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Advice on reading | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Learning Techniques, Methods & Strategies |  | |
| Jordan152 Newbie United Kingdom Joined 5756 days ago 39 posts - 35 votes Studies: English, Finnish | Message 1 of 8 24 October 2011 at 12:47am | IP Logged | ||
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I currently read childrens books to try and increase my vocabulary but it is kind of overwhelming at the moment. I have to look up 1 in every 5 words and by the time I've been reading for a certain length of time I have 30+ new words to learn. I can only manage to learn 10-15 words a day so the leftovers soon mount up. Any tips? Edited by Jordan152 on 24 October 2011 at 12:51am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Jordan152 Newbie United Kingdom Joined 5756 days ago 39 posts - 35 votes Studies: English, Finnish | Message 2 of 8 24 October 2011 at 12:52am | IP Logged | ||
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should I be more selective with the words I choose to learn?
1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| iguanamon Pentaglot Senior Member Virgin Islands Speaks: Ladino Joined 5197 days ago 2241 posts - 6731 votes  Speaks: English*, Spanish, Portuguese, Haitian Creole, Creole (French) | Message 3 of 8 24 October 2011 at 2:12am | IP Logged | ||
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I know what you're going through. You don't mention just how far along you are in your studies but I'll assume you're fairly new. I really admire you for picking a non-traditional and unrelated to English language to learn. The reason you are having so much difficulty reading Finnish is that, the language has such little relation to English. It is simply going to take more time for you to acquire the vocabulary and grammatical concepts necessary in order to start reading more efficiently than, say, if you were learning French. Eventually your base in the language will be large enough that you will be able to figure out words through context.
Some methods I use to fix words and concepts into my mind- use Google Image to search for unknown words when possible, write the unknown word at least ten times on paper with the English equivalent. Say the pesky word out loud in groups of five with the English equivalent once. These seem to work for me. Everyone learns a bit differently. Some people use word lists or SRS systems like Anki. Mnemonics is a technique whereby you create a mental association with the word. Barry Farber describes it in his wonderful book "How To Learn Any Language": "The notes on the five line music staff, E, G, B, D, and F, could easily be remembered with the help of a simple phrase, 'Every Good Boy Does Fine.' What’s more, we learned that the notes in the spaces between the lines were F, A, C, and E, or, as we ten year olds guessed, the word 'face'. Who could ask for anything more? Harry Lorayne teaches us we can ask for everything more! He teaches a system of association – called mnemonics – that allows you to almost always bring forth any word in conversation whenever you want it. The way to capture and retain a new word in a foreign language is to sling a vivid association around the word that makes it impossible to forget. Lasso the unfamiliar with a lariat woven from the familiar." Example: "The French word for 'anger' is colère, pronounced cole-AIR. Strange, we associate anger with heat. We say 'in the heat of anger', but when someone is angry at us, we say he’s 'cold', 'chilly', 'giving us the cold shoulder'” It’s not too much of a leap to imagine an angry person radiating his anger, spilling it off in all directions, in the form of cold air. You hope he’s not angry, but when you enter his office, you know your hopes were in vain because you can feel the colère, the ”col’” air” (cole’-AIR)." Mnemonics works for a lot of people and may, or may not, work for you. I've never tried to learn a language so far removed from the family as Finnish. Learners of non-Indo-European languages have an especially long, hard row to hoe. The Finnish speakers and learners on the forum like @Chung will be able to offer you more specific to Finnish related advice. Hope this very general advice helps. Edited by iguanamon on 24 October 2011 at 2:32am 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| fiziwig Senior Member United States Joined 4800 days ago 297 posts - 618 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish | Message 4 of 8 24 October 2011 at 3:04am | IP Logged | ||
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I ran into the same problem when I started learning Spanish by reading. What I finally decided to do was to look up the strange word and then just move on with my reading. If the word is important it will come up over and over in the text and that repetition alone will help make it stick in memory. If the word is less important it might only show up rarely, and so it's not so urgent to get that one memorized right away.
I found that about the third or fourth time I grabbed the dictionary and looked up the same word my mind rebelled and said "Hey! I'm sick of looking up this same word over and over. I'm just going to remember it for you." :) Anyway, as time went on and my vocabulary increased for some reason it got to the point where I would see a new word in a text and look it up, and that was that. Looking it up once was enough to make it stick. I'm not sure why that happens, but it does. At least it did for me, but only after I reached the point of knowing almost all the words I was reading. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Cavesa Triglot Senior Member Czech Republic Joined 4944 days ago 3277 posts - 6779 votes Speaks: Czech*, FrenchC2, EnglishC1 Studies: Spanish, German, Italian | Message 5 of 8 24 October 2011 at 10:39am | IP Logged | ||
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My two cents:
Choose something more fun than children books (unless you enjoy them of course). That will help to not bore you to death even when the vocab learning tries to. Either graded readers or translations of less complicated books, preferably those you really like (or even know half by heart). Try to read larger chunks first. Either you will learn the word from context as it is important and repeated, or you will write it down when going through the chunk second time (unless you find out the word is completely unimportant). If the book is yours, you can mark the words with pencil for later search and not get too worried immediately. Parallel texts are great as well. They save a lot of time with dictionnary and are easy to use. But it might be harder to get them for Finnish (the graded readers probably as well). 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| smallwhite Pentaglot Senior Member Australia Joined 5243 days ago 537 posts - 1045 votes Speaks: Cantonese*, English, Mandarin, French, Spanish | Message 6 of 8 24 October 2011 at 1:59pm | IP Logged | ||
You have 30 but you only want 10-15. Well, then, maybe just read until you get your 10-15, and stop there, and do something else? 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| WingSuet Triglot Senior Member Sweden Joined 5286 days ago 169 posts - 211 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English, German Studies: Cantonese | Message 7 of 8 24 October 2011 at 2:28pm | IP Logged | ||
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A while ago I started reading a children's book in Spanish. Spanish is a little easier for me to learn and I've already studied it before, but I still ended up with about 30-40 words per page. So I decided one page a day is enough, and it worked fine at first. However, after a while I got tired of the book and stopped reading. You might want to find something more interesting to read, like a book you have already read and know you like, or maybe learn the lyrics of a good song. That might keep you motivated longer.
And don't worry about the slow progress. When I started reading a German book, I looked up a lot of words, but after having read half of the book I didn't need to look up any more words as I could guess their meaning from the context. Already having read the book in my native language helped a lot, as I already knew what it was about. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| July Diglot Senior Member Spain Joined 5208 days ago 113 posts - 208 votes Speaks: English*, SpanishB2 Studies: French | Message 8 of 8 24 October 2011 at 4:07pm | IP Logged | ||
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The first month I was learning, I started out reading a couple of pages of a book that I
loved in English and then reading the same pages in the Spanish edition. This meant that I was constantly having 'Oh, that's the word for...!' and I could follow the story in the Spanish copy much more easily. It also meant that very soon I got a passive vocabulary of the words that kept showing up, and it was much less frustrating. After all, at this point you're learning, not trying to test your abilities or check how much you already know. Leave that for later, when every twenty words something crops up you don't know. Edited by July on 24 October 2011 at 4:08pm 4 persons have voted this message useful |
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