34 messages over 5 pages: 1 2 3 4 5
Sandman
Diglot
Senior Member
United States
Joined 5412 days ago
168 posts - 389 votes 
Speaks: English*, Spanish
Studies: Japanese
| Message 33 of 34 21 May 2011 at 11:20pm | IP Logged |
s_allard wrote:
I've always held that the basic unit of meaning is not the word but a higher-order unit that may be a group or words or a phrase. Of course, you start with learning words, but you inevitably realize quickly that you have to deal with sequences of words in real life. This is exactly what allows us to guess the meaning of a word or, more often, to simply gloss over something we really don't understand. This is why I have always stressed the importance of learning words by context (Note that I did not say "in context" because that will get me into trouble). It also means that you have to spend time going over the basics because as your knowledge progresses in a language you not only learn new word and structures you also learn how "old" words are used in different ways.
This phenomenon is particularly striking in idioms and collocations. How do you know that you are looking at or hearing an idiom? You can't, unless you reach a level of understanding whereby you realize something doesn't make sense unless seen metaphorically or at a higher level. And even then you often need a good dictionary or an explanation from a native speaker. When you listen to natives speaking to one another there is a level of what I call idiomaticity that takes a very long time to master in a foreign language. How many of us would feel as comfortable giving a radio or television interview in a foreign language as in own native tongue? Why is is that native speakers can complete other peoples' sentences or supply missing words? How many of us can do this in a foreign language?
To come back to your problem with Japanese--although I may be talking through my hat--I suspect that the problem may not necessarily be caused by having to know twice more words in Japanese than in Spanish. It could be simply that that you don't "know" the same number of words well enough because you haven't yet mastered their full range of meanings and usages.
Since mention is made of my favourite target language, Spanish, I would like to point out that I find myself revisiting all those very common verbs like ser, estar, hacer, dar, andar, ver, llamar, among others because they are used in so many different shapes and forms. I'm always finding novel ways of using the same old material. This does not prevent me from learning tons of new words. I say this lest the "words only" people jump all over me. |
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I think there's a few things going on. One is just the script itself, and the other how different the words are from English. In Spanish even if you've never seen the word you still roughly know how to pronounce it and this can give an important hint to its meaning, particularly with an English vocabulary to fall back on. In Japanese when you come across a word you don't know you very likely also have no idea how to pronounce it (maybe a guess if you've seen the particular kanji before, but they're all pronounced differently at different times so at best you have only a guess on its pronunciation) and this can be a bit unsettling. All you really have to help you guess the meaning is the look and combination of the characters which often aren't very helpful and with 2000'ish characters it may likely be that you've never really seen one of them before anyway or at least seen it extremely infrequently ... therefore one has neither a clue how to pronounce the word and no clue what the glyph might "mean". The investigative work becomes too difficult to overcome.
This difficulty then makes reading native materials harder and causes the issue of "you haven't yet mastered their full range of meanings and usages" somewhat inevitable until the previous issues can be overcome.
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Iversen
Super Polyglot
Moderator
Denmark
berejst.dk
Joined 6707 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
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| Message 34 of 34 23 May 2011 at 1:17am | IP Logged |
Cainntear wrote:
| let's go back to what the article claims: that brute-force, contextless learning of large amounts of vocabulary makes it easier to work out new terms encountered while reading. |
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frenkeld wrote:
I found the article ambiguous in one respect. It is not clear whether they advocate making word lists without any source other than a frequency list and a dictionary, or whether they expect you to encounter the words in context first and only then work on memorizing them from flashcards. |
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I do both things, but with new languages I prefer using the words from my texts copies and translations - and at this stage there is absolutely no shortage of such words. the things that make me start doing wordlists based directly on dictionaries are 1) a wish to learn words blockwise instead of skipping around in my dictionaries, 2) enough familiarity with the language to make it possible for me to see new words as variations on old ones.
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