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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| vermillon Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4676 days ago 602 posts - 1042 votes  Speaks: French*, EnglishC2, Mandarin Studies: Japanese, German | Message 273 of 1317 07 November 2012 at 3:25pm | IP Logged | |||||
Sorry I'm late, but I just wanted to react to these: -biberon is specifically the bottle with a sucker used to give milk to babies. (a "baby bottle"?) -just in case, feutre is felt. Using "feutre" for a felt hat is probably correct (but I've never heard it), but "feutre" is most often used for a felt pen (un feutre). -toile is not "fine" cloth at all, and usually the opposite. Your tent is probably made of toile, and so is the support on which you would see Mona Lisa in the Louvres. Also note (if you don't already know it) the "toile d'araignée" is a spiderweb and the internet is often called "la toile". 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
 emk Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5530 days ago 2615 posts - 8806 votes Speaks: English*, FrenchB2 Studies: Spanish, Ancient Egyptian Personal Language Map | Message 274 of 1317 07 November 2012 at 4:54pm | IP Logged | |||||
Thank you for your notes! When I post definitions in this log, I try to use the definition that corresponds with how the word was actually used in context. I suppose it would be useful to readers to post more complete definitions, but I'm lazy, and like to deal with only one usage of a word at a time. And I'm not sure what I was thinking with 'toile'. Thank you! 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| vermillon Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4676 days ago 602 posts - 1042 votes Speaks: French*, EnglishC2, Mandarin Studies: Japanese, German | Message 275 of 1317 07 November 2012 at 5:06pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I had guessed that was the way you were proceeding indeed. My comment's aim was merely to suggest that, when learning vocabulary, one may be tempted to learn the "most common meaning" of the word. I'm thinking mostly of the hat exeample here: learning that "feutre" is a kind of hat is of little practical value, while the meaning of felt pen (and to a lesser extent felt itself) is far more common.
Not sure if it's any clear: perhaps it's like learning that "wood" is a word for a kind of musical instrument before knowing it's a kind of material? 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Expugnator Hexaglot Senior Member Brazil Joined 5164 days ago 3335 posts - 4349 votes Speaks: Portuguese*, Norwegian, French, English, Italian, Papiamento Studies: Mandarin, Georgian, Russian | Message 276 of 1317 07 November 2012 at 5:18pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I don't usually trust what glossaries say or what the dictionary says either. When I come across a word that is important, I try to absorb many meanings at once by looking at context, translation (if provided), monolingual definition and machine translation into English and Portuguese.
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| emk Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5530 days ago 2615 posts - 8806 votes Speaks: English*, FrenchB2 Studies: Spanish, Ancient Egyptian Personal Language Map | Message 277 of 1317 07 November 2012 at 10:04pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Actually, I know both definitions of "feutre." But if I only knew about "felt hat", and not "felt", I'd actually be OK with that. That's a very natural sort of vocabulary problem, and it would sort itself out in about 5 seconds when I ran into the more general meaning.
To use your English example, let's imagine a student of English who knows the difference between "woodwinds" and "brass intruments". If somebody asks them, "Hey, can you bring in some wood to throw on the fire?", then it won't be too hard to figure out the general definition. Even if there's a moment of confusion, the new definition will be easy to remember. In general, my strategy is to understand the text before me with an ever-increasing degree of precision. I look lots of stuff up, but I learn at least as much from context. And I try to tolerate ambiguity and fuzzy definitions, and have faith that another 500 pages will sort it all out. There are plenty of French words—including a few common ones like arriver—where my "definition" is really just a collection of examples: - J'arrive, ma biche ! (I'm coming, my doe! —from Asterix) - Il m'arrive quelques fois de ne plus avoir le choix. - Je dois le quitter… mais je n'y arrive pas ! I use arriver spontaneously, and—to the best of my knowledge—in a reasonably idiomatic fashion. But I've never bothered to look up a proper translation for the second example, because it makes sufficient sense to me. I just know when French speakers tend to say it, and roughly what idea they're trying to convey. This may or may not be an efficient way to learn French. But I find a certain childlike joy in collecting examples and puzzling things out. … My current puzzle is the French expression d'office, which I ran into twice in 48 hours:
Three different dictionaries gave me the following:
At this point, my passive understanding of the French word is probably in the general ballpark. The dictionaries help a bit, especially the ones with examples. But I don't grasp this word nearly well enough to use it for anything other than describing a court-appointed attorney. Of course, I'm not 100% solid on how to use ex officio in English, either. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Josquin Heptaglot Senior Member Germany Joined 4842 days ago 2266 posts - 3992 votes Speaks: German*, English, French, Latin, Italian, Russian, Swedish Studies: Japanese, Irish, Portuguese, Persian | Message 278 of 1317 07 November 2012 at 11:34pm | IP Logged | |||||
This reminds me of the old joke among (brass) musicians: "What's the difference between an oboe and a bassoon?" - "A bassoon burns longer." 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| emk Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5530 days ago 2615 posts - 8806 votes Speaks: English*, FrenchB2 Studies: Spanish, Ancient Egyptian Personal Language Map | Message 279 of 1317 08 November 2012 at 12:13am | IP Logged | |||||
Heh. Not that I want to turn this log into a collection of music jokes (unless they're in French), but my personal favorite is: "How do you know there's a drummer at the door? They keeping knocking faster, but they don't know when to come in." On an unrelated subject, I want to mention that movies are awesome: They contain lots of colloquial dialog, they're entertaining (obviously), and they have lots of handy visuals and plot which provide big hints about what people are saying. It's a pity that only a minority of French films have subtitles and that films are hard to use until you reach upper intermediate levels. I mean, I like Assimil's jokes as much as the next person, but films are way better. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| DaraghM Diglot Senior Member Ireland Joined 6149 days ago 1947 posts - 2923 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: French, Russian, Hungarian | Message 280 of 1317 08 November 2012 at 10:00am | IP Logged | |||||
I don't know if you can get the channel TV5 Monde, but they show a lot of their programs with French subtitles, including films. Since my French is still at the early stages, I needed a dictionary to find out that 'bagnole' meant car. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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