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Wordlists and Novels | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Learning Techniques, Methods & Strategies |  | |
| geoffw Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 4716 days ago 1134 posts - 1865 votes  Speaks: English*, German, Yiddish Studies: Modern Hebrew, French, Dutch, Italian, Russian | Message 9 of 22 27 February 2012 at 10:42pm | IP Logged | ||
And if you're hanging out in Russia, that might not necessarily be a bad decision, either... 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Raincrowlee Tetraglot Senior Member United States Joined 6730 days ago 621 posts - 808 votes Speaks: English*, Mandarin, Korean, French Studies: Indonesian, Japanese | Message 10 of 22 28 February 2012 at 1:45am | IP Logged | ||
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Having tried to plow through authentic material at various stages of the learning game, I'd say that might be a little too ambitious at an early stage of a language. It's mostly about frustration. When you literally have to take each word on the page apart bit by bit, then go back to try to understand what's going on, it's easy to get burned out, especially if the language has a lot of homonyms.
I tried it once with a page long article in Chinese and it took me months to complete it. When I looked at it later, I realized that I had made several errors in looking up words because I had such little knowledge of the language that I had to guess where the word boundaries were (Chinese doesn't have spaces between words), and sometimes guessed wrong, looking up single characters when they were meant to be read in combination. I also had a problem doing it too early in reviving my French. There were some verbs that I looked up multiple times that wound up being the same verb because they were in subjunctive, and in the years since I had first studied the language, I had forgotten all of my irregular subjunctive forms. I ran into them in first, second and third person singular and plural, and had to look them up individually each time. Then quickly forget them and look them up again. *le sigh* With a language like Russian, that features a lot of declensions, I'd think it'd be worth your time to get an overview of the grammar features before diving into a novel, or even a short story. For one thing, as a linguistic infant, you don't know how difficult the language in the story actually is. You might be diving into something that advanced students would struggle with, which also adds to the chance of burn out. At the same time, once you've got a handle on the basics of the language, attacking novels would have lasting benefit, especially if it's a book you can keep rereading. I'd say for some books you don't even need that strong a base--I started working on the Little Prince in Korean after only 7-8 months in this program, and I learned some words and turns of phrases in it that have helped my Korean. It's not my main mode of learning, though, and I can see on the first page a few words that I underlined that I've learned elsewhere. I think whoever said you should do it as a supplement has it spot on, at least while you're still getting oriented on the language. I think novels are better at reinforcing vocabulary than teaching them because there are so many bloody words in a book; I also think that when you're reading a novel you should be at a level where the language can sound out in your head because reading literature should teach you about prosody and choice of words rather than grammar and vocabulary. That's what we get when reading in our native languages, after all, so why should we approach books in foreign languages all that differently? Edited by Raincrowlee on 28 February 2012 at 3:13am 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 11 of 22 28 February 2012 at 2:36am | IP Logged | ||
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I started out to learn Spanish that way with the first Harry Potter novel. First of all, Harry Potter is a lot more accessible than Nabokov, and secondly, reading Harry Potter turned out to be better done as "homework" while learning grammar the more traditional way. I did make it all the way through the first Harry Potter novel, and Alice in Wonderland as well. I'm working on a "real" Spanish language novel now (rather than a translated children's book), but I do have the next two Harry Potter novels in Spanish waiting on my shelf.
It definitely helps you progress in your target language, but I think, from my experience, trying to learn just from reading is doing it the hard way. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Tortoise Newbie United States Joined 4701 days ago 7 posts - 9 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Russian | Message 12 of 22 28 February 2012 at 3:52am | IP Logged | ||
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Believe me I'm definitely not using this as my sole method of learning the language, I understand that that's just too much.
Raincrowlee, keep in mind, that my main reason for reading the book is to use it as a source for wordlists. There's also an online Russian-English dictionary that is pretty good about sending you to the regular form of the word if you type in a noun in a different case, or a verb with a different conjugation. I also think it'll help me learn the endings to noun cases (of course, it's not going off and memorizing all of the endings, but it's a fun way to do it, and I think I'll learn it pretty well that way. I should also note that I intend on familiarizing myself with pronouns to a large enough extent to be able to half-way guess which case is being used). It's a lot of work, but I think it'll be fun. Also, as for not knowing what I'm diving into, I have to argue that I do. This is far from my first time reading Nabokov, and though what I have studied was all written in English, I understand that all of his works are pretty advanced; to be honest, I'm simply not worried about that. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Rincewind Tetraglot Newbie Brazil Joined 4728 days ago 19 posts - 35 votes Speaks: Portuguese*, English, Spanish, French Studies: German, Russian | Message 13 of 22 28 February 2012 at 11:27am | IP Logged | ||
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I have done this before (with English, actually, a hundred years ago), and I wouldn't do it again with other languages, especially a highly inflected language like Russian.
If you know one of the Romance languages, you could probably do it with another of the languages in the family, since it would be a lot easier to discover words' meanings in a dictionary, but with Slavic languages, I think it's bound to be a very frustrating exercise. I'm studying Russian right now, and I have tried to start on a couple of novels, but each time I come to the conclusion that I still need a better foundation in language structure and vocabulary for the reading to be more profitable and less time consuming. I believe my learning time is better spent at this stage on going through my course book(s), grammar(s) and vocabulary lists. It's definitely more time-effective than going through a novel having to "decode" every other word through a long process of analysis. If you want to improve your vocabulary, I'd suggest you get yourself a frequency list of the 20,000 most frequent words in Russian, then go through it backwards. When you reach the 5,000 most frequent mark, you'll probably find that you know most if not all of those already. If 20,000 is too much, go from 10,000 backwards. I have done this with French, and it was the best time-investiment possible. In six months time I was reading literature and listening to audiobooks. Do a search on the Goldlist method or check out Iversen's wordlist technique, and see if you can use one or both of them with the frequency lists. Last but not least, check out Professor Arguelles' youtube channel (ProfAsAr, I think), and watch especially the videos on intensive/extensive reading and on how to increase one's vocabulary. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6731 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map | Message 14 of 22 28 February 2012 at 2:37pm | IP Logged | ||
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A novel is long, and if you want to get through it in a reasonable time you don't have time to look up half the words and writing lists with them. So at this stage I suggest that you do make wordlists, but from much shorter texts (which still can have literary value). This doesn't mean that you should postpone reading novels into a far and uncertain future, but you should at least be able to get the gist of the meaning without looking up every second word. With a target language which is related to something you already know this stage may come fast, whereas it will take longer to get there with more exotic languages.
When I jot down unknown words while reading I just see this as the first step - which means that some of the word meanings may be guessed rather than looked up, and that I don't have to be too preoccupied if I can't immediately remember all the words I write down. Later I transfer the words to wordlists, where I am much more fuzzy about writing correct meanings and maybe even morphological markers, and that's where I expect to fixate the word in my memory. Besides I often copy passages by hand and then use the right margin of the paper for new words - this is so to say the ultimate way of slowing down to a speed where I can deal with everything in the text. In case I just read through a text while looking things up then I often jot new words down with their approximate meanings on a folded piece of paper (to make it more handy), marking the beginning of each new page so that I can find back to the original context for each word. However in both cases the words go into wordlists with the same layout. When you read a longer text it would be an enormous task to make a complete list of all words, and even if you just wrote down the 'interesting' ones it would hardly be worth the effort. For me it would make more sense to note expressions down, interspersed with a limited number of central terms and words you for some reason really want to know. The systematic bulk learning of new words at this stage is in my opinion better done with words taken directly from a dictionary. However I'm aware that many learners need a context to remember a word, and for them it might be relevant to make wordlists for single chapters in a thick book. But doing this for a whole book would be an ardeous task, and I can't really see the purpose. Edited by Iversen on 28 February 2012 at 5:07pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Mooby Senior Member Scotland Joined 6133 days ago 707 posts - 1220 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Polish | Message 15 of 22 28 February 2012 at 3:34pm | IP Logged | ||
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I usually have two novels or short stories at hand, for different purposes:
1. I use one for intensive reading in which I make a note of every word I don't know, as well as paying close attention to grammar. This book is usually a short children's book like 'Little Red Ridinghood', preferably with audio. 2. The second book I use for extensive reading. I read just a couple of pages outloud, concentrating on pronunciation, flow and general meaning. I don't look up any dictionaries with this book. Again it's a children's book like 'Pinocchio', but a little longer and more complex than book one. Sometimes I'll read this book again and check to see how much more I have understood. All new words are added to Anki, and I'll 'google' some of them (both text and images) to build visual association. Finally I read captions, adverts, news headlines, short magazine articles and blogs: in order to pick up slang, imperatives and idiomatic use. To read and appreciate poetry would be my summit. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Tortoise Newbie United States Joined 4701 days ago 7 posts - 9 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Russian | Message 16 of 22 29 February 2012 at 6:27am | IP Logged | ||
Wislawa Szymborska and Zbigniew Herbert are two of my favorite Polish poets :) 3 persons have voted this message useful |
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