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Acquire vocabulary through reading | ||
Tags: Reading | Vocabulary learning | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Learning Techniques, Methods & Strategies |  | |
| geoffw Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 4688 days ago 1134 posts - 1865 votes  Speaks: English*, German, Yiddish Studies: Modern Hebrew, French, Dutch, Italian, Russian | Message 17 of 35 21 February 2012 at 3:39pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
For the most part, my vocabulary "review" is just more input, mostly written and some audio. I don't necessarily think this is a universal solution, though. I'm currently working to improve my German, but I'm pretty sure my passive skills are at least at C1 already. So 1) there are a lot of English cognates that I can pick up pretty easily (usually, but not always, without bothering to look them up), and 2) most other unknown words are constructed from words I already know according to the quasi-scientific patterns upon which German is built, which makes them easier to remember (usually). For improving from a lower level in a less "scientific" language with fewer cognates, things might be very different. Also, my goal at this point is to get as MUCH extended vocabulary as I can, as quickly as I can, and this approach works well for that. I can tell that it may take longer for the new words to "grow roots," but most of these words will not make up the core of my conversational vocabulary, so I'm fine with that. When I occasionally make and use flash cards (which I basically stopped doing a month ago), I feel like I'm growing those roots faster, but for FAR fewer words, and the lack of context on a flash card means I get proportionally less "bang for the buck" on my time spent anyways, and I don't always learn how to use and understand the words idiomatically that way. When I was using flash cards, it was to help me learn high-frequency newspaper words that I wasn't quite mastering from context alone. (I had/have an especially tough time remembering the differences between all the "-trag" words, Auftrag, Betrag, Vertrag, Abtrag, Beitrag, Eintrag, etc.) Flash cards were useful in these cases because just reading more wasn't enough to make it stick. 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 18 of 35 22 February 2012 at 2:29am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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I divide my reading into extensive and intensive. Extensive reading is done for the content and for ease and speed of reading, and I look as little as possible up. That means that I don't lern many words, unless of course I'm reading an article about something which explains what the unknown terms mean. Intensive reading is done to learn words and constructions, and I look things up (almost) no matter how long it takes, and I review new words through my wordlists. So I would have to use two dots, not one.
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| Wulfgar Senior Member United States Joined 4671 days ago 404 posts - 791 votes Speaks: English* | Message 19 of 35 22 February 2012 at 8:08am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
I consider this to be on topic, since all language learning is pretty much related. I like the exercise, but as with many other techniques I read about, I wonder if taking something else out of my language plan in order to do this would make me more efficient, or get me to C1 faster. Regardless, knowing about this give me more choices, so thanks! Some other "new" things I am considering from this website are
and the "Listening-Reading system". Sorry, I'm unable to post any links.
I also have a bad memory. The main reason I do it is for Japanese and Mandarin, I hate reading and guessing, or skipping over, pronunciations I don't know. For me, Japanese is worse than Mandarin in this regard, but they are both pretty annoying if I don't know a character's reading. I like to read out loud, which probably magnifies my annoyance with not knowing the reading. Also, since I'm using LingQ now, looking up words is not very time consuming. The same would probably be true with a mouse-over dictionary.
Formerly, I was using paper. I don't like reading on my computer, but paper has it's drawbacks. It would take me a really long time to look up words, so I didn't enjoy that exercise. Have you ever considered switching to the computer? 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| Lucky Charms Diglot Senior Member Japan lapacifica.net Joined 6949 days ago 752 posts - 1711 votes Speaks: English*, Japanese Studies: German, Spanish | Message 20 of 35 22 February 2012 at 2:49pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
Formerly, I was using paper. I don't like reading on my computer, but paper has it's drawbacks. It would take me a really long time to look up words, so I didn't enjoy that exercise. Have you ever considered switching to the computer? [/QUOTE] I don't like to read on the computer, because it strains my eyes and I have trouble concentrating. I do like to read on the Kindle, but unfortunately this doesn't have any real advantages over a book until I can find a good Japanese dictionary for it. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| CaitO'Ceallaigh Triglot Senior Member United States katiekelly.wordpress Joined 6857 days ago 795 posts - 829 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Russian Studies: Czech, German | Message 21 of 35 28 February 2012 at 6:10am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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I look up every word in wordreference.com and put all example sentences and, more often than not, the word and its definition into Anki.
It takes time, but the more words you know, the better it gets. It's worth it in the long run. The pay off is rewarding. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| Randwulf Newbie United States Joined 4892 days ago 32 posts - 93 votes Speaks: English* | Message 22 of 35 03 March 2012 at 9:47pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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This is how I went about reading German. It's my first foreign language, so there was a
bit of trial and error. When I began, any word I wasn't sure of, or that I hadn't seen before, I'd look up and write down in my notebook. This led to me reading very slowly. After reading a chapter, I'd read that chapter again. This re-reading seemed beneficial back when I had to look up a lot of words, but as the number of unknown words became less and less, I found it more useful (and fun) to just read each chapter once. After a while I changed my strategy to only looking up words that I could not imply the meaning of. If the context made me fairly sure of the word meaning, I'd just continue. Oddly, I found that I retained the definition of such words more easily this way, than if I had looked them up and written them down. I'm guessing this is because my decreased reliance on the dictionary led to increased effort spent to deduce the meaning from context, and I guess this is a superior way to learn... 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| geoffw Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 4688 days ago 1134 posts - 1865 votes Speaks: English*, German, Yiddish Studies: Modern Hebrew, French, Dutch, Italian, Russian | Message 23 of 35 04 March 2012 at 12:32am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
IMHO...A meaning in a dictionary never perfectly captures the meaning and usage of a word the way an authentic contextual example can. But, by looking up a word, you VERY quickly build a connection in the brain between an idea that already exists in your brain (in connection with a different language), and the L2 word. By learning in context, by contrast, you get a more exact understanding of the word in L2 and a stronger foundation for the word in your brain, but the process can be slower, especially for uncommon non-cognates, because you have to build the associative meaning network in the brain from scratch instead of exploiting the preexisting structures in your brain. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| frenkeld Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 6943 days ago 2042 posts - 2719 votes Speaks: Russian*, English Studies: German | Message 24 of 35 07 March 2012 at 5:25am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
There may be a gap between what people think, or say they think, and what they actually do. How many people have really tried to take themselves to an advanced level in a language by reading dozens of novels without a dictionary, one after another? Ever since I bought a Sony eReader with its built-in translation dictionaries for the major West European languages, it has been my preferred reading medium, and I find myself looking up most of the unknown words I encounter when using it. I now reserve paper books for extensive reading and use the eReader for reading with a dictionary. 4 persons have voted this message useful |
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