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Pop-up dictionary: when and how? | ||
Tags: Dictionaries | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| leosmith Senior Member United States Joined 6553 days ago 2365 posts - 3804 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: Tagalog | Message 9 of 16 17 July 2014 at 6:03am | IP Logged | |||||
Speed.
Would you please not do this. 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Bao Diglot Senior Member Germany tinyurl.com/pe4kqe5 Joined 5769 days ago 2256 posts - 4046 votes Speaks: German*, English Studies: French, Spanish, Japanese, Mandarin | Message 10 of 16 17 July 2014 at 9:17am | IP Logged | |||||
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Sometimes, limiting yourself is a useful thing. You could also call that kind of limiting yourself ... concentration, focus.
When the only information you need to know about, let's say, thyme, is that it is a herb and used for cooking and as medicinal herb, looking it up in several dictionaries and encyclopedias is a waste of your time and energy. And while many people know how to limit their curiosity automatically, there are others who don't - and I guess, even those who usually know how to do it sometimes find themselves clicking through dozens of links and then suddenly realizing they'd just wanted to quickly look something up, half an hour ago. 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Michel1020 Tetraglot Senior Member Belgium Joined 5020 days ago 365 posts - 559 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish, Dutch | Message 11 of 16 17 July 2014 at 2:13pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I don't see any advantage to pop-up dictionaries. Speed is not an issue on the contrary. Most of the time spent on a word is in reading the definition or the translation and trying to understand the word in the context of your reading. I prefer to take the time I need.
The time you win in poping-up versus copying and pasting is very low if any. "Yes but with many words...". If you have to search for that many words you probably would do better reading something more easy or doing a course. Bao, I think nobody pretend you have to search for a word in all your dictionaries or open the 64 millions results of your googling. I don't see learning something outside of my original reading to be a lost of my time. When I read for learning my goal is not to finish my reading but to learn something. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| eyðimörk Triglot Senior Member France goo.gl/aT4FY7 Joined 4102 days ago 490 posts - 1158 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English, French Studies: Breton, Italian | Message 12 of 16 17 July 2014 at 2:47pm | IP Logged | |||||
And from what I can see, nobody said that a need for speed means that time spent looking up words is a waste of time. That is as much a fallacy as pretending that Googling means having to open up every single results. Personally, I don't use pop-up dictionaries (when I read e-books I have the Kindle Cloud Reader open in one tab and Larousse.fr in the other) but speed is most definitely a deciding factor in how I use dictionaries and when I use them (that goes for when I read physical books as well), and it has absolutely nothing to do with my goal being "to finish reading". It has to do with not losing motivation, not losing sense of the story, not having to go back a whole page to catch back up again, etc. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| smallwhite Pentaglot Senior Member Australia Joined 5311 days ago 537 posts - 1045 votes Speaks: Cantonese*, English, Mandarin, French, Spanish | Message 13 of 16 17 July 2014 at 4:04pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I never avoid using the dictionary just in order to practise guessing words, because I've been guessing English words all my life, and I think that's enough practice already. And even if I still want to practice, I get to practice when I'm reading physical books and don't have the pop-up function.
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| Bao Diglot Senior Member Germany tinyurl.com/pe4kqe5 Joined 5769 days ago 2256 posts - 4046 votes Speaks: German*, English Studies: French, Spanish, Japanese, Mandarin | Message 14 of 16 17 July 2014 at 4:23pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Michel, I am referring to the amount of information available to you at a keystroke.
I don't use a pop-up dictionary for English because I don't have to look up many words, but staying with my example: look at the results on my usual web dictionary, or the google results. It's just so much information, a lot of which is completely irrelevant to the person who just needs to know that it's a herb. And that was in direct response to the question why one would want to limit themselves. I made a lead from 'looking up words' to 'finding yourself browsing through pages unintentionally' because I think many people can relate to that experience. It's not that you look up one single word in many different places - usually you wouldn't have to, unless it's an urban dictionary kind of term and you want to know not only what it means but also how it's used - but that you end up being distracted. Well, maybe you don't, but the majority of people does, at least when they're tired. And that's what makes it a waste of time. If you don't want to immediately be able to use the new word then a good pop-up dictionary should offer the same kind of information as a pocket dictionary or an online dictionary/app.
I would like think that that is a decision people can make for themselves. There are languages with very few ressources available, and in most languages there are fields with a lot of specialized vocabulary which has little overlap with other fields. When it comes to general vocabulary in a language with a lot of ressources, it might indeed be a good idea to switch to easier material if looking up words is tedious to you, but in the case of specialized vocabulary or limited ressources it might just not be possible to ease your way into a higher level. I like to think of those approaches as complimentary, not as mutually exclusive. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6600 days ago 9753 posts - 15779 votes 4 sounds Speaks: Russian*, English, FinnishC1, Latin, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Danish, Romanian, Polish, Belarusian, Ukrainian, Croatian, Slovenian, Catalan, Czech, Galician, Dutch, Swedish | Message 15 of 16 17 July 2014 at 9:16pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Unless there's a deadline, I see nothing wrong with finding out more information than I need. I love knowledge :)
1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| kujichagulia Senior Member Japan Joined 4850 days ago 1031 posts - 1571 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Japanese, Portuguese | Message 16 of 16 18 July 2014 at 2:14am | IP Logged | |||||
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Nobody is arguing that it is bad to spend a lot of time getting to know a word and its usage - getting a deeper knowledge of a word.
But what if one doesn't have that time? What if you only have 30 minutes to read an article, and there are a lot of words to look up? Using a pop-up dictionary does save that person a lot of time. It's the difference between only getting through one or two paragraphs in that 30 minutes, or finishing the article. You can get a nice flow going while staying on that same page/tab. The question is this: if you are limited in time, are you happy with taking it slow, savoring the text, marinating on it, looking up words on online dictionaries or searching Google, and taking several days or weeks to read something? Or do you want to simply enjoy the text and get through it as quickly as possible, so that you can get to the next awesome text? (In other words: intensive vs extensive) If you are limited in time, why not use a pop-up dictionary? (The caveat being that you can trust the results of the pop-up; not all dictionaries are quality.) If you have a few hours to spend, then think about taking the time to get a deeper knowledge of the new words and phrases you encounter. Or do a mix of the two. Your preference. 5 persons have voted this message useful |
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