to a mental list. Memorising is not "learning", it's just a first step. You need to internalise. And to internalise you need to bang them in in context many times. Unless you are a total genius, a goal of twenty thousand vocab items in a year and a half might just be biting off more than you can chew. You could get a bigger and better impact, certainly a more permanent one, on your language skills if you cover five thousand in context, and internalise, "learn" them, rather than just memorising twenty thousand. I am also afraid you will have considerable difficulties with memory leakage, as merely memorised vocab tends to slip your mind much more easily (again, unless you are a total genius). Good luck with your efforts, whatever method you decide to follow! Edited by Hencke on 21 June 2009 at 6:01am 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| William Camden Hexaglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 6276 days ago 1936 posts - 2333 votes Speaks: English*, German, Spanish, Russian, Turkish, French | Message 6 of 60 21 June 2009 at 3:10pm | IP Logged |
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Dictionaries are a useful tool. I like carrying around pocket ones, reading them at odd moments, highlighting/underlining new and interesting vocabulary. The bigger dictionaries are good but you can't carry them about so readily.
http://de.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Datei:Vokabelheft_ Berlin_SlgKiJu.jpg&filetimestamp=20080507092449 From German Wikipedia, a photo of a child's vocabulary notebook for Latin/German, now in a museum, and apparently dating from the early 20th century. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Lizzern Diglot Senior Member Norway Joined 5913 days ago 791 posts - 1053 votes Speaks: Norwegian*, English Studies: Japanese | Message 7 of 60 21 June 2009 at 3:21pm | IP Logged |
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Hencke makes some very important points that are worth listening to. I very much doubt this will work as intended, for the reasons he mentioned. I pondered doing something similar but realized it would just be an awful lot of work for very little benefit, with little to no internalising and a huge rate of loss, and learning things without learning the context in which they might be used - not to mention it would be boring as hell. And, importantly, I'd miss out on idioms, syntactic randomness, exceptions, and so on and so forth.
Anyway. If you want to know which words you might need, then you might want to look at frequency lists and learn those. The first god-knows-how-many-thousand will come from just exposure and input anyway though so actual study of these is probably a waste. You could also look at articles from any newspaper and simply learn the words you don't know. Another thing you could try is to get a visual dictionary, mine has 20 000 words but I don't know most of these in my own language even! But you could then look for words related to things you've seen or done recently and learn those. I think if you go ahead with this you'll probably try to learn a bunch of words you're not likely to ever need (that you're likely to forget anyway) and miss out on a LOT of stuff that's actually used in the language, all the things that make it alive that a dictionary doesn't tell you. Also keep in mind that a dictionary often only tells you half the truth about what a word means - lexical meaning and actual use can be far apart. So, in summary: You're likely to get more results from your time and efforts if you go about this some other way :-) Liz Edited by Lizzern on 21 June 2009 at 3:23pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Toufik18 Bilingual Tetraglot Senior Member Algeria Joined 5748 days ago 188 posts - 202 votes Speaks: Arabic (Written)*, Arabic (classical)*, French, English | Message 8 of 60 21 June 2009 at 7:03pm | IP Logged |
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WOW !
I am so glad I started this thread! Thank you guys for your advices . Especially, thank you Hencke for you clarifications, you hinderd me from making a big mistake, I was scared to waste my time without any benifits, and that's exactly what I was going to do ! @ Lizzern Thank you for your input and you advices, how many words do you know in your native language? 1 person has voted this message useful |
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