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Vocabulary acquisition at advanced level | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| NewLanguageGuy Groupie France youtube.com/NewLangu Joined 4606 days ago 74 posts - 134 votes  Speaks: English* | Message 17 of 39 09 November 2014 at 11:51am | IP Logged | ||
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What exactly is "advanced" vocabulary? "Waddle" doesn't sound like a particularly complex word to me.
I have probably said this word once in the last 5 years. How to remember the meaning? Learn it the same way as native speakers did, from a book! Try to read as often as possible. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Cavesa Triglot Senior Member Czech Republic Joined 5008 days ago 3277 posts - 6779 votes Speaks: Czech*, FrenchC2, EnglishC1 Studies: Spanish, German, Italian | Message 18 of 39 09 November 2014 at 12:19pm | IP Logged | ||
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I always learn new words when I start with a new author. Every one has got their own
vocabulary of less common words you are unlikely to ever find outside of books. So, try new genres and new authors to get more exposure to uncommon words. To get them into the active memory, there is still nothing better than an SRS, in my opinion. As those words can be really uncommon, you are not guaranteed to encounter some of them more than once or twice per 10000 pages, which makes learning only through exposure inefficient (unless you ask your librarian "could you recommend me something where I would find "waddle" more often, please?" :-D ). If learning to understand them in context doesn't suffice for your desires, put them in Anki or another SRS. Just looking them up in a dictionary can work as well, at least for more precise passive knowledge. The act of stopping and putting half a minute into the search makes me often remember the word. It is the opposite of using an inbuilt dictionary like the one in Kindle. Both paths can work, up to you to choose. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| bjornbrekkukot Newbie United States Joined 4721 days ago 25 posts - 58 votes Speaks: English* | Message 19 of 39 11 November 2014 at 1:15am | IP Logged | ||
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I think the main problem with learning vocab at an advanced level in a foreign language is that you don't always
have a good idea if a word is common currency or not. In English, while reading, say, Moby Dick, I'll brush over dozens of unknown words with the thought, "haven't learned that word in my 20 years of reading; won't bother with it." In a foreign language, however, you aren't always so sure if a word is rare or not, so you might end up investing a lot of effort into words that a native speaker would probably just ignore. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| sctroyenne Diglot Senior Member United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5390 days ago 739 posts - 1312 votes Speaks: English*, French Studies: Spanish, Irish | Message 20 of 39 11 November 2014 at 1:37am | IP Logged | ||
I came to a realization while reading a bit of Flaubert that reading an edited, published copy of classics rather than relying on free ebooks helps in this regard. All the outdated vocabulary was noted in the footnotes so as a learner you would know that you wouldn't need to spend a lot of effort learning those words. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| lichtrausch Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 5959 days ago 525 posts - 1072 votes Speaks: English*, German, Japanese Studies: Korean, Mandarin | Message 21 of 39 11 November 2014 at 4:29am | IP Logged | ||
That's easy to remedy. As a rule of thumb, don't look up a word or expression unless you've run into it two or three times. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| bjornbrekkukot Newbie United States Joined 4721 days ago 25 posts - 58 votes Speaks: English* | Message 22 of 39 12 November 2014 at 6:56am | IP Logged | ||
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An easy enough rule to remember… but what if those two or three times are months or years apart? Today, for
example, I looked up the word "cricket" in Russian. It took me seven years to come across it for the first time, and it could be seven more before I see that word again in print (and I read in Russian for about an hour every day)! My memory is about average, and I tend to forget most words that I don't understand. I once highlighted several words in my Russian dictionary, and when I looked at those words a year later, I had absolutely no recollection of ever looking them up. I once took a Russian class at a university, and the professor insisted that on average you have to look up a word 7-10 times before you really remember it. Not sure where she got that from, but it seems about right in my case... 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| patrickwilken Senior Member Germany radiant-flux.net Joined 4532 days ago 1546 posts - 3200 votes Studies: German | Message 23 of 39 12 November 2014 at 8:10am | IP Logged | ||
I guess there are two approaches to this. The first is you just decide that 'cricket' isn't such an important word if you only going to see it a handful of times before you die. Or you decide to up the frequency of seeing the word, either by using SRS and the like, or simply by reading a corpus where the word is more likely to come up (or watching cricket on the TV), but if that sounds boring I don't see the point of trying to learn the word. Vocabulary (at least in English) for native speakers doesn't peak until the mid-30s. That's at least twenty-five years of heavy input. We language learners often talk about five years study as a decent amount of time, but when you think about it is nothing to what we do to learn our L1. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| luke Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 7204 days ago 3133 posts - 4351 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Esperanto, French | Message 24 of 39 12 November 2014 at 11:09am | IP Logged | ||
Or changing genres. A word like "waddle" may show up fairly regularly in children's books because they are more likely to talk about ducks waddling around. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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