How To Use Them Without Being Used By Them It simply doesn’t, not even at the simplest level, not even between closely related languages like English and French or Mandarin and Cantonese. Learning words between languages as though a one-to-one correspondence existed.A word without context is multiple accidents waiting to happen.A word is almost meaningless without its context.You don’t learn a language, you learn quanta - sounds, words, phrases.So tackle one and only one word at a time, one and only one article at a time. Even the best rugby players don’t try to tackle two people at the same time (in part because you’re only allowed to go for the guy with the ball…I think). ![]() the Ghost in the Shell entry in L2 WikiPedia) is already an implicit vocabulary list Every word you don’t know in a document you want to read (or that is about a topic you’re interested in, e.g.Similarly, just because a word is on your vocabulary list, exists in the language and is “useful”, doesn’t mean you have to suffer and bore yourself in order to “learn” it.Yes, a surgeon gets to cut you up so he can heal you, but just because your parents feed and clothe you, doesn’t mean they get to beat and rape you as well.Doing good in one area is not license to do harm in others.People feel obligated to go through every single word in the list.People start to feel wedded to their lists.In a nutshell: people and how they use them.They’re really good for handling small subsets of the language, like days of the week and months of the year.Can help people to focus on simple, foundational knowledge - the basics, whose mastery is the essence of mastery itself.They give you something to focus your attention and energy on (instead of free-floating anxiety and self-loathing).There are only about four hundred possible sounds in Mandarin. Similarly, there are only about two hundred (give or take) repeating parts in the kanji system. There are an infinite number of numbers possible, but only ten digits in the Arabic numeral system. Human language is - thankfully - capable of infinite variation, but all those permutations and combinations are based on repeating a large but finite set of parts.They imply (correctly and helpfully) that the language is finite and tractable.The character alignment system that I’ve been seeing around the Internets lately goes a long way toward helping people outgrow this. Live in East Asia for a while, and you’ll overcome your desire to classify everything into two categories, where one has completely (or even mostly) positive attributes and the other equally and oppositely negative ones. ![]() No, it’s a lot more complicated than that. I tackled finite, clearly defined tasks - kanji, cards - with unstoppable forward motion.Īnd yet, you won’t hear much talk of vocabulary lists here at AJATT. Of course, I wung it where winging it was appropriate and effective - I was systematic, not mechanical I’m too lazy to be mechanical - that’s why I have the SRS be mechanical for me. The point is, I like to think that I learned Japanese “like a German”, that is, in a calm, directed, systematic, way. Now I just likened a group of people to dogs…no good can come of this. If you send me an email, Heaven help you, but if we have a face-to-face meeting, I will be there a good ten minutes before time, and that’s in large part thanks to the influence of my German friends in college I slept with dogs and caught their fleas. And then there’s the punctuality thing, of which I am a big (if imperfect) fan. There was my friend and neighbour Wolfgang (actual name), who would slice, spread, lay out and eat his afternoon teatime Nutella baguette slices with ruthless - almost mechanical - forethought, precision and efficiency. I have a lot of positive stereotypes about German people. And I was like, no way, of course you could.īecause, here’s the thing. She was shocked (or maybe surprised…whatever, same difference), and she talked about how she could never learn Japanese. Anyway, we got to talking about books and I gave her a book recommendation, and it came out that I’ve only ever read the book in Japanese, so I had to find out what the English title was. So I met a German girl at a cafe today…actually, she was Austrian but, same difference.
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