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luke
Diglot
Senior Member
United States
Joined 7000 days ago
3133 posts - 4351 votes 
Speaks: English*, Spanish
Studies: Esperanto, French
| Message 113 of 115 02 February 2013 at 6:55am | IP Logged |
tastyonions wrote:
s_allard wrote:
| I find the idea intriguing. I may be able to understand a lot more words passively but I limit my active vocabulary to the 1000 most frequent period. I have 1000 flashcards and that's what I'll work with. |
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It is an interesting idea. Actually, I have a frequency dictionary of French, so maybe I'll try it out myself. I could make February my "month of the 1000 most common French words." I'm sure a bunch of them are already in my active vocabulary simply by virtue of being so common, so I bet with some help from Anki and conversation practice I'd be able to really burn all 1,000 in and discover all kinds of usages by the end of the month. Hmm... :-) |
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It will be interesting to hear about your results if you try this experiment... :)
2 persons have voted this message useful
| Camundonguinho
Triglot
Senior Member
Brazil
Joined 4544 days ago
273 posts - 500 votes
Speaks: Portuguese*, English, Spanish
Studies: Swedish
| Message 114 of 115 03 February 2013 at 5:43am | IP Logged |
Get a magazine article written in your L1, something you find interesting.
Translate it into your L2 as accurately as possible, as if you were a professional translator.
Don't use vague synonyms.
Look up words you don't know in a large L1-L2 dictionary.
Good luck ;)
PS
People say it's more difficult to translate in the L1->L2
direction than in the L2->L1 direction.
Once you've done with your translation, ask a native speaker of your L2
to check it out ;)
Edited by Camundonguinho on 03 February 2013 at 5:51am
1 person has voted this message useful
| aloysius
Triglot
Winner TAC 2010 & 2012
Senior Member
SwedenRegistered users can see my Skype Name
Joined 6035 days ago
226 posts - 291 votes
Speaks: Swedish*, English, German
Studies: French, Greek, Italian, Russian
| Message 115 of 115 03 February 2013 at 6:12pm | IP Logged |
George Orwell wrote:
‘It’s a beautiful thing, the destruction of words. Of course the great wastage is in the
verbs and adjectives, but there are hundreds of nouns that can be got rid of as well. It isn’t only the synonyms; there
are also the antonyms. After all, what justification is there for a word which is simply the opposite of some other
word? A word contains its opposite in itself. “Take good”, for instance. If you have a word like "good", what need is
there for a word like "bad"? "Ungood" will do just as well – better, because it’s an exact opposite, which the other is
not. Or again, if you want a stronger version of "good", what sense is there in having a whole string of vague useless
words like "excellent" and "splendid" and all the rest of them? "Plusgood" covers the meaning; or "doubleplusgood" if
you want something stronger still. Of course we use those forms already, but in the final version of Newspeak
there’ll be nothing else. In the end the whole notion of goodness and badness will be covered by only six words – in
reality, only one word. Don’t you see the beauty of that, Winston?
/.../
In your heart you’d prefer to stick to Oldspeak, with all its vagueness and its useless shades of meaning. You don’t
grasp the beauty of the destruction of words. Do you know that Newspeak is the only language in the world whose
vocabulary gets smaller every year?’
/.../
Every year fewer and fewer words, and the range of consciousness always a little smaller.
/.../
‘Has it ever occurred to you, Winston, that by the year 2050, at the very latest, not a single human being will be alive
who could understand such a conversation as we are having now?’
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