"Lazy" vocabulary building

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fresh_air
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"Lazy" vocabulary building

Postby fresh_air » Tue Jan 18, 2022 10:43 pm

I've been satisfied with my B2 level in Portuguese for a long time but I've come to a realization. I've been heavily dependent on cognates, my vocabulary is middling, and I've been satisfied with this imprecise and inelegant way of phrasing things. For instance, when talking about a word I don't know like a smoke detector, I'd say something like "oh you know.. this alarm on the ceiling for smoke" and would immediately proceed to forget the specific word my conversation partner tells me because I managed to get my point across. I think this phenomenon is much stronger in languages with an enormous number of cognates, like Portuguese and English, but probably becomes apparent no matter the L2, at least for lazy people like myself.

Another example: I was reading the Folha de São Paulo yesterday when I came across the verb 'prevenir'. I understand this word but never sat down and learned it specifically. I've never studied it, wrote it down, or said it until now; if I tried to use it organically I would have just fallen back on my knowledge of vowel and constant shifts between PR/EN and said something that vaguely sounded like prevenir. More likely, I would have "avoided" the confusion by sticking with evitar. I've come to the conclusion that if I come across a word I don't know backwards and forwards, I need to write it down and start incorporating it into my conversations.


I'm sure other learners have found themselves falling into this crutch. What are your techniques at remedying a habit built on the steel foundation of years of taking the easy way out?
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Re: "Lazy" vocabulary building

Postby Le Baron » Tue Jan 18, 2022 11:27 pm

Great question. I've languished with vocabulary like that before. Until I made a concerted effort to build new vocabulary in Dutch after the first few years - to be fair I was busy just getting functional with everyday speaking - I relied on a small active vocabulary with the same sort of hazy, 'recognition' vocabulary. That I can recognise more than I can use actively. In one sense this is pretty normal for an L2. I'm fairly resigned to the fact that I'm not likely to have a lifetime of words to draw upon for total flexibility. There are going to be synonyms I might never know or learn then forget.

I've also (and still do now and again) fallen into the thing you describe: the description rather than the precise word. Fair enough if it is a particular unknown thing that others might not even know; not so great if it's something all around which everyone ought to know about. I don't know what the tactics are in an accurate sense. When you already have a working knowledge of a language you can read and listen and pick up words without having to worry about the barrage of other words around them. They pop out, as prevenir did for you. So it's a smaller group of words to have to learn and manage and once they're in the vocabulary they'll likely stay there, even if in the 'reserve'. And still you might not employ them every time during conversation, only recognise them. In this case it's repetition that brings them to the fore.

I do try to deliberately redeploy new words I learn, just to make them stick. To ask questions about the word so that the discussion (as an experience) sticks in my mind and as a result the word. Not every word is worth learning though. It's great to have a wide active vocabulary, though I don't need to match a literary novelist or anything. So I only learn words in areas of interest, but also words that form part of the vocabulary of broader shared issues, like e.g. the political situation, or things that form the cultural structure (such as being aware of the discussion around Mitterrand's election in 1981 and how much cultural impact this still has in French politics).

aside from that I can only hope for words to stick. They generally do if I need them.
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Re: "Lazy" vocabulary building

Postby StringerBell » Wed Jan 19, 2022 8:30 pm

What I'm doing to beef up my vocab now that I've been at an intermediate level for a while is a combined reading/writing challenge. My Italian is good enough that I can very easily follow native speakers/TV/podcasts on a variety of topics and I can also say *most* of what I want to say with occasional work-arounds for those specific words I don't know (like the smoke detector example you gave). However, where I really notice a glaring lack of vocabulary is with reading. When speaking, it's enough to know 1 word for something but reading really makes you realize just how many synonyms there are for everything.

I just read 5 or 6 books and put almost all the unknown words into Anki. I'm doing some vocab review everyday but I'm also doing 10 minutes of freewriting daily. Often, I'll pull a few words or expressions at random from my Anki deck specifically to incorporate in my writing somehow. I find that forcing myself to use new words works really well to help me learn them and then I feel confident to use them in conversation at some point. I've also found that freewriting is really helpful in identifying gaps that I need to remediate. When I realize that I don't know how to say what I want while writing (or I'm not convinced that I phrased it well) I make a note of what I want to say in English so that I can look it up once I'm done writing.

Like you, I'll often forget a new word if the person I'm talking to just tells me what it is while talking. I have to really make some kind of effort (reviewing it with flashcards, using it in my writing or while I'm talking, etc) if I want to remember it.
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Re: "Lazy" vocabulary building

Postby sirgregory » Wed Jan 19, 2022 11:39 pm

Another thing when there are a lot of cognates is that you can often roughly guess what the word will be and often be right. But the drawback is that if you are too reliant on this you won't always get the correct form. For example, if you want to say "realistic" in Spanish and you already know the root real, you have a good starting hint. From there you might be tempted to guess something like realístico. After all, there are English/Spanish pairs of this type: fantastic-fantástico/a. But the correct form is realista which would correspond to realist in English. Or take the word "conservative." Hmm, how about conservativo? Nope. Conservador. And then the worst is if you make up a word that sounds plausible but that isn't really a word, e.g., pictura for picture. Books usually have lists of false friends but not usually lists of fake words or incorrect forms you are likely to invent.
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