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The three dictionary technique | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Learning Techniques, Methods & Strategies |  | |
| DaraghM Diglot Senior Member Ireland Joined 5936 days ago 1947 posts - 2923 votes  Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: French, Russian, Hungarian | Message 1 of 17 12 April 2013 at 3:59pm | IP Logged | ||
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I've found a handy little trick for learning a lot of vocabulary quite quickly. As per the title, this method require three dictionaries of differing sizes. The smallest dictionary should still be a reasonable size, and the largest should be very large with numerous example sentences. The dictionaries can be a blend of mono-lingual and bilingual, but that's not necessary. Step 1. Using the smallest dictionary, pick a letter, say D if the language uses the Latin alphabet. Step 2. Read each column in the smallest dictionary three times going down once, back up once the column and down again. Step 3. Do this up to a certain word. E.g. debit Step 4. Do the same with the medium dictionary but only do each column twice just down once and up once. Step 5. Do this until your reach the same word you finished with in the small dictionary. Step 6. Do the same with the largest dictionary but read the columns once just down. You'll be amazed how much from the three dictionaries you'll remember, including words in the largest you read only once. You don't need to cover one side and test yourself. The words seem to anchor themselves. Maybe the different fonts and translations help. Perhaps the contextual sentences in the largest dictionary does the trick. I don't actually know, but it seems to work well. If you feel like a language experiment, try it yourself, and let us know the results. 16 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| SteveRidout Diglot Groupie Spain readlang.com Joined 4067 days ago 65 posts - 121 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish | Message 2 of 17 12 April 2013 at 5:01pm | IP Logged | ||
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Interesting, but I'd far prefer an approach which prioritises the most frequent words in a
language first. Learning groups of words which happen to be on the same dictionary pages seems inefficient. Even for a small pocket dictionary working through the whole thing would take a long time, and until you work through the whole thing you are likely missing out on some important words. Sorry to be negative, if you already have a reasonably strong vocabulary there is obviously no harm in this, as long as you enjoy it! 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Cabaire Senior Member Germany Joined 5384 days ago 725 posts - 1352 votes | Message 3 of 17 13 April 2013 at 2:23am | IP Logged | ||
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Personally I do not think this method to be efficient.
First it is boring like hell. A dictionary is the most boring book I may read consecutively second only to a phone book, and when you are bored you do not learn much. Second there is no context. When you see debit, deblock, debouch, debris, debt ... you cannot accociate anything with them, there is no comprehensible context. Because they are close to each another in the alphabet, they even sound nearly all the same and you will confuse them. This is like cramming for an exam; you sponge it up, but you will forget it rapidly, because it is no deep learning. But different brains may work their own way and may succeed. 4 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6382 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 4 of 17 13 April 2013 at 3:01am | IP Logged | ||
The technique seems awesome! How long does it take you? how many pages do you normally do? Have you tried this with L2-L3 dictionaries? 6 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Haksaeng Senior Member Korea, South Joined 5983 days ago 166 posts - 250 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Korean, Arabic (Levantine) | Message 5 of 17 14 April 2013 at 5:34am | IP Logged | ||
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Thanks DaraghM, for posting your idea. I'm planning to give it a try.
I found the negative comments unhelpful. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Warp3 Senior Member United States forum_posts.asp?TID= Joined 5320 days ago 1419 posts - 1766 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish, Korean, Japanese | Message 6 of 17 14 April 2013 at 4:46pm | IP Logged | ||
Does this approach not already do that? The words that are more common are going to appear in all three dictionaries whereas less common words will only appear in the larger dictionaries. Thus you've just now read the most common words (with definitions and examples) 3 times, somewhat common words twice, and less common words only once. If the words in the smallest dictionary still aren't common enough, then you could always use an even smaller dictionary (like perhaps a children's dictionary or an "essential 6000 vocabulary" type dictionary) as the first dictionary early on then bump up to a larger set of dictionaries later. 4 persons have voted this message useful | |||
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6488 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map | Message 7 of 17 14 April 2013 at 6:41pm | IP Logged | ||
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People who find dictionaries boring will of course not be able to profit from this method. But no method can appeal to everybody - for instance I get sick just thinking about roleplay or total physical response or chorusing, and that hasn't stopped people from using those methods.
The three dictionary method is an interesting and original idea with a clear logic, and even though I doubt it will make me drop my wordlists I could see myself trying it out. The notion of context is not as simple as some might think. When you already know a fair number of words in a word you will certainly run into some of them when you take a random page in a small dictionary. And you will see other words which remind you of already known stuff, maybe from other languages. And precisely because the words are taken in alphabetical order the steady movement through the letter combinations will also establish a connection between them. I have tried both L2->L1 dictionaries and L1->L2, and the first direction functions much better than no. 2, precisely because the words will be organized through the alphabetical order. In contrast words from a text book have a connection through the text. But with the kind of text book where the samples consist of isolated unconnected sentences this context isn't worth a dime. For me a textual context must be a real text with an interesting theme, and I do make wordlists out of my notes from my work with such texts. But often I feel it goes too slowly, and then I grab a dictionary, two pens and some paper. Grabbing three dictionaries as proposed by DaraghM could be a realistic alternative when the thirst for lots of vocabulary here and now has to be sated. Edited by Iversen on 15 April 2013 at 11:11am 5 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| SteveRidout Diglot Groupie Spain readlang.com Joined 4067 days ago 65 posts - 121 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish | Message 8 of 17 14 April 2013 at 6:53pm | IP Logged | ||
Thanks for correcting me, I didn't express myself very well and you're completely correct of course. I was just imagining my pocket dictionary as an example of the small one, which has over 12,000 words from Spanish -> English, and for someone who isn't already very strong, I think it's better to restrict the selection further than this. Your suggestion of using a more limited dictionary like a children's one as the small one sounds very good. Here's a modified method inspired by the original that tries to prioritise strongly by word frequency, but which is no-where near as practical. (Sorry, I'm a programmer and I don't tend to think about restrictions like the availability of physical books of word definitions in my methods :-)) 1. Get a dictionary where the words are sorted by word frequency. 2. Skip to the first word you don't know, let's say word 260, and use this as a starting point. 3. Read 50 words (or pick different number), from 260 to 309, 3 times each, by going down, up, and down again. 4. Now read the same 50 words again, but in between each one, read one from the next batch of 50 words, e.g. read in this order: 260, 310, 261, 311, 262, 312, etc... This could be made very easy to do if the words were arranged in 50 line columns. Do this twice, down then up. 5. For the third pass, interleave the next 50 words too, e.g. 260, 310, 360, 261, 311, 361, 262, 312, 362, etc... Again, if arranged in columns this would be easy. 6. For the next *session* (i.e. 3 more passes), you can start at word 310, which means you refresh 100 of the words you saw last time, and introduce 50 new ones. I suppose one of the nice things in the original method was the pleasure of discovering some interesting obscure words, and in that sense my proposed method loses the fun discovery aspect of the other one in it's complete focus on the most common words. Thinking about the original method more, it could help with reinforcing word prefixes. e.g. in English, you would encounter lots of words starting with "un...", "pre...", or "bi...", grouped together. Anyway, sorry for this tangent, and thanks to the original poster for an interesting method! 1 person has voted this message useful |
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