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Knowing which words are worth remembering | ||
Tags: Reading | Vocabulary learning | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| Jinx Triglot Senior Member Germany reverbnation.co Joined 5694 days ago 1085 posts - 1879 votes  Speaks: English*, German, French Studies: Catalan, Dutch, Esperanto, Croatian, Serbian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Italian, Spanish, Yiddish | Message 9 of 12 05 February 2012 at 12:22am | IP Logged | ||
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I use this foolproof (for me) method called: real life. It ensures that I learn words in their best possible order of usefulness, personalised for me and my interests. How does it work? Simple: I read a ton, and when I can't figure out a word from context I look it up. I make no effort to remember it. The words I encounter most often and/or am most interested in are the ones which naturally stay in my brain after a few look-ups. Since my natural tendency is to read about topics that interest me, that ensures that I learn the words I will want to use in conversation; and since all texts are sort of like miniature frequency dictionaries to an extent, that ensures that I learn the most common and useful words and expressions for every sort of text I read. This method is not the best approach for everyone, but it works great for me!
EDIT: Whoops, I left out a very important word: "not" between "is" and "the" in the last sentence. ;) Edited by Jinx on 05 February 2012 at 2:10pm 6 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Arekkusu Hexaglot Senior Member Canada bit.ly/qc_10_lec Joined 5382 days ago 3971 posts - 7747 votes Speaks: English, French*, GermanC1, Spanish, Japanese, Esperanto Studies: Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Estonian | Message 10 of 12 05 February 2012 at 5:51am | IP Logged | ||
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I wholeheartedly second Jinx' suggestion. Since it isn't possible to remember every word the first time you
encounter it, letting frequency dictate which words stick is an excellent strategy. Ensure you get frequent exposure and production, and the words you need the most will come to you. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| mrwarper Diglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member Spain forum_posts.asp?TID=Registered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5227 days ago 1493 posts - 2500 votes Speaks: Spanish*, EnglishC2 Studies: German, Russian, Japanese | Message 11 of 12 05 February 2012 at 6:21am | IP Logged | ||
I think that was me. Link to Cainntear's comment. Interestingly, I just had a conversation on this very topic 'what to try and retain, what vocab (as a whole) select to to learn from the start in a new TL' with one of the best students I wish I'll have sometime. Our tentative conclusions: You need to do some introspection and see what words _you_ need to keep active in your native tongue, and unless you radically change your behaviour/activities you'll need their TL counterparts with a 99% probability. So you can start by having a look at English frequency lists and your daily activities. On the one end, we have extremely high frequency words (personal pronouns, simple nouns and verbs, common quantifiers and connectors). These are simply a must and they are simple to spot because they'll appear on every frequency list, no matter how biased. On the other, you have extremely low frequency words like 'curmudgeon', 'scalpel' or 'octahedron'. Only you know which ones you are likely to need to express yourself or to find in the kind of stuff you read / listen to. They may vary greatly across frequency lists. The most problematic part is, however, words that are somewhat rare, but still extremely important because everybody knows them. A typical example would be 'spoon, fork, knife', or 'dentist'. Just how many instances of these can you expect to find in any given corpus? Surprisingly few -- we take many things like these for granted and they are relatively uninteresting so we don't discuss them that often and they usually end up not scoring very high in frequency lists. As much an enemy of modern textbooks as I am because they're littered with 'theme' stuff about dull 'everyday situations' where you spend bloody ages not learning much other than vocabulary, these books tend to be excellent for this specific purpose. Think of them as a kind of pre-compiled common vocabulary, sorted by theme/subject. Once you consider vocabulary 'areas' covering related terms, there's a natural priority scale in every one of them. Do you really need to know, say, violet, purple, fuchsia, lilac, mauve and the like? You can probably get by with a 16-color palette plus 'light', 'deep', 'dark' and a few more. No need to learn terms for specific vegetables, trees you can't really distinguish even if you know the words, or gait types -- it is way more important to know the vocabulary that will allow you to accurately describe any of them when you need to do so. The broader your 'usual' repertoire is, the more effort you'll have to put to gather these valuable lists -- OTOH the more languages you learn the more this will pay for itself. In the end it all kind of boils down to knowing yourself reasonably well and depicting yourself through the vocabulary you used already. How so? Unless you are extremely dull and unadventurous, you never know what the future will bring, so no prediction can be 100% accurate. However, unless you are extremely adventurous or kind of a flick, it can't be that different from your past either or involve too many things you never thought about before. It is therefore reasonable to analyse what you did in the past to gather what was relevant for you in any aspect you may consider, and actually, this is what we do when trying to make any kind of predictions of the future -- this naturally covers what vocabulary you use, if you really think you're not so predictable or you've never had an introspective look at yourself in this regards. Just make some lists of words _you_ use or used the most, and try to tell anyone these are not the ones you'll probably use. I thought so ;) Edited by mrwarper on 05 February 2012 at 6:22am 6 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Camundonguinho Triglot Senior Member Brazil Joined 4750 days ago 273 posts - 500 votes Speaks: Portuguese*, English, Spanish Studies: Swedish | Message 12 of 12 05 February 2012 at 12:12pm | IP Logged | ||
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There is a 5000 word frequency book and 20 000 word frequency list (with collocates)
available, commercially, for American English (they are based on the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA)). There are similar 5000-most-common-word books for Spanish, Portuguese, German and French. For Russian, there is a 20 000 word book (from another editor). For Italian, there is a nice 15 000 word dictionary made by Tulio de Mauro (an Italian linguist), published by Paravia: it's called Dizionario di base (DiB). Not every language is crazy about vocabulary like English. In Chinese, with 5000 words, you're a genius. In English, you need to know at least 20 000 words to do well in high school. ;) I enjoy reading what music reviewers write, they always use new words I don't know. Yesterday, I read ''Lana del Ray is so fey'' in a review, but that word wasn't even in a dictionary I use (Merriam Webster Learner's; with 100 000 words). So, I had to look it up in a larger dictionary. I like using words I learn this way, but most people who have English as L2 just don't know them, words like sizzling or fey, they're too obscure to them. Oh well. :( Reading expands your vocabulary much faster than watching movies or sitcoms. Many times, I learn only one word per 5 movies I watch. Reading reviews on Amazon is more efficient. ;) There is at least one word in every review that I don't know, I look it up and ''acquire it''. ;) Escutcheon is easy for me, it means Escudo in Portuguese. ;) Edited by Camundonguinho on 05 February 2012 at 12:28pm 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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