Yocabulary resources neglecting genders

[sjintje]

Why, why, why? Any and every language learning advice will tell you to always learn the gender with the noun yet there are loads of utterly useless vocabulary trainers on youtube. Some are even quite nice, for example.

Even quite a few text books seem happy to skip the genders in their vocab lists.

Sorry, just needed to get it off my chest.

[Querneus]

I would say exactly the same thing regarding vocabulary resources for Arabic. Arabic nouns should be given with their unpredictable plural form, and all "basic" (وزن فعل wazn fa3ala) verbs should be given in their three principal parts (imperfect, perfect, verbal noun), but they generally aren't.

Mandarin vocabulary has similar issues, where a significant number of nouns (i.e. not all, but many) should be given with their unpredictable classifier, and if a verb typically needs to become a verb-object or verb-verb compound to become intransitive this compound should be specified as well (e.g. 聽 ting1 'to hear [sth]' commonly becomes 聽說 ting1shuo1 'to hear, listen [something said]' or otherwise 聽到 ting1dao4 'to hear [anything] successfully', when it's not expanded as the limitative 聽（一）聽 ting1(yi)ting1 or with an adverbial; as another example, 寫 xie3 'to write [sth]' becomes 寫作 xie3zuo4 'to write').

Explicit teaching of potential verb-verb compounds would be highly desirable as well (e.g. 跟上 gen1shang4 'to catch up [with sb]' is a potential compound markable with 得 de or 不 bu: 跟得上 gen1deshang4 'can keep up [with sb]', 跟不上 gen1bushang4 'cannot keep up [with sb]'. Same goes for disyllabic abbreviations of common two-word phrases: 詳細項目 xiang2xi4 xiang4mu4 'detailed item' (i.e. the details of a product) is sometimes reduced to 細目 xi4mu4.

From what I've seen, resources for Spanish typically don't provide enough information to conjugate verbs either.

I have no idea why vocabulary resources tend to be this much unhelpful, but it's worth ranting about.

[Iversen]

There is a similar problem with perfective/imperfective verb pairs in the Slavic languages. Dictionaries compiled for native Slavic speakers have a tendency to quote verb indidiually without mentioning its category let alone indicating its companion, whereas those compiled with foreign learners of those languages in mind are much careful to quote verbs as pairs because they KNOW that aspect iss a problem for foreign learners - even the tiny yellow Langenscheidts from Germany do so.

A special problem in Romanian: some verbs use infixes in their inflection, others don't, but it is rare to see a dictionary that indicates which group a given verb belongs to - maybe because they were actually written for Romanians learning English or German or whatever.

The problem also extends into the realm of grammars. I have just reread parts of a Greek grammar in French, but originally written in Greek. And it is not nearly as useful as a grammar written for for foreigners because it spends time on definitions and loose babble instead on systematizing the structures I as a learner need to learn. And on a related note: why do dictionaries from language A to language B give less morphological information about B than about A? After all, if I look a word up in such a dictionary it's quite likely I do so because I intend to use it - and then I have to look the translation I found up in a dictionary in the opposite direction (or a grammar) if I want to know the details about its morphology. Where is the logic?

[IronMike]

But why Yocabulary vs. Vocabulary?

[eido]

But why Yocabulary vs. Vocabulary?

Because they want to be a rapper.

[Iversen]

Speaking of rappers, when some scholars in 2014 counted words they found that many rappers had a larger vocabulary than Shakespeare - but most of those words are probably dirty...

[trui]

Speaking of rappers, when some scholars in 2014 counted words they found that many rappers had a larger vocabulary than Shakespeare - but most of those words are probably dirty...

Have you read Shakespeare?

[Iversen]

Some of it...

[Deinonysus]

Speaking of rappers, when some scholars in 2014 counted words they found that many rappers had a larger vocabulary than Shakespeare - but most of those words are probably dirty...

Bite thy thumb not at yonder Wu Tang Clan,
And challenge not the rhymes of Aesop Rock,
But Snoop Dogg's words are naught but gin and juice,
And Kanye rappeth only about Kanye.