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Vocabulary acquisition at advanced level | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| 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 9 of 39 01 November 2014 at 9:08am | IP Logged | ||||||||
I was so happy when that started to pop up everywhere in the news. I'd learned 籲 (jyu6) a long time ago and had started to think it's one of those rare characters that are never used, and then suddenly it was everywhere. Painstakingly learning to write it was suddenly worth it.
This feature is nowadays also availible on the Kindle app on iOS, so you can do it on your iPhone or iPad, too. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Jeffers Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4908 days ago 2151 posts - 3960 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Hindi, Ancient Greek, French, Sanskrit, German | Message 10 of 39 03 November 2014 at 8:20am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Ironically, I had to look up the meaning of "louche" (from the tags). I still don't get why this thread has been tagged with it.
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| robarb Nonaglot Senior Member United States languagenpluson Joined 5058 days ago 361 posts - 921 votes Speaks: Portuguese, English*, German, Italian, Spanish, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, French Studies: Mandarin, Danish, Russian, Norwegian, Cantonese, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Greek, Latin, Nepali, Modern Hebrew | Message 11 of 39 06 November 2014 at 4:12am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Congratulations to the OP, judging by the words they have trouble with, their vocabulary is probably roughly on
par with that of a native speaker. But that's no reason to stop growing. What can you do to take that next step and achieve a reading vocabulary superior to most native speakers? If this is even a question, it probably means your vocabulary in your native language is exceptionally good. So, step 1 is to think about how your native language vocabulary got that way. Did you read a lot of books? Did you read a lot more books than you have in your target language? Did you read a wider variety of book genres, perhaps because you had to for school? How much explicit vocabulary study did you do? Since it presumably worked, the first thing is to try and replicate that process for your target language. Now, on to specific things you can do, grouped into three sections by decreasing order of importance. 1. More Exposure to the Language: Obviously, you'll learn more words through more exposure. -It could be as simple as you need to read 300 more books. -Don't just read books. Some words are really infrequent in literature-- infrequent enough that you won't be able to learn them through repeated exposure in literature. But they may be much more common in some nonliterary context. You can then quickly learn them, and when they do come up in literature, you'll know them. So: watch TV and movies, chat with friends, read on the Internet, read magazines. Listen to talk shows. Spend time in an English-speaking country if you can. -Try re-reading books. This will give you repeated exposure to the same words, so they're more likely to stick. 2.Improve Chances of Words Sticking: Words are more likely to stick if they are not simply arbitrary pairings of sound to meaning, but have some understandable structure. Therefore: -Read books about the structure and history of the English language. You may get a better intuition about new words when you encounter them. -When you look up definitions, try reading the etymology, too. It could serve as a memory aid. -When you encounter new words, try building artificial memory aids, such as imagining an image for the word that involves both its sound and meaning. -Obviously this would not be an efficient strategy, but if you learned French, Latin, German, Dutch, Swedish, Norwegian, or Danish, you would learn a lot of words with many indirect English cognates, so you would have better intuition about new words, and they would be more likely to stick. Of course time would be better spent reading more English if that is the only goal, though. -Learn more history/science/philosophy/other subjects. When you have a deeper understanding of the content, the words will stick more. 3.Study words: Optional and probably not necessary, but if you feel you're making no progress: - Write down each unknown word you encounter. At the end of a reading session, briefly scan the list of new words. At the start of a reading session, briefly scan the list of new words that you made last time. - You could put new words on flashcards and study them with Anki. - Use vocabulary building tools/books/software such as the ones native speakers use to help prepare for standardized tests such as the SAT. P.S. I also didn't know "louche." Edited by robarb on 06 November 2014 at 4:13am 4 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| chiara-sai Triglot Groupie United Kingdom Joined 3707 days ago 54 posts - 146 votes Speaks: Italian*, EnglishC2, French Studies: German, Japanese | Message 12 of 39 06 November 2014 at 9:34am | IP Logged | ||||||||
I second this. When I was learning English I was mostly reading non-fiction and I ended up discovering that novels, even the simplest ones, were ripe with words I had never seen before, even though I thought I was fluent in the language. I had accidentally achieved good fluency in a very narrow area of the language and I was struggling with artistic and mundane usage (I learnt the word ceiling in “price ceiling” before I learnt it as “the upper interior surface of a room”! In my defence I wasn’t really trying to learn English, I was just trying to learn economics and learning English turned out to be a pleasant side effect). However native speakers are subject to the same effect: a person with a passion for rap music will acquire a very different vocabulary than someone with a passion for Victorian literature, despite both of them being native speakers. As foreign-language learners we’re conditioned to think that if we don’t know a word it’s because we’re non-native, but once you achieve fluency it’s going to become increasingly likely that unknown words will be unknown due to their rarity and not due to your status as foreigner. 4 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Dark_Sunshine Diglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 5764 days ago 340 posts - 357 votes Speaks: English*, French | Message 13 of 39 06 November 2014 at 8:34pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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I second (or third) the advice of reading on a Kindle. The pop-up dictionary definition
feature has increased my reading speed in French immeasurably, and at the end of the day, more books read equals more vocabulary learned. It also has the option to auto-save all of the words you look up into a vocabulary list, and scan for all other sentences containing the same word (although that part is probably less useful at the OP's advanced level). But the list can be used to look up other sentences online afterwards, or you can obviously create your own. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| patrickwilken Senior Member Germany radiant-flux.net Joined 4532 days ago 1546 posts - 3200 votes Studies: German | Message 14 of 39 06 November 2014 at 8:36pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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You sound like you have a pretty good vocabulary already. Getting the nuance of words is really the next step up and takes a while.
My wife went from C1 to C2 since we first met. What she did was expose herself to a lot of good books and read good weekend newspapers (New York Times or the Guardian). Oh and she also wrote a book in English. She took about five years to get to C2. OK writing a book is a bit extreme, but writing in general is an amazing way of sensitising you to the nuance of words. So you might consider joining some sort of creative writing group with feedback online. Edited by patrickwilken on 06 November 2014 at 8:37pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Richard Burton Newbie Spain Joined 4331 days ago 34 posts - 64 votes Speaks: Ancient Greek* | Message 15 of 39 07 November 2014 at 3:56pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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An English dictionary which was supposed to address this kind of goal was the Longman "Activator", but as hopeful as I was when I bought it, never really got to love it; definitions in the "core" language are too stupid and it seems to me as if the authors themselves lacked a sense of nuance. The idea is that words are organized in clusters or semantic networks in our heads too, therefore it is good
My old Longman "Dictionary of English Language and Culture" , the sometime in the 90s edition, ended up being the love of my life, it has been falling apart for a decade now after so much use and still is all I have that satisfies me in terms of miraculously conveying nuance.The multiple attack by register labels, dialectal labels, diachronical labels, and cultural commentary, plus the examples and the living example I have in front of me gives me the extra of flavor that I need to really understand what kind of functin the word is fullfilling in the "semantic landscape" of the synonyms cluster, as it were. Later editions never lived up to this wonderful dictionary, all the clout was gone. I've tried to move to regular dictionaries used by native speakers like the Oxfords, and I find that my thirst for nuance is NOT quenched. I agree with people above saying that if you really want to get all the obscure literary terms in your active vocabulary, you need studying them in synonyms series with an eye on nuance, and being a regular reader of literature plus going over the same texts more than once; subconscious acquisition of nuance and collocation appears to work only in regular language, and the reason is what you say, literature is about saying things in unprecedented fashions, therefore it won't come up again, therefore not much is built in memory, unless oft-quoted texts like, say, the Bible or classics. Personally I seem to remember better when I get emotionally involved. I am one of those idiots who, though an adult, fell in love with Anne of Green Gables out of spiritual kindredness. And I dont seem to have any difficulty remembering and using "scrumptious", "bosom friend" and many others. She conquers new words the way she conquers new landscapes, dreams and social skills, with full pouring out of her romantic heart. Acquiring words for the sake of acquiring words from a tedious descriptiion is dry and stupid in a way. You need to need them, to love them, to live them. Indeed, the words that I find stick better are those you acquire in spontaneous research you do and interactions you have as your life interests develop and evolve, they seem to become imprinted in the story of your life, more than merely in "intellectual" memory. Funny enough, very often I remember the occasion, person, video or book when I first came across a particular word. It is interesting as you say that indeed we keen foreign users who take this this far, seem to outdo native speakers, particularly in the "long words" (meaning Latin-derived) arena. Many times I've been told or e-mailed "I dont understand it" "I thought you were a major in English, I had to use a dictionary several times to decipher your interesting e-mail" "you use too many words" "you sound bookish" "you come across as an exceedingly learned person", etc, when in fact, you have many deficiencies in several areas of the language, old "fossilized" mistakes and what not. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| bjornbrekkukot Newbie United States Joined 4721 days ago 25 posts - 58 votes Speaks: English* | Message 16 of 39 09 November 2014 at 7:57am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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I teach community college English in the US, and only a couple of my students each year would probably know
those words (with the exception of "waddle," maybe). That said, they also don't read. I have the same issue with Russian and Icelandic. I know a host of words that my Russian friends in the US have never even heard before. I write them down and make flashcards. Not at all useful in daily conversational settings, but handy for Pushkin. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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