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Languages with comprehensible words? | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| moonjun Bilingual Diglot Newbie United States Joined 4604 days ago 8 posts - 17 votes Speaks: English*, Mandarin* Studies: Korean | Message 1 of 4 24 December 2011 at 4:59pm | IP Logged | ||
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One difficulty that I am still facing today in English is it's seemingly infinite
amount of vocabularies and synonyms. I am struggling to enlarge my vocabulary by reading newspapers, and almost every article I read in English newspapers such as the Wall Street Journal, New York Times or the Economist have either words that look familiar or words that I don't think I've ever encountered. Mandarin is the language that I speak at home and received 5 years of primary school education with it as the language of instruction. However, I don't remember having any difficulties reading novels, newspapers etc. in Chinese. Of course, many scientific or mathematical words I learned in secondary education in English I only know in English, but in terms of vocabulary used in books or the media, I never fail to understand the meaning. I think what caused my perceptually large Chinese vocabulary is that the Chinese language is very regular in forming words. I think almost all nouns have are constructed with word stems originating in Chinese, that made it incredibly easy to memorize. For example, mathematics is "shuxue," the "study of numbers." Also all the adjectives seems to be modern, meaning that Chinese words that existed historically but not used in conversations are considered out of circulation, and archaic, but English words might be rarely used, but one can still use it in formal writing. Is my hypothesis correct about the difference in Chinese and English? I think most of the time, when I look at a Chinese word, I can understand the meaning without consulting a dictionary, while it is impossible for English because of the very heterogeneous sources of English vocabs, and that pronunciation drifts in English causes spelling irregularities, while these are non-existent in Chinese. Are there any other language that share this trait of regular word construction in Chinese? Sorry if I rambled but I was trying my best to make myself clear. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| outcast Bilingual Heptaglot Senior Member China Joined 4749 days ago 869 posts - 1364 votes  Speaks: Spanish*, English*, German, Italian, French, Portuguese, Mandarin Studies: Korean | Message 2 of 4 24 December 2011 at 5:50pm | IP Logged | ||
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I believe what you are hinting at is that English has an every day core vocabulary that is distinctly Germanic in origin, but a "literati" (elitist) vocabulary whose lexicon is clearly underpinned by Latin, Norman, French, and to a much lesser extent Italian dialects.
So, to be capable of deducing meaning of words based on prefixes, suffixes, etc (or even an educated guess through inference), you need to be familiar with Latin either through study of Latin word formation, or knowing a Latin or Romance language outright, as well as Germanic prefixes and word stock. This became patently obvious to me when I began a conscious effort to substantially increase my English vocab, that my knowledge of Spanish, and my (still basic) but improving French, was an invaluable asset when I learned new words in English, because a decisive portion of non-core English vocabulary is mainly rooted in Latin/French. I know for a fact that if I did not have that advantage, the time required in figuring out meaning would be sensibly slower. Many times I see a new word and immediately know what the general "theme" will be, because it is similar to a word in Spanish or French (denouement, dishabille, raconteur, gravid, solo, métier, luminary, insuperable, just as an example of words that are rare but when I first saw them I immediately knew their general or exact meaning, without even referring to the dictionary for their official definition). Yes, sometimes there are false friends that sneak in, but that occurs surprisingly infrequently with low-frequency vocab it appears to me, because theese words are used so sparingly that they rarely have the chance to undergo semantic drift that comes with widespread usage. As you said, since Chinese has an overwhelming native component to word formation, once your brain establishes and hones in to that pattern, you are pretty much set to go. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6397 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 3 of 4 25 December 2011 at 2:18am | IP Logged | ||
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| fiziwig Senior Member United States Joined 4665 days ago 297 posts - 618 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish | Message 4 of 4 25 December 2011 at 8:30am | IP Logged | ||
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I am a native English speaker with a a year of Latin and two years of German in high school, 50 years ago. I rarely see an unfamiliar word in English, but when I do, I can almost always figure out what it means from a combination of context and the fact that if it is an unfamiliar words it's probably from Latin or Greek. The Germanic words are all so fundamental to English that I'm pretty sure I know them all. ;-)
When I was in high school my sister and I used to play a game where we would find a word in the dictionary and see if the other person could define it. We could go back and forth for hours picking words, trying to stump the other, and we rarely missed any of them. My impression of English vocabulary is that it is very logical and systematic. and Now that I'm really getting into Spanish I'm finding that it, too, had a very logical vocabulary. Very often I'm able to work out the meaning of an unfamiliar word by knowing the affixes and the likely Latin cognates. I know nothing at all about Chinese, but I'm willing to bet trying to figure out an unfamiliar Chinese word would be a nightmare for me. So it all depends on what you're used to and what you grew up absorbing. All I absorbed was English, and as a voracious read I absorbed a LOT of English, so the whole system of roots and affixes and Latin cognates is second nature to me. 4 persons have voted this message useful |
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