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What about unknown words in a book ? | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Learning Techniques, Methods & Strategies |  | |
| Emme Triglot Senior Member Italy Joined 5339 days ago 980 posts - 1594 votes  Speaks: Italian*, English, German Studies: Russian, Swedish, French | Message 9 of 38 28 October 2010 at 7:08pm | IP Logged | ||
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Of course everyone has to choose his/her priorities, but personally I would find it useless to look up the translation for the kind of bird. There’s no point for me to find out that I can translate ‘wren’ with ‘scricciolo’ and ‘chiffchaff’ with ‘lui piccolo’ because I don’t know enough about birds even in my mother tongue to make any difference. I would need to pick up an Encyclopaedia to find out something useful, but I wonder whether that’s worth the effort while I’m reading a novel.
If I’m enjoying the flow of the novel, I would certainly prefer to keep up with it and accept a little bit of ambiguity in my reading than to go off on a tangent to find out as much as possible about ornithology just to make sure I’m not missing out something important the author might mean with his/her choice of bird species. 4 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Ari Heptaglot Senior Member Norway Joined 6574 days ago 2314 posts - 5695 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Mandarin, Cantonese Studies: Czech, Latin, German | Message 10 of 38 29 October 2010 at 4:41am | IP Logged | ||
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If I read something in a foreign language I'm not pretty fluent in, I'm likely reading it in order to improve my skills in the language. Hence looking up every unknown word. Sure, it'll make it harder to enjoy the story, but it'll be good for my skills in the language, and that's why I'm reading it in the first place. My thinking is "I'll probably want to learn the word at some point anyway. Might as well learn it now."
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| plaidchuck Diglot Groupie United States facebook.com/plaidchRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5297 days ago 71 posts - 93 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish | Message 11 of 38 29 October 2010 at 5:24am | IP Logged | ||
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My basic method is to read a chapter and highlight the words/frases/grammar I don't know. If they're essential to the story, I look them up immediately; if not, I leave them till I have finished a chapter. Once finished, I go back through and add these highlgihted words/frases to a wordlist/SRS. The idea is of course to internalize and actively learn the most frequently used words; others that don't appear as much are more of the passive type.
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| Bao Diglot Senior Member Germany tinyurl.com/pe4kqe5 Joined 5758 days ago 2256 posts - 4046 votes Speaks: German*, English Studies: French, Spanish, Japanese, Mandarin | Message 12 of 38 29 October 2010 at 10:48am | IP Logged | ||
One of my friends thinks like that. Funnily enough, I read more or less comfortably in four foreign languages, whereas she avoids to read in any. (She did study English and French at school.) A little story: I did so little formal vocabulary study and review in English that it is moot to say I did any intensive study after school. (And even in school I just picked up the words that were repeated a lot.) I might not be able to point out the femur in an anatomy chart but that doesn't faze me. (Never mind the malapropisms.) I guess it all comes down to the time spent on working with more or less comprehensible input, regardless of whether this time is accumulated by looking up every unknown word or by reading extensively without looking up anything. However, my ideal approach is to underline every word that I am not sure how to pronounce, and then the ones I don't know. Depending on my mood and level in the target language that means anything between the words I can't give a good definition for on the spot and the words I don't have the slightest clue what they might mean. After finishing a chapter, a couple of pages or a set time span I then go back and look up the underlined words and add the ones I deem important to a word list/flashcards. That way I don't waste my time on switching between activities, have a chance to remember the meaning of some words or deduce it from context and still learn the words I can't figure out. Edited by Bao on 29 October 2010 at 10:51am 6 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Sierra Diglot Senior Member Turkey livinginlights.comRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 7116 days ago 296 posts - 411 votes Speaks: English*, SwedishB1 Studies: Turkish | Message 13 of 38 29 October 2010 at 4:04pm | IP Logged | ||
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I love reading as a study method, but my approach differs depending on how advanced I
am in the language and what I'm trying to accomplish during that particular study session. If I'm getting between 60-90% of the material (which is my comfort zone for study- reading), I'll look up every unknown word* and write down those which seem useful. I find that there are three categories of unknown words: "Tiger? How on earth have I made it this far without knowing that?" Immediately gets written down. "Bronze... hmm, yeah, I guess that's pretty useful." Usually gets written down unless I've just encountered a billion more useful unknowns in the past few pages and I'm feeling overwhelmed. "Soldering iron. Okay, moving on." I won't bother with this kind of thing unless it's central to the text I'm working on or I've reached a level where I know almost all the more frequent/useful words and can spare some brainspace for the comparatively useless ones. *Except in the rare case that I can both a) work out from context exactly what the word means and b) tell that it's not one I want to stick on a flashcard anyway. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Nudimmud Groupie United States Joined 5184 days ago 87 posts - 161 votes Studies: Greek, Korean | Message 14 of 38 01 November 2010 at 10:45pm | IP Logged | ||
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Learning to guess words by their context and constituent parts is a valuable skill which needs to be exercised, so you probably shouldn't always lookup a word the moment you have a doubt about it. My rule of thumb is that if it's important enough to look up then it's important enough to create a flash card for it. Since I use Google Translate to lookup words, (very lazy of me, I know) it's pretty easy to just past it into my flash card software.
BTW, I used to be much for exacting about how I created flashcard entries, including making sure that I entered a new word's base forms, gender, class, etc., and using dictionary excerpts that had example sentences. But I found that all the added effort didn't add a lot of extra value -- rather I would use it as excuse to just look up words and promise my self to create an entry for it 'later', so now an entry is as it appears on the on for the front side and whatever Google translate comes back with on the reverse. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Sennin Senior Member Bulgaria Joined 6026 days ago 1457 posts - 1759 votes 5 sounds | Message 15 of 38 01 November 2010 at 11:53pm | IP Logged | ||
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Hmm. I used to underline and translate unknown words after finishing a given chapter. THat's tedious and I don't do it anymore. It doesn't bother me in the slightest if there are unknown words, because they tend to reappear, and I know sooner or later I will figure out the meaning.
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 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6695 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 16 of 38 02 November 2010 at 12:55am | IP Logged | ||
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I don't trust the guesses I make while reading. But it doesn't matter, I don't read (or listen to speech) to learn words - my wordlists take care of that. I read in order to understand something about a subject, and if it is important for the meaning that I find the meaning of a certain word or expression then I look it up. But basically I want to keep reading/listening without too many of those interruptions.
If it is very important for the meaning of a text that understand certain words or expressions then a dictionary will probably not be enough. As Emme writes: "There’s no point for me to find out that I can translate ‘wren’ with ‘scricciolo’ and ‘chiffchaff’ with ‘lui piccolo’ because I don’t know enough about birds even in my mother tongue to make any difference. I would need to pick up an Encyclopaedia to find out something useful,.. " If I need to know what a "wren" or "scricciolo" is then a bird guide would be the logical place to look. And then we are not talking language learning, but the study of ornithology. In principle I could learn a subject through texts in another language - actually there are subjects that I know better in English than in Danish - and then I would use specialized literature or encyklopedias, not dictionaries. Edited by Iversen on 02 November 2010 at 1:01am 1 person has voted this message useful |
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