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Widening your vocabulary | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Learning Techniques, Methods & Strategies |  | |
| simpleasy Diglot Newbie Belgium Joined 5021 days ago 12 posts - 12 votes Speaks: Dutch*, English Studies: French, Mandarin | Message 9 of 17 04 April 2011 at 4:23pm | IP Logged | ||
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In my case, it's mainly active vocabulary that I'm missing, which can obviously be
acquired through a lot of passive immersion. I think the idea to try writing, speaking, thinking with very unfamiliar words is very good. This ain't always so easy though, since it's very tempting to use familiar words, which is way easier. But I'll definitely try it though, seems very promising for now. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| montmorency Diglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4856 days ago 2371 posts - 3676 votes  Speaks: English*, German Studies: Danish, Welsh | Message 10 of 17 09 June 2012 at 5:50am | IP Logged | ||
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I always used to find it pleasurable to "read" (or browse) a dictionary in my own
language. You'd look up one word, then see an interesting reference to another....and so on, and you could be hooked for ½ hour or more. I guess the same would work in a dictionary of your TL (whether bilingual or monolingual ... my favourite are those monolingual ones that are aimed at foreign language learners). And come to think, isn't going through dictionaries one of the ways that Iversen collects words for his wordlists? Personally, I think reading novels is great, but I suppose if new words are what you want, it's hard to beat a dictionary in many ways. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| iguanamon Pentaglot Senior Member Virgin Islands Speaks: Ladino Joined 5290 days ago 2241 posts - 6731 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Portuguese, Haitian Creole, Creole (French) | Message 11 of 17 09 June 2012 at 1:26pm | IP Logged | ||
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Have you ever tried crossword puzzles? They are challenging at different levels. I doubt that such a thing exists for Mandarin given the radically different script, but they do exist for French. Mots Croisés Faciles. Mots croisés Wikipédia
Combine a crossword a day with a random wikipedia article a day and you will soon see your vocabulary grow. Every day, wikipedia features a random article on its home page Most wikipedia language sites have a feature that allows you to select a random article also. Some people may ask, "what if I don't like the choice?". Read it anyway! In today's world it is so easy to remain within your comfort zone and never venture outside your known preferences. This can have a tendency to limit us and our intellectual growth. The ability to pick and choose only things that we know we like doesn't help us to expand. We lose a lot of serendipity. Warning- crosswords can be fun and addictive! Careful, reading a random wikipedia article a day could cause your IQ to increase along with your vocabulary and broaden your knowledge! Advisory: writing on lang8 in French or speaking to native French speakers or participating in French forums using what you've learned could cause you to internalize your new vocabulary. Edit: Forgot to add that you need to be at at least intermediate level and that this most likely won't work well for Mandarin due to the difficulty involved in reading the language for intermediate learners. Edited by iguanamon on 09 June 2012 at 4:51pm 5 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| s0fist Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5074 days ago 260 posts - 445 votes Speaks: Russian*, English Studies: Sign Language, German, Spanish, French | Message 12 of 17 09 June 2012 at 5:57pm | IP Logged | ||
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Find good, hard content, then read it, and make lists of words you don't know or would like to learn to use actively (anki is a great help here). Very practical, highly entertaining, and combined with an SRS very efficacious.
Play word game like scrabble, boggle, etc. Solve crosswords and other word puzzles. Lots of those apps for your mobile phone nowadays. Harder, but, for a certain type of person, very rewarding is to find a high quality dictionary (go for short 30-50-100k words dictionaries, don't start with the likes of OED 2ed) and quickly go through the entries, find the ones you don't know and would actually like to know (you may want to leave out all the different types of obscure rocks, plants, chemicals, medical terms, OR you might want to include those, up to you of course) enter them into Anki/SRS. Another way, if you are interested in very, very rare words is to find already compiled premade collections of rare words (for example for English obscure words google "Grandiloquent Dictionary", "Luciferous Logolepsy", Phrontistery, "Scorpio Tales Diversions", "10,000 of the Most Difficult Words"). 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| lingua nova Newbie United States Joined 4583 days ago 25 posts - 39 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish, Indonesian, Tagalog, French | Message 13 of 17 11 June 2012 at 3:40am | IP Logged | ||
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Like many others have said, reading. If you gave me a list of 10 words and I had to
memorize them, I'd probably retain 3 of them, if I'm lucky. But if I read those words in a novel, or an article, I'll engage with them more and probably remember twice that amount. I find that, in general, the older the book, the more impressive and obscure the vocabulary. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| fiziwig Senior Member United States Joined 4893 days ago 297 posts - 618 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish | Message 14 of 17 11 June 2012 at 8:34pm | IP Logged | ||
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I find reading to be the most efficient way to absorb new words. I've tried Anki and paper flash cards and lists, but just reading still works best for me. And in reading I don't make any special effort to "memorize" a new word. I just look it up when I run into it, and then move on. Later, if I run into the word again, I usually have to look it up again. About the fourth or fifth time I have to look it up it begins to stick a little.
The odd thing is I often remember where I first saw a word, too. I was reading book 2 of Hunger games (in Spanish) this morning and ran across a verb I immediately remembered having seen on the page of Jonathan Livingston Seagull about 6 months ago! (chapotear) Funny how some words can be so sticky when you encounter them in the right context. As a child I read my native English voraciously, and always scored very high in vocabulary tests in school, so if it worked for my native language, why not for my target language? 4 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Jeffers Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4937 days ago 2151 posts - 3960 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Hindi, Ancient Greek, French, Sanskrit, German | Message 15 of 17 12 June 2012 at 11:43pm | IP Logged | ||
Great idea, but the link doesn't work! However, using the title you gave, I found this page: Mots croisés pour enfants Edited by Jeffers on 12 June 2012 at 11:45pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| montmorency Diglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4856 days ago 2371 posts - 3676 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Danish, Welsh | Message 16 of 17 13 June 2012 at 6:38pm | IP Logged | ||
In principle, I think the same is true for me. However, reading your post, I got to wondering whether having a sort of compromise between this and Iversen's wordlist method, might be even more effective. That is to say, if you have to look a word up, write it down, and the meaning and gender, but don't do it right away. IIRC, what he does when compiling his lists is to look it up, then wait for some little time before writing it down (not sure, maybe 30 seconds). The idea is to try to get it stored in your long term memory, and that's where you are hopefully recalling it from after the delay period, instead of just dumping it out of your short term memory by writing it down as soon as you look it up. You may not even look at the list again if you don't want to. It's the act of recalling it after a short delay that is the point. I think I'm going to give this a try, anyway. Edited by montmorency on 13 June 2012 at 6:39pm 1 person has voted this message useful |
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