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Specific words and where to find them? | ||
Tags: Finnish | Vocabulary learning | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Advice Center |  | |
| Chris13 Groupie FinlandRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4051 days ago 53 posts - 64 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: Swedish, Finnish | Message 1 of 10 24 October 2013 at 11:27am | IP Logged |
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Hey guys,
I have had a passion for languages for a long time now though I've never fully committed to learning one to fluency, I always dabbled in various languages so as to be able to communicate with people from around the globe and pick up cultural information from various countries. I recently moved from England to Finland, I know a reasonable amount of Finnish, at least enough to get the gist of conversations with a little context at hand, etc. The trouble is, I am finding the grammar very difficult for my first proper foreign language - I say "proper" as I learned a little Spanish at school, though those of you familiar with the English education system will know that language-wise it's a bit of a joke. After looking at various learning methods and trying to find one that would fit my needs and allocated time, I decided to go further with flash cards and word lists. I've always used Byki for key words and found that it has worked wonders with basic vocab in Finnish. Now, for the main question; where exactly do you get your lists of words from to learn? I have searched the web for frequency lists and usually come up with nothing that would be that useful. I was wondering if somebody could, perhaps, put up a list of what would be the first 5 - 10,000 words to try and commit to memory. I have often read that, yes, it obviously depends on the specific learner, however there must still be a generalised list of the most frequently used words out there somewhere, surely? I realise that even if there is, a lot of you probably wouldn't advise trying to learn them all in that way, but it's something that I'd like to have. I could still pick out the words I deem most useful to me out of those words. I found a list of the most frequently used words in English, for the top 500 which I have already made flashcards of. Any help would be greatly appreciated. Also, I realise that due to Finnish having a lot of suffixes, etc that there will be words that cannot be translated. I mention this as I am also attempting to teach myself Swedish, spending a little more time on Swedish currently than Finnish so that I'm able to communicate with at least a couple of people. P.S Apologies for rambling, this is my first post and I've never really written in a forum like this before. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Emme Triglot Senior Member Italy Joined 5347 days ago 980 posts - 1594 votes Speaks: Italian*, English, German Studies: Russian, Swedish, French | Message 2 of 10 24 October 2013 at 2:16pm | IP Logged |
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First of all, welcome to the forum!
I’m not learning Finnish so I can only offer limited help, but are you aware of this frequency list? It lists the 9996 most common lemma assembled from Finnish printed news in 2004. From what I can see, the list is the same that is published on Wiktionary, but my computer hangs on this page, so open it with caution. Anyway, should you ever need a frequency list, this page on Wiktionary is a good starting point as it links to several frequency lists for numerous languages. I hope this helps and good luck with Finnish! 2 persons have voted this message useful | |
| Cavesa Triglot Senior Member Czech Republic Joined 5009 days ago 3277 posts - 6779 votes Speaks: Czech*, FrenchC2, EnglishC1 Studies: Spanish, German, Italian | Message 3 of 10 24 October 2013 at 2:30pm | IP Logged |
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Welcome to the forums!
Some vocab resources ideas: 1.A textbook. A well constructed textbook should give you a base to put into your byki. A few thousand words to get you well started. 2.Frequency and similar lists. However, there is a trouble. They are often the most frequent newspaper words. And even if they are the most often spoken words, there are not the usual understood words. So, these lists are a good tool but probably not enough by themselves. 3.A thematic dictionary. There are a few quite good ones. There is a series of illustrated dictionaries that could have even Finnish as it has got other less common languages, sorry I can't remember the publisher. But these often don't have verbs at all. So a specific verb book can be a source of both grammar and vocabulary. 4.Wikipedia and similar sources for thematic vocabulary. 5.A classical tourist aimed conversation guide. However, there are plenty on the market for any language and only a few are usually good quality ones. 6.Specific vocabulary book for your level. But this might be a bit tricky to find when it comes to Finnish. These are a few ideas from my experience with languages in general. However, for Finnish in particular, you might want to look at threads and logs by people learning or knowing Finnish, such as Chung. Or add "Finnish" to the name of the thread to catch their attention :-) 2 persons have voted this message useful | |
 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 4 of 10 24 October 2013 at 3:02pm | IP Logged |
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I use wordlists, but not RSR systems like Anki, Byki or flashcards. However the question of sources is probably the same. And the answer is that I may use a textbook for a short while to get extremely simple texts in a new language, and then it would of course be silly not to add words from the wordlists in that textbook to my own wordlists. But as soon as possible I switch to intensive work with genuine texts, preferably using bilingual printouts. That means that I cease to use prefabricated wordlists because my needs are amply served by the new words I get from my study materials.
When I then feel I have got some feeling fora new language I inevitably get to the stage where it irritates me no end to look words up all over the dictionary, and then I supplement the textbased wordlists with lists based directly on a dictionary (always from the target language to my own language, because I then get some help from the alphabetical order). And other kinds of lists? Well, thematic sources are mostly just bare lists without any further information, and I find them totally worthless. I may include excerpts from language guides in my wordlists, but otherwise the only kind of thematic sources I might use would be specialized articles or books, where I get some information about each item. Otherwise I would be better served by my dictionaries, where there normally is a minimum of morphological and idiomatic information. And the same applies to frequency lists - if a word is so common that I definitely must learn it, then I definitely also will meet it during my studies in real texts, and then I don't need a list. Or maybe I'll even learn such words from a grammar, because very common words more often that not have weird morphological, syntactic and idiomatic behaviours. Edited by Iversen on 24 October 2013 at 3:17pm 3 persons have voted this message useful | |
| Chung Diglot Senior Member Joined 7156 days ago 4228 posts - 8259 votes 20 sounds Speaks: English*, French Studies: Polish, Slovak, Uzbek, Turkish, Korean, Finnish | Message 5 of 10 24 October 2013 at 8:18pm | IP Logged |
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I place the most emphasis on getting a textbook loaded with dialogues/narratives, exercises and audio when learning a language by myself. The vocabulary as a matter of course will come as I work through a textbook (not to mention when being forced to deal with the target language be it with native speakers or authentic materials such as short stories or video segements).
Pictorial dictionaries are often arranged by themes and so might be up your alley even though I treat them as supplements in my studies since I learn better when using new words (rather than merely seeing them adjacent to an iilustration or photograph) as assigned and introduced in a course's textbook. Here's a visual English-Finnish dictionary that's online and free to use, while here's a site of flashcards in Finnish. Related to the second website is this image bank which has illustrations and photographs for various concepts and nouns which in turn are arranged by word class (e.g. Verbit "verbs") or semantic theme (e.g. Kasvit "plants"). All captions are in Finnish so you'll have to guess from the picture what the caption means if you don't want to look up the caption's meaning in a Finnish-English dictionary. An example of a pictorial dictionary in hard copy that covers Finnish is this one for which every photo or illustration has a caption in each of English, French, German, Spanish and Finnish. As for Finnish thematic dictionaries, I don't know of any that arrange words by semantic fields or concepts/classificatory schemes that suit our perceptions of our environments. Then again I've really only been interested in such dictionaries for slang or dialectalisms and even then these are remarkable for their focus on a particular register or set of phrases or words that are non-standard. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |
| Ari Heptaglot Senior Member Norway Joined 6582 days ago 2314 posts - 5695 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Mandarin, Cantonese Studies: Czech, Latin, German | Message 6 of 10 24 October 2013 at 8:39pm | IP Logged |
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Anki (a popular SRS program) has finished flashcard decks created by other users that you can download. Chances are good there are some great Finnish decks in there.
2 persons have voted this message useful | |
| Cavesa Triglot Senior Member Czech Republic Joined 5009 days ago 3277 posts - 6779 votes Speaks: Czech*, FrenchC2, EnglishC1 Studies: Spanish, German, Italian | Message 7 of 10 24 October 2013 at 11:32pm | IP Logged |
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A small tip: When you are using a resource giving you too little context for your words
(or in a lot of other situations), google the word. No need for google translate, just google. You will get websites where the word is used in real sentences, you may get related pictures or even videos. Sometimes, you get links to monolingual dictionaries or thesauri as well or related wikipedia and similar articles leading to related words. The opportunities are endless. So, there is no need to be afraid of picture dictionaries, frequency or thematic lists and similar tools. Especially as you have much narrower choice than learners of the giant languages. And what I failed to include: real sources. I learnt quite a lot even during my first shopping in a German supermarkt. The same goes for a lot of other situations where everyday vocabulary appears. You are in the country, use the opportunity. Use even the smallest bits you learnt, read Finnish instructions on spaghetti, get used to greeting and thanking in Finnish and so on. Just small steps in the beginning but you will surely improve really fast. Perhaps you might like to start a log. :-) I would be thrilled to follow your progress, and I am sure I wouldn't be the only one by far, and you could get a lot of advice and encouragement when needed. And it is awesome to read through your log after several months and see "wow, I learnt so much since then." or "hmm, September was a messy/lazy month, I need to catch up". 3 persons have voted this message useful | |
| Chris13 Groupie FinlandRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4051 days ago 53 posts - 64 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Swedish, Finnish | Message 8 of 10 25 October 2013 at 11:03am | IP Logged |
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Thank you all so much for the wealth of advice and resources. I also really appreciate the warm welcome to these forums, I no longer feel so weary when posting now.
Emme: Thank you for the frequency list, I'd not come across that one and have now started to cull the words I feel will be most useful to me. I can see it being quite useful in the long run, so I'm really pleased you showed it to me. Cavesa: Thanks a lot, I've been to the library and found two reasonably good course books, at least they seem okay thus far. I have started compiling some more word lists from the index of these books. Regarding the contents of many frequency lists consisting of words that may not be so common in spoken language, I do see your point. With Swedish this doesn't seem to be a problem at all - though I learn Finnish-Swedish so I'm not able to comment too much on this. The main problem I have with Finnish is the fact that, as you say, words that have been learned are not always useful for understanding conversation. Finnish has a different way of writing in book language anyway, with endings that one would never use in spoken language. It's even crazier with colloquialisms which could turn a sentence that you know into seemingly another completely different language. I really liked your suggestion of Googling a word instead of just straight up translating it. It sounds as if it is far more likely to be retained if I find it in context like you said. I could start a log for Finnish, but in all honesty I'm not entirely sure what I'd write in it. I wouldn't want to take up space on the forum with a thread that wasn't updated with anything exciting. There's also the thought that if I don't make notable improvements after a certain time has elapsed I'd feel as if I'm failing. I'll give it some thought :) Thank you for your interest in such a log. Iversen: That's certainly food for thought, I'll start thinking how best to implement your method with my current language attempts. I'm just not sure I'm ready to introduce "intensive work with genuine texts" as my Finnish grammar isn't where it needs to be for that, I could come unstuck if I attempt it too soon. I will try when I feel a little more ready, so thank you for the insight into your methods. Very helpful. Chung: Those links are awesome, I'm especially fond of the picture dictionary you linked me to. I can see myself using it often and it could also be a great addition for Byki, too. I've added the other links to my favourites so that I can check them out in more detail at a later time as at the moment I'd like to focus on amassing some more vocab. I appreciate your help very much, thank you. Ari: Thanks! I've had a look at some but because I'm so used to Byki it feels a little strange, hard to use and such. I thought of recreating some of the decks with Byki but it might be too time consuming for me. I'll definitely look back at the Anki decks when I can, especially now that I have it downloaded. Edited by Chris13 on 25 October 2013 at 11:05am 1 person has voted this message useful |
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