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How to make things stick? | ||
Tags: Vocabulary learning | French | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Advice Center |  | |
| victorhart Bilingual Tetraglot Groupie United States mandarinexperiment.o Joined 3706 days ago 66 posts - 155 votes  Speaks: English*, Portuguese*, Spanish, French Studies: Mandarin | Message 9 of 15 07 October 2014 at 3:28am | IP Logged | ||
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I have found that new words stick fast when they are learned in a very engaging way,
and especially when there is a lot of emotional involvement and/or deep concentration. Otherwise, I have to come across a word 10 or 20 times to really assimilate it, which, as some have pointed out, is also OK. The upshot is that, in my opinion, the most effective way to learn and improve with a second language is to use it in ways that you love or that really engage your attention--romantic or otherwise intense relationships, fun conversation with friends, reading wonderful novels, watching gripping movies, writing about things that really interest you, and so forth. Pure volume also works, as long as some attention is involved, so I would encourage you to also continue listening to radio, as much as possible. Edited by victorhart on 07 October 2014 at 3:29am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| chiara-sai Triglot Groupie United Kingdom Joined 3707 days ago 54 posts - 146 votes Speaks: Italian*, EnglishC2, French Studies: German, Japanese | Message 10 of 15 07 October 2014 at 8:01am | IP Logged | ||
SRS programs such as ANKI are very useful for this in my opinion, also sometimes using memory techniques and etymologies can help words stick for longer. For example, the word avoir is actually a cognate of English have, if you think about it they’re quite similar words (there’s no phonetic H in French and in this case they dropped it in writing too, but it used to be there), while voir is cognate of video, and neither have an A at the beginning. This is all a very lengthy process, but you don’t have to do it for every word, just those that you find hard to remember or those couples that you mix up frequently. Edited by chiara-sai on 07 October 2014 at 8:01am 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6596 days ago 9753 posts - 15779 votes 4 sounds Speaks: Russian*, English, FinnishC1, Latin, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Danish, Romanian, Polish, Belarusian, Ukrainian, Croatian, Slovenian, Catalan, Czech, Galician, Dutch, Swedish | Message 11 of 15 07 October 2014 at 5:04pm | IP Logged | ||
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Technically they're not cognates, the English/Germanic have is related to the Latin capere and not habere. But in general etymology helps a lot. I know a great book for Spanish learners that explains the cognates, but there must be something (not heavily academic) for French too?
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| AlexTG Diglot Senior Member Australia Joined 4637 days ago 178 posts - 354 votes Speaks: English*, French Studies: Latin, German, Spanish, Japanese | Message 12 of 15 07 October 2014 at 5:31pm | IP Logged | ||
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Serpent you have just blown my mind. If it wasn't you saying it I would have assumed I
was being pranked. "Habere" and "To have" (along with German "Haben"!) are not related!! But fake etymologies are just as useful to a language learner as real etymologies, actually, no, they're more useful because they make more sense. Linguists can insist till they're blue in the face that the Japanese word for "work", "shigoto", isn't related to the English "she got to", I shall not recant. Edited by AlexTG on 07 October 2014 at 5:32pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| robarb Nonaglot Senior Member United States languagenpluson Joined 5058 days ago 361 posts - 921 votes Speaks: Portuguese, English*, German, Italian, Spanish, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, French Studies: Mandarin, Danish, Russian, Norwegian, Cantonese, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Greek, Latin, Nepali, Modern Hebrew | Message 13 of 15 07 October 2014 at 6:43pm | IP Logged | ||
They made a lot of sense to people hundreds of years ago, too. The coincidental similarity of form between these two words seems to have led them to converge in meaning across the Germanic and Romance languages, in the following structure which I'm pretty sure didn't exist in Latin or ancient Germanic: English: I have seen it French: Je l'ai vu German: Ich hab's gesehen Spanish: Lo he visto In Portuguese you can even say "tenho visto," where "tenho" means "have" but isn't related either to haben or habere! Languages aren't only genetic descent and loanwords; this is the European Sprachbund at work. Edited by robarb on 07 October 2014 at 6:46pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| chiara-sai Triglot Groupie United Kingdom Joined 3707 days ago 54 posts - 146 votes Speaks: Italian*, EnglishC2, French Studies: German, Japanese | Message 14 of 15 07 October 2014 at 7:07pm | IP Logged | ||
Well that's embarrassing, you're absolutely right, French avoir is not cognate of have. Just a remarkable linguistic coincidence (or maybe the similarity of the two words is what caused them both to acquire the same meaning). 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Lemberg1963 Bilingual Diglot Groupie United States zamishka.blogspot.coRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4238 days ago 41 posts - 82 votes Speaks: English*, Ukrainian* Studies: French, German, Spanish, Polish | Message 15 of 15 10 October 2014 at 4:48am | IP Logged | ||
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For Anki what works best for me is
Front: Short phrase in L1 with context-relevant image Back : L2 translation with recorded reading of the phrase 1 person has voted this message useful |
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