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Acquire vocabulary through reading | ||
Tags: Reading | Vocabulary learning | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Learning Techniques, Methods & Strategies |  | |
| vermillon Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4678 days ago 602 posts - 1042 votes  Speaks: French*, EnglishC2, Mandarin Studies: Japanese, German | Message 25 of 35 07 March 2012 at 12:43pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Ah, it seems that nobody uses my method yet! As I was really bored looking up the dictionary when reading Chinese novels, and as about any Chinese novel exists as an ebook, I decided to use my moderate programming skills to do something that has dramatically improved my vocabulary intake and retention: learn word before you read them.
-I use the open source dictionary CEdict. -I have an Anki word deck for Mandarin => from it I retrieve the list of words I know. -I have written a simple word tokenizer (as words are not space-separated in Mandarin) to obtain the list of words in the text I'm about to read. If the ebook (a .txt) is well made, I can select the chapter I'm going to read, or be more restrictive by indicating the first sentence and the last sentence. -I compare the two lists => it returns a list of the words I am "going to" read and as a bonus, I sort them by number occurrences in the whole book (or in the corpus of the few novels I have read / plan to read). I can then decide to learn the words that are the most frequent and ignore the very occasional adverb... I can also decide to focus on chengyu if I want to. -I have a little script to create cards more quickly than putting them in anki (it creates a .csv file which I later import in Anki). With that method, I've learnt several thousands of words (30/day while having more than 8000 already at that time) quite quickly, and the good thing is, when you read them for the first time in the novel, it acts as a review! The problem with this method is that... it works better with isolating languages... for other languages, you'll need a stemmer or something close to revert the inflexions back to the dictionary form first. For Korean (in which I so wish I could use that), because of a complex grammar/morphology, and because I haven't found a morphological analysis tool, it's almost impossible to use. If people are interested in this, please let me know. It works well for Mandarin, that's for sure, and perhaps it is possible to adapt it for other languages, perhaps most likely the lesser inflected Western European ones (English probably being the best candidate, but I clearly wouldn't be motivated to do it). 7 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Wulfgar Senior Member United States Joined 4671 days ago 404 posts - 791 votes Speaks: English* | Message 26 of 35 07 March 2012 at 8:51pm | IP Logged | |||||
I've done this before. I prefer using mouse-over dictionaries that create lists automatically for me when I look things up. But your method is one of the most efficient one I've heard of for pre-learning words.
This is not an easy task, and the reason I only review words in one of my 4 languages. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| vermillon Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4678 days ago 602 posts - 1042 votes Speaks: French*, EnglishC2, Mandarin Studies: Japanese, German | Message 27 of 35 07 March 2012 at 11:04pm | IP Logged | |||||
I actually read paper novels... but as I said, in Mandarin every novel is available online for download, so the goal here is to be able to read in my bed without having to get out of the bed to look up a word, or to confidently bring my book on the bus while commuting... no mouse-over possible in these situations. And I think it's still more efficient, because when you pre-learn your awareness is raised and it's going to "tick" once you see it in context. Having "instant look-up" (mouse-over, native next to you) hasn't the same effect on memory.
Same here, when I don't read novels I add no vocabulary because I've no real source of vocabulary to pick from. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Raincrowlee Tetraglot Senior Member United States Joined 6702 days ago 621 posts - 808 votes Speaks: English*, Mandarin, Korean, French Studies: Indonesian, Japanese | Message 28 of 35 08 March 2012 at 1:24am | IP Logged | |||||
Where? I've been looking for places to get Mandarin books in txt or pdf format and haven't found a good source yet. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| vermillon Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4678 days ago 602 posts - 1042 votes Speaks: French*, EnglishC2, Mandarin Studies: Japanese, German | Message 29 of 35 08 March 2012 at 8:08am | IP Logged | |||||
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There's not "one" source I believe... it's not always easy (some websites try to make you install some "downloading software".. don't), but with half an hour I've always found the novels I was looking for. Admittedly, I've read pretty popular stuff like 莫言、余华、苏童、巴金、老舍、陆文夫.. also, I read in simplified (I don't plan to wear glasses in the next six months..), and I suppose that if you're looking for the traditional version it may be slightly more complicated.
Any particular novel you couldn't find? 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Raincrowlee Tetraglot Senior Member United States Joined 6702 days ago 621 posts - 808 votes Speaks: English*, Mandarin, Korean, French Studies: Indonesian, Japanese | Message 30 of 35 09 March 2012 at 4:07am | IP Logged | |||||
Honestly, I don't know much about modern Chinese authors--I guess that's been one of my problems. I've just been looking for real books and never figured out a good place to get them. I can do both simplified and traditional, btw. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| vermillon Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4678 days ago 602 posts - 1042 votes Speaks: French*, EnglishC2, Mandarin Studies: Japanese, German | Message 31 of 35 09 March 2012 at 8:34am | IP Logged | |||||
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"for real books"? What do you mean? Paper books? or as opposed to "modern authors"?
Given the relatively recent use of the spoken language as a writing tool, if you want to read Mandarin then you almost need to read 20th century books (ok, now I'm waiting for contradictors to take examples of 西游记 or something, but it's still generally true). Personally, my choice of novels in Mandarin is conditioned by the fact that they've been translated into French, assuming that if people took the pain to translate it into French (wouldn't be true for English) then it's at least a decent one, and it has worked until now. I would heartily recommend novels like 余华《兄弟》、《活着》、许三观卖血记》to anyone wanting something that happens during the Cultural Revolution and be very funny at the same time. 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 32 of 35 09 March 2012 at 1:38pm | IP Logged | |||||
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vermillon, that's a really cool idea. The program you wrote sounds similar to LingQ or
LWT, but I never thought to "pre-study" the words. It seems like this would make reading in a foreign language much more enjoyable. A few questions/comments: 1. Do you put just the unknown words into Anki? I prefer to study new words in context using the cloze-deletion feature, or else study sessions are boring for me and the words don't stick as well. But studying sentences out of a book I haven't read yet somehow feels like a strange idea, and I'm worried about spoilers :) 2. I imagine your software has no way to distinguish between individual characters and character compounds, right? So it will only list unknown characters, and not necessarily unknown words? 3. It seems to me like this would work best if every word (or the vast majority of words) you've learned in the language are in your Anki deck. Over time I think it would get annoying if more than half the words that came up were ones you already knew but had never SRS'd. So it might not be very suited to languages that are related to your native language so you already have a large passive vocabulary, for example. Edited by Lucky Charms on 09 March 2012 at 1:39pm 1 person has voted this message useful |
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