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Don’t learn hot and cold together! | ||
Tags: Vocabulary learning | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Questions About Your Target Languages |  | |
| Lykeio Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4039 days ago 120 posts - 357 votes  | Message 9 of 26 10 August 2014 at 4:23pm | IP Logged | ||
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On the contrary, I find it helpful to give the same vocabulary grouped different ways. So
for Latin or Ancient Greek I'd give a frequency list of vocabulary (around 90% of any given text) arranged a) alphabetically, b) grammatically (parts of speech) and c) conceptually (you know, divine, emotions, fashion). It seems to do the trick pretty well. Students who organise their vocab in terms of synonyms and antonyms seem to do better...at least at the composition stage. 4 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| montmorency Diglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4623 days ago 2371 posts - 3676 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Danish, Welsh | Message 10 of 26 10 August 2014 at 6:42pm | IP Logged | ||
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I wonder if it helps to add some additional context, e.g. learn the phrase
"hold and cold running water", or "black and white, and in chess, white always moves first", or other things along those lines. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Expugnator Hexaglot Senior Member Brazil Joined 4961 days ago 3335 posts - 4349 votes Speaks: Portuguese*, Norwegian, French, English, Italian, Papiamento Studies: Mandarin, Georgian, Russian | Message 11 of 26 12 August 2014 at 12:01am | IP Logged | ||
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I'd go further, I'd advise against learning groups of themed vocabulary (like colours, household activities) all at once, like most textbooks do. When I'm learning a non-Romance languages, either form looks arbitrary and I find it much harder to distinguish them. To make it worse, caldo is hot in Italian, kald(t) is Norwegian for cold, German being kalt, and caldo in Portuguese means broth which is usually served hot.
The same goes for learning groups of themed vocabulary. I mix up the words for fork, knife, spoon, pan, plate. I'm learning mostly languages that share few cognates with my native tongue, so they're totally arbitrary to me. I'd rather learn each of these items in each of my readings or textbook lessons, in context. Assimil once again does things better than the traditional approaches at this respect. Such themed lists may be better in upper-intermediate stages, once you already know the basic items and can work on actively learning more specific items, but until you've set the ground it doesn't make much sense to go into so much detail. 5 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Paco Senior Member Hong Kong Joined 4072 days ago 145 posts - 251 votes Speaks: Cantonese* | Message 12 of 26 19 August 2014 at 5:57am | IP Logged | ||
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Though this has ended, for the sake of reference, have a look at the tables
here Edited by Paco on 19 August 2014 at 5:59am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6498 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 13 of 26 19 August 2014 at 1:37pm | IP Logged | ||
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I prefer using themed wordlists or similar sources for mopping-up operations, where I try to fill out some holes but actually already know the majority of the words involved. Lists of pairs of opposite adjectives or prepositions or other things are useful for the same purpose because you easily can see the logical structure, but I wouldn't use them before I already knew a suitable number of the words - not necessarily one item per pair, but enough to let me see holes instead of a barren desert. Edited by Iversen on 19 August 2014 at 1:39pm 4 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| beano Diglot Senior Member United KingdomRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4417 days ago 1049 posts - 2152 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Russian, Serbian, Hungarian | Message 14 of 26 22 September 2014 at 5:10pm | IP Logged | ||
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I always found it more logical to learn adjectives in obvious pairs. So when I first heard the word for stiff, I would want to know how to say flexible.
2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6498 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 15 of 26 23 September 2014 at 2:37pm | IP Logged | ||
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There is one case where I like to learn words in pairs, namely pairs of perfective / imperfective verbs in Slavic languages. And two, maybe three verbs where there usually are usable cues in affixed and/or endings is OK - I actually prefer that to learning each verb in isolation and (in really ugly cases) without any clue to the aspect class of any given verb. For reasonably common words it is also OK to learn pairs raither than isolated words because you soon discover if your memory plays a trick upon you.
Similar shapes/sounds can be problematic. I always use bilingual wordbooks from target to base language for my wordlists, and the alphabetical order here functions as a help rather than a problem - but in the sections dominated by a prefix there may may hundreds of words that all share the first letters. The whole thing then looks like a confused mess of almost identical long words, which it would take a superhuman brain to memorize. The solution here is deliberately to focus on the part that follows the prefix and just keep in mind that there is something before it. The real problem is however learning large groups of semantically related words, like seven berries or twelwe different occupations or two hundred small brown birds from Africa, and it is here that it really pays to learn them dripwise - preferably from a source with pictures and explanations. Edited by Iversen on 23 September 2014 at 2:39pm 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Ari Heptaglot Senior Member Norway Joined 6377 days ago 2314 posts - 5695 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Mandarin, Cantonese Studies: Czech, Latin, German | Message 16 of 26 23 September 2014 at 2:46pm | IP Logged | ||
You've written about these "mopping up operations" before and I find the concept interesting and worthwhile, but I've never attempted such a thing myself (probably because I rarely use my languages actively). I'd be interested in trying, though. Do you think you could start a new thread to describe some of the techniques you use to "fill in the gaps" in your vocabulary? Or is there already such a thread that I haven't seen? 1 person has voted this message useful |
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