Stepping Stone: Learning English (Language Learning Log) Language Learning Forum

Stepping Stone: Learning English
Share with: Delicious Digg reddit Facebook StumbleUpon
Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log

18 messages over 3 pages: 1 2 3

irrationale
Tetraglot
Senior Member
China
Joined 6042 days ago
669 posts - 1023 votes

2 sounds
Speaks: English*, Spanish, Mandarin, Tagalog
Studies: Ancient Greek, Japanese

Message 17 of 18

06 August 2008 at 10:30am | IP Logged

alancairns wrote:

Lynn wrote:

Day 8:
Progress of the day:
Vocabs fed into Anki: 60

She is still lagging behind, and it's almost twelve o'clock here. What she used to do is to stay up all night to finish
up the workload... and woke up feeling cranky and somnolent, (Ah ha! How was it for instant use of vocabs into
journals?) this time however, she will sleep sooner and wake up refreshed. The past two days (three if including
today) have not been utilized to the maximum capacity unfortunately, and she has a truckload of work lined up,
and that's counting English studies alone. Well, sweet dreams everyone.

Lynn, it really bugs me when people refer to themselves in the third person. Besides, your English is excellent,
so I have no idea what this is all about.

Alan

I glean thus far that this is purely about learning high level English vocab?

If that is true, then although I am in no way discouraging you or disparaging educated English vocab or reading classic English novels, it would behoove you to consider three points before learning the many thousands and thousands of English words out there;

- The vast majority of native English speakers do not speak, and will not understand a lot of the words you might be learning, effectively making it useless for communication. Plus, using a word to an acquaintance that they doesn't understand in a face to face conversation is very embarrassing for both parties (and even sometimes insulting) and is to be absolutely avoided.

- Even if they do, using a word like "somnolent" instead of tired, even to an extremely learned person, will make you seem, at best, an ersatz intellectual, and at worst, arrogant.

- These words will have no bearing in anything but the aforementioned face to face conversations, since when writing in forums or the like, people will just assume you used an online thesaurus.

Really, the only place for these words, in my humble experience, is in private conversations between friends who have the same kind of vocabulary, and in placed where they might be necessary. But by all means, I'm not discouraging you, just giving a perspective of an English speaker for you to consider.

Edited by irrationale on 06 August 2008 at 10:31am
1 person has voted this message useful

Lynn
Newbie
United States
Joined 5957 days ago
11 posts - 11 votes
Speaks: English

Message 18 of 18

08 August 2008 at 2:06am | IP Logged

edit

Edited by Lynn on 19 September 2009 at 1:34am
1 person has voted this message useful

This discussion contains 18 messages over 3 pages: << Prev 1 2 3

If you wish to post a reply to this topic you must first login. If you are not already registered you must first register

Printable version

You cannot post new topics in this forum - You cannot reply to topics in this forum - You cannot delete your posts in this forum
You cannot edit your posts in this forum - You cannot create polls in this forum - You cannot vote in polls in this forum

This page was generated in 0.2969 seconds.