Best way to tackle early-stage vocabulary building in a language with few cognates

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Best way to tackle early-stage vocabulary building in a language with few cognates

Postby Raconteur » Fri Mar 10, 2023 11:58 am

TLDR: Is developing a very small foundation, allowing for fully inteligible context sentences as soon as possible a good idea? What would such a foundation be? Will the repetitive nature of this context become a problem? Is there anything else I'm missing when considering this idea? Is it even a good idea to do it this way?

I much prefer learning vocabulary within context sentences, rather than in a vacuum. However, early on this works much smoother in a language like French (from EN/PL base). Even if you don't fully understand, you get the gist.
Example:
Ce livre de cuisine est fantastique.
This cookbook is fantastic.
If I was to learn say Japanese or Turkish in sentences, likely every single word would be unintelligible at first, and so the context wouldn't be much help. Possibly, the grammar would also be less intuitive.
Example:
Bu yemek kitabı harika.
This cookbook is fantastic.
What's the best way to overcome this issue in practice?

Given that I hate learning new words/concepts dry, my only hunch so for is to learn:
  • A very limited number of highly versatile words without context → common words that could serve as subjects, objects, and verbs. Verbs like: be, have, need, want, eat, do. Nouns: brother, friend, mother, man, apple, book, computer, smartphone, notebook
  • Learn the most essential grammar – personal pronouns, genitive case, prepositions, making a question, etc.

Up this point, I'm aware all of this sounds very "DUHHHH" – just about every language textbook/course starts with these. My question is, how far can we take this? What is the absolute bare minimum one needs to start creating sentences that work as useful context for learning new vocabulary.
Largely incomprehensible text including genitive
講演録に「私個人主義」がある。漱石の私邸に門下生が集まった会は木曜会と呼ばれた。

Introducing genitive within confines of 100% understandable base [first knowing that: man = 男; apple リンゴ; is = です]
リンゴです
The smaller the foundation, the faster one can get away from learning words/concepts in a vacuum (or within unintelligible sentences, which imo isn't much better).

My main concern, however, is that this limited base would create a lot of repetitive sentences. Would this repetitive context lower recall/understanding of new words? I need a computer, I need an apple, I need a phone, I need a pen, I need a car, I need a bicycle, and so on.
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Re: Best way to tackle early-stage vocabulary building in a language with few cognates

Postby leosmith » Thu Mar 16, 2023 5:31 am

As you mentioned, the fewer words you use, the more repetitive your sentences will be. Recall shouldn’t be a problem though, because you’ll be using the same words and structures over and over again. We are told that actually making an effort to recall stuff is the best way to improve our recall, so we don’t want things to be too easy. But I think at this early stage it isn’t that important. And maybe the effort in remembering the grammar balances out with the ease of remembering the vocab, or vice versa.

As an example, I wrote a Tagalog grammar. I made an effort to minimize the vocabulary, and it was quite difficult. I used the lowest number of high frequency words that I could to demonstrate all the basic grammar, but it still took 500. And even with 500 words, I still came up with sentences such as “She will not be allowed to put the questions on the door this year”. A valid sentence, but very contrived. However, these strange ones are from the Sample Sentences which are designed to build on and review previous lessons, something like an SRS. There are drills too, where building is not a consideration, and the sentences are quite normal. If you don’t require building, you can use less words and you sentences can be less contrived.

Is it a good way to start a language? I’ve actually done something similar with Pimsleur many times. For example, I used it for 20 days when starting Brazilian Portuguese. I did the lesson the first time, typed out the main dialog, memorized the individual words and sentences and put them in Anki. The next day I would do the reps (L1 to L2 and L2 to L1), reading all the Portuguese out loud. With some languages, I also type out answers to get writing practice. Finally, I repeat the lesson, then do the next lesson the same way. I probably had around 150 words that I was using over and over again. I was reading/writing/listening/speaking the same words. So in that sense, it was very efficient.
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Re: Best way to tackle early-stage vocabulary building in a language with few cognates

Postby Iversen » Thu Mar 16, 2023 9:54 am

I am impressed by your Tagalog grammar, and if I ever start learning that language I'll definitely run through all its pages.

The first thing you should do with a totally incomprehensible language would be to learn the alphabet and the sound inventory (and if it isn't an alphabet but thousands of small ideograms as in Chinese then you might consider starting learning the language itself in parallel either by ear or through a pinyin-like transcription).

Right after that you should learn the most important grammar words and a few hundred other words which you can manipulate using simple grammar. And it's hard to see how you can do that without a textbook system of sorts or some other source of ultra simple utterances (humans might do in a pinch). But after that stage I would personally switch to using native texts with a translation and a dictionary, even though it might feel a bit hard in the beginning - and of course I would use my wordlists to memorize the avalanche of new words, but I don't expect the whole world to suddenly adopt my system.
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Re: Best way to tackle early-stage vocabulary building in a language with few cognates

Postby Picaboo » Thu Mar 16, 2023 2:55 pm

Personally, I think it would be better to start with high frequency word pairs, and then work out from there after X hundred words. This way, these chunks you're learning are smaller, more natural, and easier to learn. Plus, they will appear regularly in actual content unlike the word combinations in "fake" sentences.

Like in Korean, high frequency pairs would be:
이번 주말 (this weekend)
우리 나라 (our nation)
영화를 보다 (watch a movie)
일찍 일어나다 (wake up early)

But you'd need materials based on pair frequency with good sound.
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Re: Best way to tackle early-stage vocabulary building in a language with few cognates

Postby leosmith » Thu Mar 16, 2023 5:14 pm

Iversen wrote:I am impressed by your Tagalog grammar, and if I ever start learning that language I'll definitely run through all its pages.
Thank you kindly!
The first thing you should do with a totally incomprehensible language would be to learn the alphabet and the sound inventory
Absolutely. It's the first thing I do with all languages, including Portuguese (actually made my own tool for it), so I'm glad you reminded us of that.
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Re: Best way to tackle early-stage vocabulary building in a language with few cognates

Postby sporedandroid » Fri Mar 17, 2023 6:38 am

This is my approach for Finnish. It’s probably not the most efficient, but here’s what I’ve done so far. I already knew some random words from listening to music. I found some learner videos randomly on YouTube a few years ago. They have bilingual subtitles you can turn on and off. I just left them on because my comprehension was obviously very low. I just recognized a few words here and there. I didn’t learn a whole lot, but it was just for fun.

I decided to try watching a “super beginner” video without subtitles. My comprehension was super low like you’d expect. Then I rewatched the video with subtitles again and sort of took a mental note of what I missed. I also looked up words that stood out to me on wiktionary. After doing this a few times, my comprehension went up. You might think it’s just rote memory, but it also worked for other videos as well.

Around a month ago I “officially” started learning Finnish. Which basically means I’ve decided to actually be consistent. I got some pre-made Anki decks. Even though I wasn’t all that consistent, I did know most of the words on the sentence cards I encountered. The learner videos I watched already taught me enough high frequency vocabulary to not encounter a ridiculous amount of unknown vocabulary per sentence.
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Re: Best way to tackle early-stage vocabulary building in a language with few cognates

Postby kelvin921019 » Fri Mar 17, 2023 7:17 am

I think the early stage vocabulary building inevitably involves rote memorisation. That said, one particular thing I did when I started doing Russian was to learn the "structure" of words and how to identify the stems. Sometimes I deliberately learnt these concepts at very early stage.

Like the word замечательный (remarkable), which is a rather common word at early stage. I found out that it is formed by the word замечать (to note / to notice), and -тельный ending turning it into an adjective. This greatly reduced the amount of information I had to cramp into my brain, and I can right away guess the meaning of the words like удивительный (surprising, which comes from удивить (to surprise)).
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Re: Best way to tackle early-stage vocabulary building in a language with few cognates

Postby sporedandroid » Fri Mar 17, 2023 7:59 pm

kelvin921019 wrote:I think the early stage vocabulary building inevitably involves rote memorisation. That said, one particular thing I did when I started doing Russian was to learn the "structure" of words and how to identify the stems. Sometimes I deliberately learnt these concepts at very early stage.

Like the word замечательный (remarkable), which is a rather common word at early stage. I found out that it is formed by the word замечать (to note / to notice), and -тельный ending turning it into an adjective. This greatly reduced the amount of information I had to cramp into my brain, and I can right away guess the meaning of the words like удивительный (surprising, which comes from удивить (to surprise)).

This is also a good strategy for Finnish and a bunch of other languages. I love seeing the etymology and logic of each word I learn. It makes it a lot easier to memorize words and guess new words.
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Re: Best way to tackle early-stage vocabulary building in a language with few cognates

Postby Iversen » Fri Mar 17, 2023 9:50 pm

kelvin921019 advocated learning the "structure" of words and how to identify the stems, and for languages with heavy use of prefixes and recivation that's definitely advisable, but that information could have been served in a more userfriendly way by our dictionaries.

I once bought a book that claimed to tell me all about Russian stems and their derivations, but I was quite disappointed by it. Actually I look at my shelves right now and can't see it soo I have probably thrown it away - that doesn't happen too often so I must have been quite annoyed. The problem is that it did indeed run through she stems and did mention the words you could reasonably expect, but it was almost totally devoid of any information about the words that could have made it possible to use them - such as whether a verb is perfective or not or the gender of a substantive. And apparently this bad book now blocks other authors from publishing something better based on the same idea.

In contrast I like the setup of my Tuttle dictionary for Bahasa Indonesia and its parallel from Oxford for Bahasa Melayu. Both languages depend heavily on prefixes, and the articles that tell about headwords that are 'pure' stems also list the most relevant derivations, while all articles about headwords with a prefix are explained and served with a reference to the stem. The problem is that a stem may start with another consonant than expected: for example "menolong" is a derivation of "tolong" (both basically mean 'to help'). There are some rules of thumb concerning this, but the beginner doesn't know them yet so it's nice to see references in both directions in the dictionary.

An ordinary dictionary is listed alphabetically, which means that those members of word families that only differ at the end mostly will stand near each other, whereas differences at the start of the words will send them to locations far away in the dictionary. I appreciate that the best of my dictionaries for Slavic languages quote the 'partner' in perfective/imprfective pairs. But those that do this are generally those that are written for foreigner trying to learn Slavic languages. Those of my dictionaries that were written for Slavic speakers learning Romance or Germanic are not nearly as systematic about this.

By the way I have also wondered why it is normal to quote gender and things like that in the section that is supposed to got from a target language to a base language, but not in the other direction where it would be really practical to have the information. And unpredictable irregular forms of for instance words should also be included as headwords with a reference to the canonical form - like 'шел' in Russian: how on Earth can a newbee be expected to guess that this is the past tense of 'идти' (to walk, go) if the dictionary doesn't give this information?

So to aid lingustic neophytes it would be nice to have some dictionaries that quoted stems with their derivations AND morphological information about these derivations.
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