How to begin learning vocab in a foreign language?

Justin   Wed Jul 22, 2009 8:01 am GMT
I want to start by saying I love this site. It has given me great advice for future language learning. Yet, I have 2 main problems when it comes to learning vocabulary:

1) Initially learning basic vocabulary
2) Learning the meaning of certain variations of words.

Time and time again articles on this site state that the best way to learn a new language is to start reading books or listening to native speakers in the target language. The articles say not to learn grammar first, and that you should use a mono-lingual dictionary instead of a bi-lingual one.

So, here's the first problem. If I don't know any words in the target language (let's use Spanish as an example), what good is a mono-lingual Spanish dictionary going to be? It seems that if I don't know one word in Spanish, then reading a definition that uses thirty words in Spanish will be a waste of time. One faces the same problem with reading Spanish books or watching Spanish movies - all it does is add more unknown words.

So my first question is: How does one initially learn foreign vocab words? It seems that a bi-lingual dictionary of some sort is a NECESSITY, not an option.

The second problem is finding the meaning to words that undergo intense variation - such as irregular verb conjugation in Spanish. Dictionaries aren't much of a help in this case, since conjugated verbs aren't listed (at least not always) in dictionaries. For example if i come across a verb like Íbamos - this form is not in the dictionary. It seems that this problem can't be solved just by looking it up or reading more Spanish. I don't know how one would learn the meaning to this particular word (variation) unless they studied the grammar first.

My second question is: How does one find the meaning of words (or phrases) that undergo intense variation from the dictionary form?

Sorry this is so long winded, thanks for your patience.
wordreference   Wed Jul 22, 2009 8:26 am GMT
<<Íbamos - this form is not in the dictionary. It seems that this problem can't be solved just by looking it up or reading more Spanish. I don't know how one would learn the meaning to this particular word (variation) unless they studied the grammar first.

My second question is: How does one find the meaning of words (or phrases) that undergo intense variation from the dictionary form? >>


Use an online dictionary which recognises all forms of all words, for example WORD REFERENCE www.wordreference.com . There just write in "íbamos" and it will direct you to the entry for "ir" and click on "conjugate" for a full list of conjugations.
wordreference   Wed Jul 22, 2009 8:27 am GMT
If you mean, how to find it in a paper dictionary, then I don't know. Ask your grandparents! LOL!
wordreference   Wed Jul 22, 2009 9:08 am GMT
It is a monolingual and bilingual dictionary combined, so you can start off with the mono version and then "check" the bilingual one afterwards, or the other way around.
MiddleKingdom   Wed Jul 22, 2009 10:27 am GMT
China has no intention of dominating the world. It never did and it never will.
It's western mindset to try incessantly to conquer and dominate the world....and they live in constant fear of being dominated or replaced...
MiddleKingdom   Wed Jul 22, 2009 10:42 am GMT
Oops...the above post doesn't belong here...just ignore it
--   Wed Jul 22, 2009 2:42 pm GMT
<<So my first question is: How does one initially learn foreign vocab words? It seems that a bi-lingual dictionary of some sort is a NECESSITY, not an option.>>

Yes, of course, you need a bilingual dictionary. To my mind, total immersion doesn't work if you already have a mother tongue, at least if you don't live in that country. And even that's not sure.

<<My second question is: How does one find the meaning of words (or phrases) that undergo intense variation from the dictionary form?>>

But what you really need is a good textbook. There are lessons with selected material building up on previous lessons. There, you will encounter different forms of words step by step. There are exercises. There are conjugation (or flexion) tables at the end.

Read the text of the lessons in a textbook. Write down the new vocabulary for each lesson, new word on the left and translation on the right side.
Take this sheet of paper with you, go through the list, one column covered with another sheet of paper or just with your hand. Try to remember the translation or the original form. Learn both, pronunciation and spelling the same time.

Make your own lists or tables of interesting stuff concerning that language. You can use LaTeX to typeset it. I'll look very nice then.
K. T.   Wed Jul 22, 2009 6:13 pm GMT
An easy way (for several languages) is to use Vocabulearn from Penton Overseas. They are bilingual recordings of a huge amount of vocabulary (7500 words in the complete set). It is an easy and painless way to learn and review vocabulary. It isn't expensive and it's fast.

The only caveat is that there may be a male or female voice. For Spanish, the voice is male and the English voice is female. For many of the other languages I've heard, the non-English voice is female.

Why the heck does this matter? Well, in languages like Hebrew and Russian, males and females use different endings when speaking.

So if you are a female, it will not matter in many cases, but if you are not...

Borrow a copy at your library before you buy. You'll know right away if you like the speaker's voice you'll be imitating.
Xie   Wed Jul 22, 2009 8:35 pm GMT
I think, first, language acquisition can be done in multiple ways, and there's no single way that must be good or better than others for a person. I personally started learning English rather early in my life, at 3. Although my progress had been slow, since I never used (spoke and wrote) English until I got into high school where almost everything written was English, my passive skills improved only well after puberty. I've never been a keen reader, either, and I did English in a messy fashion. One day I read the grammar (I no longer read grammar now), the other day I did nothing, and the other day I learned one more word or two.

I still don't have the reading ability comparable to a native speaker, nor can I speak as fluently as this person does. But in general, when talking to exchange students/Anglophones, I don't have problems except subtle expressions. I didn't follow Antimoon exactly, and I didn't even know Antimoon, but I made it by studying grammar a bit and so on.

>>
Time and time again articles on this site state that the best way to learn a new language is to start reading books or listening to native speakers in the target language. The articles say not to learn grammar first, and that you should use a mono-lingual dictionary instead of a bi-lingual one.<<

Reading books is a must if you want to acquire a wide vocabulary. I find this a brilliant idea, especially if you are looking for, say, studying opportunities in Anglophone universities, and if you want to move to an Anglophone country. I'd concur with Kato Lomb that, except pronunciation, reading is perfect for learning everything of a language in general - the only drawback is, obviously, that you won't know the pronunciation directly just by reading, and particularly for English. (Note: Chinese, English, French are some of the more troublesome languages for reading. I don't have many experiences in French, but I can see French isn't much simpler than English orthographically.)

Listening, on the other hand, I think it's a skill of fluency that is just like speaking. But it isn't that bad to start with reading first. Or the best way may be to do both together with audio books. I'll leave the rest, including cultural knowledge, to meeting native speakers.

I did do a bit of grammar in a messy fashion. It's nice to thrive on chaos. I didn't consciously force myself to use my Cambridge Advanced Learner's Dictionary, but I started using it since 5 years ago. But I still use bilingual dictionaries. But at any rate, context is the most important, while dictionary is just a little crutch to help you with context.

>>So, here's the first problem. If I don't know any words in the target language (let's use Spanish as an example), what good is a mono-lingual Spanish dictionary going to be? It seems that if I don't know one word in Spanish, then reading a definition that uses thirty words in Spanish will be a waste of time. One faces the same problem with reading Spanish books or watching Spanish movies - all it does is add more unknown words.<<

I think the human mind is designed NOT to follow every instruction strictly. Most of us, if we are lazy, try to avoid instructions/steps - i.e. not even do the thing. Most of us, if we do work, try to have creations or do something in another fashion or with little changes. This is why I, after multiple experiments last year, got to give up the Antimoon flashcard method or that of alljapaneseallthetime.com, a similar variant.

Perhaps I do things rather inconsistently, and messily. Now, take my German as an example, the first language I tried to acquire in a controlled manner. Why the first? Because I learned English at school, but German is never popular in my country, so I had to learn everything on my own - and classes sucked, so, obviously, you know what I had to do. So, I have electronic dictionaries, namely by langenscheidt, by you can replace it with the paper monolingual dictionary for people learning German as a foreign language. I don't even have to understand every word in this dictionary.

And in Germany, I learn words here and there, every now and then, not quite consistently - esp. since I enjoy the life and I don't have that much time to learn seriously, and I left also considerable time to speak English only to other people, some are Germans, and some don't even know German. I know, there are also vocab gaps, and visual clues often prevented me from asking for more German from the Germans. And I don't socialize all the time with Germans AND in German, so there must be more that I could have done. Apart from the thing about enjoying, since I'm doing German in daily life NOW, I don't strictly need reading all the time. But my case is different from some others, because I built a considerably strong base of German, without the physical environment, before I came to Germany. My grammatical knowledge and oral language are actually even stronger than most exchange students in some ways or another. So I started with a strong base, always trying to speak grammatically, and I expanded my vocab considerably as well as a result.

But as my stay is approaching to the end, I started to realize that I'm actually still illiterate in German, because I can't figure out even the basic meanings of, say, elementary school maths, although my spoken language has been very impressive for most Germans I met. But to maximize my enjoyment, I'll delay the reading effort until I come back to Hong Kong, where, when I won't meet many Germans and foreigners anyway, I can conquer one novel after another intensively.

>>So my first question is: How does one initially learn foreign vocab words? It seems that a bi-lingual dictionary of some sort is a NECESSITY, not an option.

I've been learning German for more than 2 years. German-Chinese dictionaries are often very thick, ugly to read, have a lot of old-fashioned words or hardly practical sample sentences, and so on. Chinese also turns out to be a rather poor language for mapping bilingual sentences. I can't even see the grammar in it. Anyway, I didn't use my bilingual dictionary much, in fact. I use the German-English more, but still not much. German-English is very useful for phrases, especially isolated ones. Well, I'd say a bilingual can be useful even with a few years of learning experiences...
Justin   Wed Jul 22, 2009 9:34 pm GMT
Wow! Thank you all for the quick responses!

>>Use an online dictionary which recognises all forms of all words, for example WORD REFERENCE www.wordreference.com . There just write in "íbamos" and it will direct you to the entry for "ir" and click on "conjugate" for a full list of conjugations. << -wordreference

Thank you for this website.

Middle Kingdom, that was a hilarious mis-post, hahaha! Thank you.

I have a Spanish textbook. I just think it would be more worth my time looking up words in their variation/conjugation rather than memorizing verb charts.

>>Reading books is a must if you want to acquire a wide vocabulary. I find this a brilliant idea, especially if you are looking for, say, studying opportunities in Anglophone universities, and if you want to move to an Anglophone country.<< -Xie

By the way, I totally agree with this idea. I am a full supporter of the "input" philosophy to learn a language by immersing yourself in it. I am currently reading and listening to as much Spanish as I can. The only problem is the INITIAL contact with unknown words or variations. My learning has been very messy. So, I'm trying to find an efficient way to initially learn the English equivalent to the Spanish word when it can't be found just by looking in the dictionary.

Thank you again for your responses! It has been much help.

-Justin
--   Thu Jul 23, 2009 11:02 am GMT
@ Xie

Xie, where in Germany are you now? I'm in Frankfurt. If it happens that you are in Frankfurt, too, we maybe can meet. Would be nice to meet a fellow Antimooner.

Hallo Xie, wo in Deutschland bist Du gerade? Ich bin in Frankfurt. Wenn Du zufällig auch in Frankfurt bist, könnten wir uns mal treffen. Es wäre schön, mal einen anderen Antimooner persönlich kennenzulernen.
--   Thu Jul 23, 2009 11:07 am GMT
Justin, what exactly do you mean by ''variations''? Do you mean flexion or suppletion? Are there that many suppletive forms in Spanish?
Justin   Thu Jul 23, 2009 12:01 pm GMT
What I mean by variation is any change made to a word that give it a slightly modified meaning - such as tense, mood, person, etc.

This is usually the case with verbs. For example: subí means I went up / got up / rose. This is the first person past tense from subir - to rise. But the only reason I know that is because I've already studied the grammar. Hypothetically the conjugated (or inflected) forms of verbs are not in the dictionary. So, when I come to a conjugated verb that I don't know in a Spanish article, how am I supposed to find the meaning without intensive grammar study?

I'm trying to avoid learning a list of grammar rules to learn the language. (trying to learn similar to the way we learn our native language)

This is also the case with phrases. For example "puede" means "you can," and "que" means that (who, which, what, etc.). But when you put the two together "puede que," it means "maybe." How in the world am I supposed to know that unless someone or something (dictionary, classes, textbook) tells me?

That is where I don't quite understand how the "input" theory (immersion) works. I can listen to and read as many Spanish words and sentences as I can handle, yet not learn anything because nothing has given me the English equivalent. It seems that merely listening or reading another language isn't enough. Eventually something somewhere is going to have to show you how it relates to your own language.

Obviously this is where bilingual dictionaries come in handy. But dictionaries fall short when you have words or phrases that undergo changes in form and meaning.

By the way, internet translators seem to be the best option for what I'm talking about. I've been using PROMPT translator - http://www.online-translator.com. However, they even fall short along the way. So, if there are any other suggestions.

Basically I'm looking for a good efficient workflow to learn a foreign language. My goal is to learn at least 3 or 4 different languages.

Thanks again for the replies!
Justin   Fri Jul 24, 2009 1:40 am GMT
I guess what I'm really asking is - what are the steps to learning a language you have no idea about?

When I encounter a language that I know nothing about, what is the very first step? Dictionary? Textbook?

Then, what is the second step, third step, etc. Basically, how do I go about learning a language on my own in the most efficient way?

If someone has experience in mastering a second language, what were the steps you took?

Thank you!
dsadas   Fri Jul 24, 2009 3:49 am GMT
Use a textbook and a CD. The Antimoon method is for people who at least have a basic knowledge of the grammar and an intermediate vocabulary.

There's no getting around actually being told "this is what a verb looks like. The verbs which end in -ar conjugate as follows: hablo, hablas,.. etc".
To try and infer these endings by yourself would be incredibly stupid. It would probably take months if not years to work out which ending means what.

Learning a foreign language as a baby learns a language doesn't work. Babies take years before they finally open their mouths and say "food" or "mummy". Do you raelly want to take years to figure out these basic words when you could just open a textbook and see them on the first page?