i_forget Triglot Newbie United Kingdom Joined 5195 days ago 35 posts - 38 votes Speaks: Greek*, English, Spanish
| Message 1 of 18 29 September 2013 at 2:54am | IP Logged |
So here's another question that I have... Have you found that it's helpful for you to
read newspapers, even if an article might have a huge number of unknown words? I have a
plug in on firefox which translates instantly a word I don't know, just by clicking on
it, so it's not such a tedious task for me to read a newspaper in my target language.
The only problem is that just by looking at the translation for one second, you don't
learn the words.
Have you found this method to be working for you, if you are on a B1 level?
1 person has voted this message useful
|
i_forget Triglot Newbie United Kingdom Joined 5195 days ago 35 posts - 38 votes Speaks: Greek*, English, Spanish
| Message 2 of 18 29 September 2013 at 2:59am | IP Logged |
Hm... Let's say I'm A2-B1, not a full B1 yet.
1 person has voted this message useful
|
Bao Diglot Senior Member Germany tinyurl.com/pe4kqe5 Joined 5764 days ago 2256 posts - 4046 votes Speaks: German*, English Studies: French, Spanish, Japanese, Mandarin
| Message 3 of 18 29 September 2013 at 3:37am | IP Logged |
It depends on the language. If you're concerned about not learning enough, why don't you read once with pop-up dictionary and read the most interesting articles again the next day, but without a dictionary?
2 persons have voted this message useful
|
Henkkles Triglot Senior Member Finland Joined 4251 days ago 544 posts - 1141 votes Speaks: Finnish*, English, Swedish Studies: Russian
| Message 4 of 18 29 September 2013 at 12:16pm | IP Logged |
What is the plugin called? Tip a brotha.
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 5 of 18 29 September 2013 at 5:54pm | IP Logged |
Newspapers are a great learning resource, once you have enough of the language to stumble through an
article and get the main points.
As your reading skills improve, I would argue that spending some loose change on a paper is the best value
for money you can get when learning languages.
1 person has voted this message useful
|
Fuenf_Katzen Diglot Senior Member United States notjustajd.wordpress Joined 4367 days ago 337 posts - 476 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Polish, Ukrainian, Afrikaans
| Message 6 of 18 29 September 2013 at 6:13pm | IP Logged |
I imagine it depends on the language. I've known people who seemed to start reading newspapers in Spanish very quickly, and if they found it to be extremely difficult, they never expressed it. With German I stuck mostly to Deutsche Welle, which I eventually found had a much easier vocabulary and sentence structure than other news sources. I was around an A2/B1 at the time, and although it was a challenge, it wasn't unmanageable. Polish, however, I've found to be very complicated. I don't know if it has something to do with how many people learn the language as a foreign language, that maybe there's a greater chance for a wider range of difficulty levels. There's no way I would be able to stumble through a Polish newspaper at the moment without being too frustrated. Maybe when I'm closer to the B1 level I'll have a different opinion! Newspapers can be a very helpful source of vocabulary, especially if you read articles about something with which you're already familiar.
2 persons have voted this message useful
|
i_forget Triglot Newbie United Kingdom Joined 5195 days ago 35 posts - 38 votes Speaks: Greek*, English, Spanish
| Message 7 of 18 29 September 2013 at 10:53pm | IP Logged |
It's called "Wiktionary and Google Translate 6.3.3"
it's very fast, all i have to do is click on a word and then press Ctrl + Alt and it
gives the translation.
2 persons have voted this message useful
|
i_forget Triglot Newbie United Kingdom Joined 5195 days ago 35 posts - 38 votes Speaks: Greek*, English, Spanish
| Message 8 of 18 29 September 2013 at 11:25pm | IP Logged |
@Fuenf_Katzen yes that's true, Spanish of example has some many words similar to
english, so you get a significant amount of passive vocabulary for free. Polish on the
other hand, this amount is much less.
1 person has voted this message useful
|