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Spanish Course, few words taught | ||
Tags: Number of words | Spanish | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Programs, Books & Tapes |  | |
| Peregrinus Senior Member United States Joined 4290 days ago 149 posts - 273 votes  Speaks: English* | Message 33 of 51 05 September 2012 at 12:49am | IP Logged | |||||
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hrhenry,
You are right that most of the examples I gave to fall into the category multi-verb constructions, but they also fall into the lexical chunk category, as in set phrases that native speakers rattle off without thinking as one unit. But I just grabbed what I could quickly from a spreadsheet I put them in prior to putting them in Anki (longer process but allows a glance at usage for one word). Regarding idiom books, two particularly stand out, The Big Red Book of Spanish Idioms, and The Ultimate Spanish Phrase Finder. The problem though is that they are too big. Even ignoring obviously literary idioms, they simply contain so many idioms with no indication of frequency, that one often cannot determine if a given unknown idiom is actually common or rather a higher register one. USPF is especially useful, and perhaps in line with frenkeld's objection to using a dictionary as a source I should be using it. However even disregarding the Eng-Span section which I do, there are over 450 *densely packed* pages. It includes verb, phrasal verb, adverb usages and compound words that can be found in other sources. Helpfully it does indicate what Spanish words/phrases are synonymous and sometimes also which synonym is more common. Reviewing USPF again, I think perhaps I should be using it in preference to the dictionary for sentences and phrases, though it would take forever to extract into Anki (looks like around 70-80 per page) even disregarding the most literary entries. It is indeed a most comprehensive source. A book I like, 750 Spanish Verbs and Their Uses, with about 4500 example sentences, is probably totally contained in USPF. Again though it seems more formal/literary than conversational based. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Peregrinus Senior Member United States Joined 4290 days ago 149 posts - 273 votes Speaks: English* | Message 34 of 51 05 September 2012 at 12:50am | IP Logged | |||||
Eric Greenfield's book. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| frenkeld Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 6741 days ago 2042 posts - 2719 votes Speaks: Russian*, English Studies: German | Message 35 of 51 05 September 2012 at 1:29am | IP Logged | |||||
I'd be careful about letting my remarks affect your approach in any way. It's not that I don't agree with myself from one post to another, but my approach is based on a different overall philosophy, and there's more than one general philosophy of language learning that works, at least for different people. Once past the foundational textbook, I generally only concern myself with vocabulary items I meet in continuous sources (readers, novels, movies, conversations, etc) or that one finds on items of realia, like signs, tickets, labels, and recipes. The most I might deviate from this is by picking up something like a not overly thick vocab builder or book of idioms and leafing through the pages, only scanning through the content, and I don't do this often. I would certainly never transfer such content to Anki in toto and start drilling it. Does that mean others shouldn't do it? Not necessarily, barring the objection you have raised yourself, that with some sources, especially the lengthier ones, one may not be able to judge what's in common use and what's too obscure to be worth committing to memory. Edited by frenkeld on 05 September 2012 at 1:32am 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| hrhenry Octoglot Senior Member United States languagehopper.blogs Joined 4928 days ago 1871 posts - 3642 votes Speaks: English*, SpanishC2, ItalianC2, Norwegian, Catalan, Galician, Turkish, Portuguese Studies: Polish, Indonesian, Ojibwe | Message 36 of 51 05 September 2012 at 1:49am | IP Logged | |||||
I doubt it, since the book I'm thinking of is from the early 80s. But the book you mention may have been an outgrowth from it. I don't know. Hopefully I'll be able to find it among all the other things left behind by my parents. I have fond memories of it... I remember marking it up with plenty of notes. R. == 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5228 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 37 of 51 05 September 2012 at 3:05am | IP Logged | |||||
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Just to add a wrinkle to the debate I think we should recall the distinction between collocations and idioms. In my understanding, an idiom is a unit of two or more words whose meaning cannot be derived readily from the component words. So we say "estar en el ajo" meaning "to be involved in something" is a idiom because it's hard to see what "ajo" has to do with all this. On the other hand, things like "darse por vencido" or the more common "no darse por vencido" would not be considered an idiom but more a collocation.
This may be splitting hairs but I think the distinction is important because in many cases what to our external eyes may seem to be idiomatic, from a Spanish perspective, is just a sort of set combination of words. For example, "obrar en poder de..." meaning "to be in someone's possession" is probably more a collocation. As a matter of fact I think that many of the examples given earlier with "poder" would not really be idioms. I think we tend to lump all these things together because for us it is all set combinations of words or phrases. 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Peregrinus Senior Member United States Joined 4290 days ago 149 posts - 273 votes Speaks: English* | Message 38 of 51 05 September 2012 at 3:40am | IP Logged | |||||
The reason I said that is because after reading the preface where the author mentioned needing a source to look up phrases from literature, I presumed that many of the example phrases/sentences in USPF would come from such native sources as opposed to contrived, albeit grammatically correct, dictionary examples. @s_allard, I doubt a well-written printed work would confuse collocations with idioms, although self-learners reading isolated threads here might if they went mining large corpora without knowing the distinction, so that is good advice for them. USPF does contain compound words as I mentioned which I find a little odd as those are commonly found in dictionaries and the author was wishing to provide a source for phrases/idioms. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Gala Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 4348 days ago 229 posts - 421 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Italian | Message 39 of 51 05 September 2012 at 3:44am | IP Logged | |||||
I agree, but the learning materials (including books about Spanish idioms) tend to use the term "idiom" for both. In Spanish though, I think modismo= idiom and frase hecha= collocation. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Random review Diglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 5581 days ago 781 posts - 1310 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Portuguese, Mandarin, Yiddish, German | Message 40 of 51 05 September 2012 at 4:18am | IP Logged | |||||
I was thinking along the same lines, but too scared to say so because it just seemed so obvious that I feared I was missing something. I was thinking that a lot of those examples looked to me like they'd be completely transparent as long as you knew the individual elements. Frankly some of them just looked like the application of basic grammar- e.g. "no pudo haber sido Pilar", which just seemed to me to merely be one half of a cleft sentence (with the other half left implied in context). But then maybe I *am* missing something and have misunderstood this thread, I do have a feeling I might have. Edited by Random review on 05 September 2012 at 4:27am 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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