zenmonkey Bilingual Tetraglot Senior Member Germany Joined 6486 days ago 803 posts - 1119 votes 1 sounds Speaks: EnglishC2*, Spanish*, French, German Studies: Italian, Modern Hebrew
| Message 1 of 23 17 October 2009 at 12:55pm | IP Logged |
I am sometimes having trouble with learning or confusing word meanings for words with common roots and came across the the issue of grouping and representation. Have any of you seen a dictionary or web site that presents words in the following manner or in a visually related manner?
See below for one representation. I'm working on building a website for myself and others to help on this type of brain or context map. Comments and ideas are welcome.
Edited by zenmonkey on 17 October 2009 at 12:56pm
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Tupiniquim Senior Member Brazil Joined 6017 days ago 184 posts - 217 votes Speaks: Portuguese* Studies: English, Russian
| Message 2 of 23 17 October 2009 at 2:02pm | IP Logged |
I like this idea very much, as I am a visual memory kinda guy.
What exactly are you planning on implementing, a website with several previously designed graphics or an online tool for people to build those on their own?
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zenmonkey Bilingual Tetraglot Senior Member Germany Joined 6486 days ago 803 posts - 1119 votes 1 sounds Speaks: EnglishC2*, Spanish*, French, German Studies: Italian, Modern Hebrew
| Message 3 of 23 17 October 2009 at 2:30pm | IP Logged |
Thanks for the input.
My interest is learning the language and not becoming a dictionary manager. I'd much prefer to find that the idea has already been implemented (and this representation of the mind map is not what I want, I find it has some failings, like meaning cross-linking, link qualifying, etc).
But I've been thinking about this for several months and find that it percolates back up as a personal need.
I would most likely want to see a collaborative implementation -- a place where people can enter and edit (based on a set of linking rules) words, meanings, roots, etc. Very much a visual hyper-linked dictionary format with some features like SRS for high frequency words...
So to answer your question it would be a tool to create these types of language representations and navigate them and make them useful.
Edited by zenmonkey on 17 October 2009 at 2:32pm
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Tupiniquim Senior Member Brazil Joined 6017 days ago 184 posts - 217 votes Speaks: Portuguese* Studies: English, Russian
| Message 4 of 23 17 October 2009 at 2:38pm | IP Logged |
I think this idea has a lot of potential, I see myself visiting such a site daily.
How do you imagine you're going to deal with reliability issues?
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zenmonkey Bilingual Tetraglot Senior Member Germany Joined 6486 days ago 803 posts - 1119 votes 1 sounds Speaks: EnglishC2*, Spanish*, French, German Studies: Italian, Modern Hebrew
| Message 5 of 23 17 October 2009 at 2:44pm | IP Logged |
Reliability in such a small field would mostly be effective with wikipedia-like features allowing for back-editing, shadowing, etc. It would need some trusted super-users like the moderators here.
Also take a look here, I'm not the first to see this and structure a little around it.
Edited by zenmonkey on 17 October 2009 at 3:13pm
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meramarina Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5901 days ago 1341 posts - 2303 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: German, Italian, French Personal Language Map
| Message 6 of 23 17 October 2009 at 7:12pm | IP Logged |
Thank you for posting this, it's a great idea! I'm going to try making some of these for myself. I really like the graphical representation of relationships between words. It's so much more vivid and memorable than lists or cards.
Do you know how one might set up a graph to show how words from two separate languages are related? For example, maybe the concept "weather" could be the central node, and German words could branch one way,"das Wetter" with sub-branches or offshoots for related vocabulary, and Spanish "el tiempo" could go on the other side, with corresponding sub-branches.
I don't know how or if that would work; the idea is to keep the concept of weather at the top, while dividing the options for expressing it into different languages, to avoid mixing two or more languages together. This might not be the best example, since "el tiempo" has meanings unrelated to weather, but there could be a way to depict that too. Just an idea.
Edited by meramarina on 17 October 2009 at 7:13pm
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administrator Hexaglot Forum Admin Switzerland FXcuisine.com Joined 7310 days ago 3094 posts - 2987 votes 12 sounds Speaks: French*, EnglishC2, German, Italian, Spanish, Russian Personal Language Map
| Message 7 of 23 17 October 2009 at 7:52pm | IP Logged |
This is very interesting! If used for analytic languages like Germans, whose words often use clearly identifiable root words, you should have an hyperlink to the verbal particles, as from the contemplation of many verbs using the same particle will emerge an epiphany of its intrisic meaning.
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zenmonkey Bilingual Tetraglot Senior Member Germany Joined 6486 days ago 803 posts - 1119 votes 1 sounds Speaks: EnglishC2*, Spanish*, French, German Studies: Italian, Modern Hebrew
| Message 8 of 23 18 October 2009 at 1:49am | IP Logged |
I've been playing with this more and more and can explain some of the ideas.
language (Spanish, French, etc) linking is just another hyperlinked dimension which could be represented by depth. Links need some sort of qualifier.
el tiempo - das Wetter (branching into German)
- weather (definition link)
- time (definition link)
- temporada (season, common root link)
I like the expression "epiphany of intrinsic meaning" of particles, thanks for bringing that in; it is certainly that idea that motivates some of this as "durch", "aus", "ein", etc. are all roots that can be perceived like that with a common if shifting meaning across composite words. This is a nice little problem because it demonstrates the need for a multiple parent structure for a word. For example, "aussehen" is both of the family of words with prefix "aus" and words with the root "sehen". The visual representation of that should be fun to build.
Now my desk is covered by all sorts of diagrams, tables and drawings and my linguistics texts are in use...
Edited by zenmonkey on 18 October 2009 at 1:53am
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