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Vocabulary acquisition at advanced level | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| nystagmatic Triglot Groupie Brazil Joined 4308 days ago 47 posts - 58 votes  Speaks: Portuguese*, English, French Studies: German | Message 1 of 39 31 October 2014 at 6:00pm | IP Logged | ||
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I'm a fairly proficient English speaker, having read a couple hundred books and countless more stuff online in it, but there's still an astounding number of words I find myself unsure about. "Waddle", "fatuous", "grout", "spate", stuff like that. Of course, you can usually infer their meaning from the whole sentence (and that is perhaps part of the reason why many of them, especially the verbs, don't stick: they're made invisible by the context), but I always feel I could be missing some interesting nuance. What I've been doing is marking them and then going back after finishing the text and writing the definitions on the margins, but this is tiresome and I'm not sure how effective it is. What about you guys — what's your policy on unknown/half-known words for languages in which you're already teetering on C2, or even for your native language? Any thoughts, advice, methods?
EDIT: I'm mostly interested in acquiring vocabulary for reading literature, so it's not just a matter of being functional in the language! Edited by nystagmatic on 31 October 2014 at 7:22pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| daegga Tetraglot Senior Member Austria lang-8.com/553301 Joined 4520 days ago 1076 posts - 1792 votes Speaks: German*, EnglishC2, Swedish, Norwegian Studies: Danish, French, Finnish, Icelandic | Message 2 of 39 31 October 2014 at 6:13pm | IP Logged | ||
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I read on a kindle and use the (L1-L1) pop-up dictionary for those words. They occur
seldom enough, so it's no burden. Those words don't usually come up in conversations, so I don't care if I remember them or not. Next time they come up in literature, I just use the pop-up dictionary again. edit: If a word comes up that seems useful for conversation, just note it down and put it into a SRS system afterwards. But words like "spate" seem to stick anyway, provided you saw them in a strong context (like the images of Western Norway those last days...the equivalent Norwegian word is all over the news headings right now) example for good "waddle" context plus mass repetition: http://www.youtube.com/watch? v=ECmpUJdgm-g Edited by daegga on 31 October 2014 at 7:06pm 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| BaronBill Triglot Senior Member United States HowToLanguages.comRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4688 days ago 335 posts - 594 votes Speaks: English*, French, German Studies: Spanish, Mandarin, Persian | Message 3 of 39 31 October 2014 at 6:48pm | IP Logged | ||
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Honestly, I'm a well educated native English speaker who have never even left the US
and I had to look up "fatuous" and "spate". And unless I'm repairing tile or discussing home improvement, I don't typically talk about grout. As for "waddle", I can only think that I use that word if I happened to be talking about a duck. My point is: If THESE are typical of the types of English words that you don't understand, then you probably have a near-native vocabulary. Congrats! You are sufficiently advanced. My advice: Don't worry about trying to expand your vocabulary. You will absorb everything you need to by reading. And words like the ones you mentioned, you don't need. My 2 cents. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Ari Heptaglot Senior Member Norway Joined 6581 days ago 2314 posts - 5695 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Mandarin, Cantonese Studies: Czech, Latin, German | Message 4 of 39 31 October 2014 at 6:53pm | IP Logged | ||
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At a certain level, the new words are infrequent enough that it becomes inefficient to try to learn them from context. In order to improve your vocabulary by reading alone at an advanced level, you have to read huge amounts, which isn't always practical. My solution is to simply add interesting words to an Anki deck. I also add the sentence where I found the word on the back of the card, which makes me see it in context and remember where I encountered it, helping to stick it firmly in my mind. Some people prefer putting the sentence on the front, but if I can sort of half figure out the word in the context, I might not understand it in a different context. Also I have a tendency to learn the sentence and not the word.
I rarely read in my native language, but I do the same if I encounter an interesting word in Swedish. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| tarvos Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member China likeapolyglot.wordpr Joined 4706 days ago 5310 posts - 9399 votes Speaks: Dutch*, English, Swedish, French, Russian, German, Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Afrikaans Studies: Greek, Modern Hebrew, Spanish, Portuguese, Czech, Korean, Esperanto, Finnish | Message 5 of 39 31 October 2014 at 7:52pm | IP Logged | ||
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Once your vocabulary is good enough that you are at the point where differences imply
the following type of things - slight nuances and connotations - archaisms - slang - regionalisms' - jargon / technical language, what you need to do is learn the terms that you will use in your field of specialization. Your domain. After that, progress will be slow anyway. Sometimes vocabulary comes through reading or from strange places. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| holly heels Groupie United States Joined 3885 days ago 47 posts - 107 votes Studies: Mandarin | Message 6 of 39 31 October 2014 at 10:47pm | IP Logged | ||
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For what it's worth, if you're a non-native English speaker and you know a word like "teetering", that puts you above the level of many native English speakers.
On the other hand, a word like "waddle" is easily understood, even by most children and would not be considered advanced, but it's one of thousands of words that are non-essential but still comprise a well-rounded vocabulary, especially when it comes to listening comprehension. Recently I was confronted with a challenge to acquire many non-essential Mandarin words when the Taiwan newscasts covered the Asian Games for 2 weeks in Sept. and Oct. Instead of avoiding those programs I reluctantly went ahead and watched them anyway and every day there was noticable progress in comprehension of sports terminology. It was not to the point where I could understand all of a sportscaster's rant about the Korean rowing team, but I acquired vocab relating to archery and weightlifting and learned some sports lingo like the measure word for "medal". So I guess the method that works for me is daily passive acquisition thru TV, and as it becomes easier the words seem to be almost in slow motion. Sometimes I close my eyes or look out the window while I am listening. Most major languages including Mandarin have visual dictionaries which present sports or medical vocab in a more colorful way than a standard dictionary. I am at a level where I know the Mandarin words for most of the internal organs, and maybe a visual dictionary could teach me the word for "spleen" but maybe that's a little too freakish, even for me. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| shk00design Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 4443 days ago 747 posts - 1123 votes Speaks: Cantonese*, English, Mandarin Studies: French | Message 7 of 39 01 November 2014 at 12:15am | IP Logged | ||
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Even as a native Chinese speaker, I have to admit that I don't know a lot of Chinese characters. Even the ones I do
know there are new terms that keep popping up for new gadgets such as iPad, smartphone, computer, etc. A term like 浏览网站 (to serf the Internet) only came about in the last 20 years. If you look up "Android smartphone" and try to get a translation into Chinese you get: Android 智能手机. Note the Chinese doesn't have an equivalent for "Android" so they just filled in the English word. The closest translation you get for an iPad is 平板电脑 píngbǎndiànnǎo which applies to all tablet type devices. I was in Hong Kong recently and came across a phrase used in the newspaper a lot: 呼籲 or 呼吁 (hūyù) in Simplified characters which means "to appeal". The second character in Traditional characters looks complicated like it has more than 20 strokes. Just recognizing the character is already an accomplishment. Nowadays I tend to prefer to see Chinese news online. If I have to look up a character, it gets cumbersome to write it on a graphic tablet or look up by the radical and # lines. Once the text is online, I can simply Cut & Paste a word / phrase to an online dictionary for a quick lookup. A Chinese word that was in the news a lot lately was 地溝油 (gutter oil). The expat Chinese community in the US, Canada or elsewhere outside of Asia may / may not know what this term refers to. It is basically "used" cooking oil that was repackaged into containers and sold as "new" cooking oil. We are talking specifically about oil made from pork because cooking with this type of animal fat makes local cuisines taste good. If you are in Taiwan or Hong Kong in the past month, you would have seen articles in the local newspaper on gutter oil because the cooking oil scandal involved 2 companies in Taiwan & Hong Kong. Certain words and phrases are used in specific places. In English we use "truck" in N. America and "lorry" in England. We use "subway" and in England they use "underground". The Chinese for chocolate in Hong Kong is 朱古力 and in China it is 巧克力. The word for taxi in Hong Kong is 的士 (dik si) a loan word based on the English and 租车 in China. When you read a newspaper in HK, you are going to find the word 的士 used for taxi. Edited by shk00design on 01 November 2014 at 12:16am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Lemberg1963 Bilingual Diglot Groupie United States zamishka.blogspot.coRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4238 days ago 41 posts - 82 votes Speaks: English*, Ukrainian* Studies: French, German, Spanish, Polish | Message 8 of 39 01 November 2014 at 2:34am | IP Logged | ||
My old Kindle broke and this feature is the only reason I bought a new one. Very useful, highly recommended. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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