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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5428 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes  Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 25 of 74 26 October 2013 at 1:30pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
The verb GET is used in three common examples but @Serpent says that two of them are not about the usage of GET but some other verb, This is an astute observation but begs the question: why is the verb GET used in all three examples? The answer is that GET is a multi-purpose verb that can replace many other verbs. For example, get sick is the same as fall sick or become sick. Get a cold is the the same a catch a cold. Get an e-mail is the same as receive an e-mail. Etc. That is precisely why GET ranks to high in the list of common verbs; it can replace many other verbs. Not all the time of course, GET does not replace the auxiliary HAVE. It only replaces certain uses of HAVE. The point here is that the examples are all about GET because they demonstrate the power of a single verb to convery three distinct meanings. It's a sort of three-for-one verb. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Ari Heptaglot Senior Member Norway Joined 6580 days ago 2314 posts - 5695 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Mandarin, Cantonese Studies: Czech, Latin, German | Message 26 of 74 26 October 2013 at 1:47pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
The thing is, without knowing the word "get", you can get (haha) a pretty good idea of the meaning. "What can I X you to drink?" is a lot clearer than "What can I get you to X"? And for production, you can express these concepts in much simpler terms when you're still a beginner. Hell, you'd be understood with a "You drink what?", though that's not very good, of course. But a grammatical "What will you drink?" will get you far. This is using the most basic meaning of the word "will", to indicate a future tense. So when producing language, knowing the most basic meanings of the fundamental words will get you far, and when listening, knowing all of the different variants in which the word can be used will get you nowhere if you don't know the noun in the sentence. This is because in general you can only do a few things with a noun (you can play or watch football), but verbs can correspond to any number of nouns (there are thousands of things you could play or watch). So I agree with the ones saying that "Something's got to give" is much, much more advanced and should come much later in te learning process than the words "umbrella" and "football". 6 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5428 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 27 of 74 26 October 2013 at 2:19pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
If I understand this correctly it is more important to learn nouns than verbs because you can always guess the meaning of verbs but you can't do this with nouns. So one should learn nouns like "football" and "umbrella" before learning any verbs. Am I reading this correctly? I don't really object. to this idea of first learning the words for concrete objects. I think that many language classes for beginners, especially children do exactly this. But what about the rest of the language? How do you put those nouns together? That's pproblem. How many people here at HTLAL start a language by learning 200 nouns? Nor do people start with sophisticated idiomatic expressions. What everybody does is start with simple constructions that highlight the major components of the language, including nouns of course. Why do people pay attention to lists of the most common words of a language? It's not to learn the words in that order. It's to get an idea of what the most important components are. We know for example that around the 50 most common words are structural or connector words. They are to be found in nearly every sentence in the language. So you learn to recognize them and then how to use them. In English, for example, I having nothing against learning football and umbrella as the first two words in the language. I just happen to think that the personal pronouns (I, you, he, she, etc) , the articles (the, a, an) and the verbs like BE, HAVE, SAY and GET should be learned as soon as possible. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| beano Diglot Senior Member United KingdomRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4620 days ago 1049 posts - 2152 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Russian, Serbian, Hungarian | Message 28 of 74 26 October 2013 at 3:00pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
That's interesting. A beginner would probably have more chance of understanding "accommodate" rather than "put you up" or tolerate rather than put up with. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| montmorency Diglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4826 days ago 2371 posts - 3676 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Danish, Welsh | Message 29 of 74 26 October 2013 at 3:31pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Yes, learn verbs and connectors very early on, but you have to have at least a few nouns
and maybe adjectives/adverbs, in order to construct interesting phrases or sentences with them. Ditto nouns of course. No point in learning "football" if you can't say "play football" "watch football" "enjoy football" "he scored a goal" "he was offside" "that was a foul!" "the ref's an idiot...." etc, etc. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6595 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 30 of 74 26 October 2013 at 3:36pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
Also, frequency lists are useless when it comes to travelling. For a traveller umbrella would be on the top-10 words you need to know, unless you're going to the Sahara. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6595 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 31 of 74 26 October 2013 at 3:41pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Ari Heptaglot Senior Member Norway Joined 6580 days ago 2314 posts - 5695 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Mandarin, Cantonese Studies: Czech, Latin, German | Message 32 of 74 26 October 2013 at 4:05pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
Actually, I don't think it matters that much, at least for me. I'll be working on lesson material where I can learn all the words anyway, and I won't start working on native material, let alone start talking, before I have several thousand words under my belt, anyway. I just got the impression that you advocated learning all the nuances of the basic words in the beginning, and that seems odd to me. The basic words are high frequency in large part because they have so many meanings. Learning all the meanings of the word "get" because it's such high frequency is a bit odd, because not all the meanings of the word are high frequency. You get pretty far with learning to basic meaning of the word and then leave the rest until later. You don't need to learn all aspects of a word at the same time. 4 persons have voted this message useful |
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