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How much time studying vocabulary? | ||
Tags: Time to learn | Vocabulary learning | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Learning Techniques, Methods & Strategies |  | |
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6390 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 273 of 350 24 May 2015 at 6:45pm | IP Logged | ||
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Is there any information about these techniques online? This stuff for teachers looks interesting.
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| daegga Tetraglot Senior Member Austria lang-8.com/553301 Joined 4314 days ago 1076 posts - 1792 votes Speaks: German*, EnglishC2, Swedish, Norwegian Studies: Danish, French, Finnish, Icelandic | Message 274 of 350 24 May 2015 at 6:59pm | IP Logged | ||
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You can find a short illustration here (in German):
https://www.uni-due.de/imperia/md/content/prodaz/interkompre hension20110412.pdf Here you find a short online tutorial for Romance languages (the introduction is again in German): http://www.eurocom.uni-frankfurt.de/siebe/7Siebe/BIN/start.h tm In general, you need to search for German (Interkomprehension) and French (intercompréhension) titles to find something substantial. But the researchers want you to buy their books, eg. this one: http://www.amazon.de/EuroComRom-sieben-Romanische-Sprachen-s ofort/dp/3826569474 Look at your university library, maybe you have luck. In a less academic and more intuitive form we have seen similar approaches already in the middle of last century though, Madrigal for example. edit: There is usually the assumption that you have a teacher (who has studied intercomprehension techniques him-/herself) providing you with the right material for these techniques. Not very practical I'm afraid. But the principles make sense if you can find a way to use them on your own. In other words: don't try to follow the precise steps, it's probably futile. Edited by daegga on 24 May 2015 at 7:27pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6390 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 275 of 350 24 May 2015 at 7:36pm | IP Logged | ||
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(I'm not a university student anymore, and even if I was there would be zero chance to get this kind of stuff from a library here, but thanks for the links and suggestions :)))
edit: yeah, as a linguist I'm familiar with this kind of stuff, but this was a nice read, thanks! For the Romance languages there's also The Seven Sieves book (not sure which one was the first), and books for specific languages like "Spanish vocabulary: an etymological approach" (it has examples from Latin and modern Romance languages too). Edited by Serpent on 24 May 2015 at 10:06pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5223 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 276 of 350 25 May 2015 at 5:41pm | IP Logged | ||
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Are vocabulary problems really vocabulary problems? This question came to my mind after reading that a poster
was having difficulties reading a novel in German because of vocabulary. Undoubtedly, problems of reading comprehension present themselves as problems of unknown words. We are reading a sentence and suddenly we come across a word that we don't recognize. Therefore we head for the dictionary. In this sense, vocabulary problems are real. On the other hand, we know that the meaning of a word depends heavily or entirely on the context, especially when the word has some morphological adaptation according to agreement rules. A dictionary definition is generic and has to be applied to the concrete situation in front of our eyes. A good dictionary will have enough examples for us to find something that fits our situation. In essence the real meaning depends on what comes before and after the unknown word. This is particularly important with idioms and collocations. It also means that the word itself may not be all that important for understanding the entire sentence, as the following post underscores:
This brings into question the concept of "learning" words from lists where the definitions consist most of the time of one word, supposedly the principal or main meaning. I believe that such lists can be very useful as mnemonic tools to keep the words in memory but for primary learning I am very skeptical. All the more so when we are talking about huge numbers of words and spending only seconds on individual words. I know that wordlists are to be used only as one element of a general strategy but the thought of trying to learn thousands of words in no particular order, with the slightest of definitions and no guide to usage is mind- boggling. I looked at some the frequency lists available on Net for languages I'm interested in. For example, I had a look at a 5000-word Polish list and found the following ten words at the very end: zostawisz, nisko, chleb, wyjaśnia, ooh, dzielić, dotrzemy, diabeł, ćwiczenia, użył There's no translation of course, but I can't see the point of just trying to memorize 50 words like these every day for months. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6496 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 277 of 350 25 May 2015 at 7:00pm | IP Logged | ||
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The point is that you don't learn those 50 words from a frequency list without translations, and you don't just memorize them - maybe they come from a source (hopefully a comprehensible source), and even if they don't you can also try to use connections to other words or associations based on their sound to make them more memo(iz)rable. The meaning of a word has always reminded me of a brain cell with its myriad of neurons that connect it with other braincells, which in the analogy becomes words and things that aren't words.
The point of wordlists is to combine a certain amount of repetition with opportunities to build such 'neuronal networks' without the temptation to read or listening solely for content, and my personal experince is that I do this more efficiently when I don't waste my time on looking words and expression up all over my dictionaries. But I need to know a fairly number of words already to be able to form the linguistic associations, and it also takes some training to see possible associations based on sound. Actually only the 'grammatical words' and a few other high frequency words and expressions are necessary to form the active framework of your language - and if we look at chaotic_thought's sentence ("Lupinus texensis, the Texas bluebonnet, is a species of lupine endemic to Texas") then only "the", "is" and "a" fall in that category. So the task of learning that basic wordstock (and learning to use it) is quite another thing than learning the 'rare' words. And it is clear that I wouldn't even try to memorize all words I see. For instance I'm not a keen botanicist by any standard, but it does strike me that there are lupines in my mother's garden, and then there are apparently some blue ones in Texas. So if I remember the Texas bluebonnet and its Latin name it's solely because of this chain of associations, and any repetition involved in the memorization is only there to reinforce it. The point of learning flower names from content-heavy sources Wikipedia or gardening manuals is that you get the words and ample information of the things they denote served on a silver platter in one single location, and you don't get that amount of information from a dictionary. So when I suck up words from a dictionary I only use those that refer to something I already know - learning foreign words for unknown or vaguely known notions is pointless. I mentioned linguistic relationships and associations based on sound as important memory hooks (associations based on the context or situation where you first saw a word might form a third category, and it seems that I now have learnt "the Texas bluebonnet" through that venue). To illustrate the linguistic associations you might notice that some of the Polish words are loanwords ("diabeł") or they occur in related languages ("chleb" meansr 'bread' in Polish and so does "хлеб" in Serbian). Others can be stripped of a prefix and the rest is known from other Polish words ("wyjaśnia" = 'explains' - "jaśny" means 'clear' so the whole word means something like 'making (out) clear' - please disregard the idiomatic use of English "making out"). When I spoke about wordlists in Berlin earlier this month I used an Assimil Albanais de Poche bought two days before as my source to explain the method, and this included the sentence "nuk e di" = 'ne-pas le sais' (I don't know). My very first soundbased association to this was "night and day" which means something totally different and has a different grammatical structure, but for some reason I find it easy to associate darkness with lack of knowledge (to be dispersed by the first rays of the sun) so I form a mental picture containing these elements and get the Albanian sentence as a phonetic attachment to the English phrase. For others this may not function at all, but then they might find an alternative that functions. The important thing is not whether the likeness in sound is overwhelming and even less whether it is complete. The important thing is that YOU invent a connection which permits you to use something wellknown to trigger a connection that leads directly to the foreign word or expression. Edited by Iversen on 25 May 2015 at 7:06pm 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| daegga Tetraglot Senior Member Austria lang-8.com/553301 Joined 4314 days ago 1076 posts - 1792 votes Speaks: German*, EnglishC2, Swedish, Norwegian Studies: Danish, French, Finnish, Icelandic | Message 278 of 350 25 May 2015 at 7:03pm | IP Logged | ||
My impression from other threads concerning SRS is that those advocating SRSing frequency lists usually suggest making the cards yourself. The initial exposure and therewith the initial learning is thus provided by dictionary entries with example usage, images from google image search and example sentences from the net. Everything else is just review. Edited by daegga on 25 May 2015 at 7:16pm 7 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6390 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 279 of 350 25 May 2015 at 8:08pm | IP Logged | ||
I agree. Many are conjugated/declined forms, though. And unlike English or Spanish, the affixes are less obvious AND more elaborate. I'd say you need at least 500-700 Slavic roots, and then you can learn to mix them and add affixes, but generally it will feel like learning a separate word (unlike get vs get up). 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5223 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 280 of 350 25 May 2015 at 8:12pm | IP Logged | ||
For me the key takeaway in iversen's excellent contribution here is "So when I suck up words from a dictionary I only use those that refer to something I already know - learning foreign words for unknown or vaguely known notions is pointless." If I am to interpret this phrase and the entire post correctly, the wordlist is not an arbitrary list of words to be memorized but more an organized collection of meaningful words to be regularly reviewed. Fair enough, I agree with this point, and I said as much. Wordlists as mnemonic tools are a good idea. And they can make different forms. I actually use short thematic lists for things like the parts of the body, foods and cooking. But aren't some posters here talking about actually learning 8000 or 10000 general words at rates of 50 words or more a day? Are we talking about the same thing? 1 person has voted this message useful |
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