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Memorising abstract concepts | ||
Tags: Vocabulary learning | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Learning Techniques, Methods & Strategies |  | |
| luke Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 7208 days ago 3133 posts - 4351 votes  Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Esperanto, French | Message 9 of 13 18 January 2014 at 10:26pm | IP Logged | |||||
I think reading and listerning are most effective for getting vocabulary to the B1 level in the first place. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6706 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 10 of 13 19 January 2014 at 1:35am | IP Logged | |||||
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I don't feel that there is any particular difference between learning abstract and concrete words - it is all a question about relating the words to something in languages you already know OR finding them in a context which is self explanatory. And this will generally mean that you make even the most abstract things concrete.
In Danish we use "fair" as a loanword so it wouldn't be a big step to go to the notion of "fairness", which presumably would be the thing you display (or are characterized by) if you act in a fair way. If I had to go back to something concrete I would probably find concrete cases where fairness was displayed, like when judges give fair and just sentences or sportmen or politicians don't deliberately try to win by cheating. OK, I didn't promise realistic examples. If we take something more concrete like a country fair then I would see lots of people and cows in a rural setting, not the abstract notion of fairs as a landscape law might define them. Abstraction is a luxury which you can permit yourself when you already have understood something through concrete examples or illustrations. And that is also something that can be applied to grammar studys: keep them as concrete as possible ... and let the linguists juggle around with the abstractions. Edited by Iversen on 19 January 2014 at 1:38am 4 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| DinaAlia Pentaglot Newbie Norway Joined 3935 days ago 24 posts - 49 votes Speaks: Swedish, Danish, Norwegian*, English, French Studies: Greek, Latin, Arabic (Egyptian), German, Spanish, Russian, Arabic (Written), Icelandic Studies: Modern Hebrew | Message 11 of 13 25 February 2014 at 10:42pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Words like "fairness" and "justice" conjure images of courtrooms, too me. The abstract notion has concrete anchors.
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| Lizzern Diglot Senior Member Norway Joined 5912 days ago 791 posts - 1053 votes Speaks: Norwegian*, English Studies: Japanese | Message 12 of 13 26 February 2014 at 12:33am | IP Logged | |||||
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If you're a visual thinker, you could try making elaborate scenarios in your head that tie the word to a situation that somehow relates to it. It doesn't have to take long. I know some people claim to use this as a way to learn vocabulary very quickly by connection the sounds to something very vivid/absurd/interesting/emotional/whatever, so it might be worth trying if you come across something difficult. Find a situation that fits the word and make a scenario to help you remember.
You could also try seeking out sentences and paragraphs that use the word, to get lots of exposure in a short amount of time - or just give it time and hope it starts to make sense later. If you know a word is difficult for you, you'll probably notice it more easily and your brain will try to figure it out next time you come across it. In a while you might wonder why it was ever difficult... Another thing that's worked for me is translating phrases (including the word) into English, and then translating the whole phrase back, but that depends on the meaning being roughly the same. Liz 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
 DavidStyles Octoglot Pro Member United Kingdom Joined 3944 days ago 82 posts - 179 votes Speaks: English*, German, Italian, Spanish, Latin, French, Portuguese, Norwegian Studies: Mandarin, Russian, Swedish, Danish, Serbian, Arabic (Egyptian) Personal Language Map | Message 13 of 13 26 February 2014 at 1:37pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Learning abstract nouns, I tend to rely on cognates wherever possible, or artificial connections (ie linkword, memory hooks, etc) if no cognates are clear.
For example, that Russian for "purity" is "чистота" might be fairly opaque, but if I note the link to the English "chastity", it becomes obvious. Alternately I may struggle to remember that 要 means "wish", until I find it amusing that it's essentially a woman bringing wine, or that 重要 means "important", until I consider it a man in a car with a woman bringing wine, all clearly essential things for life :p In this latter case you may note as an example (without me taking the space to take apart every radical in this post) that the "西" radical isn't really wine; ideographically it's a bird settling into its nest, thus representing the sun setting in the west; so the wish here is a woman in the evening - But the momentary lie makes it more memorable yet, so hey. Alternately bear in mind that as Alia said above, many abstract nouns have their roots in concrete nouns, so for example "صداقة" might be easier to remember as "friendliness" if you know already that "صديق" is "friend". By the time you get to almost irreducible abstract nouns, such as "fear", you're into a much smaller vocabulary set, which then becomes more manageable due to its small size. Hopefully you will know some cognates (edit to add: and you usually will, because these are usually very old words, which means they have had time to mingle), and if not, then the other advices in this post and the others in this thread should hopefully help. As for learning words in contextual phrases, even simple word pairs can help (so if you have a vocab list or flashcards or somesuch, instead of just saying "blackness", "holiness", "cleanliness", putting them in pairs: Black box Holy father Clean bedsheets Italicized here for clarity; don't do that in your own list, because you want to chunk each pair as one item in total. You don't want to feel that you're having to remember two words, so much as one "thing". In many (most?) languages, adjectives will generally give you the related abstract noun for free, of course: Black box > Blackness Holy father > Holiness Clean bedsheets > Cleanness, cleanliness Edited by DavidStyles on 26 February 2014 at 3:44pm 3 persons have voted this message useful |
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