Postby coldrainwater » Sun Nov 03, 2019 6:06 pm
From following and reading your prior logs, it may be that you have a thirst that isn't properly quenched using your existing study habits. It might help as an exercise to shift your priorities and your mindset away from learning the TL and specifically toward learning vocabulary for a period of time. I suggest about three months from personal experience. With your language milieu, you can start at a very advanced level with Italian. The same pattern is likely to repeat for future languages as well and you may be unsatisfied with the vocabulary portion until you make an intentional paradigm shift. Here is roughly how I would implement it:
Allocate plenty of upfront time for administration and reflection when choosing reading resources. Don't dive in until you are satisfied that your goals will be met. No autopiloting of resources. Choose some books that cater heavily toward logophiles. I haven't done the legwork in Italian, but I know plenty of English examples. Scour blogs that cater heavily to advanced usage of vocabulary. With blogs and forums, you get 2 for 1 with great examples of native writing combined with tough vocabulary that is already vetted (choose blogs with some native followers). Word-a-day type blogs are decent, but they may be best for diagonal reading and skimming for content since I often come across 1001 ''advanced'' words that are little more than well-known cognates vs English/French. Try your hand at etymology sites. You can sometimes find decent word-density on those. You will have to sort the sound from the noise no matter what since you have one massive starting romance vocabulary being a French native with adv. EN, but you can use admin time to help with that. Rather than trying one or two dictionaries, I would try ''virtually all'' types of dictionaries and find efficient ways to pull words that are of personal interest to you. Those can be the words that you directly add to your active daily word use. Keep your interests in mind and be greedy. That is good ammo in the sense that you mould your active voice into exactly what you want it to be. It will have your own personal diction, ideally bumped up against actual use cases for the audience you intend to engage.
Speaking of actual use cases, there is also a sweet spot for audiobooks. Audiobooks in general and advanced translated audiobooks specifically can be great for picking out and imprinting lower to mid (advanced) vocabulary (and for reinforcing even easier content below that). I find in ES that 19th century and early 20th century classics work well for this (as a simple field-tested example). They bring rich diction and once your ear gets to a point where it can parse it, you do actually have time to ''learn'' vocab from it. That is partly since the speaker speaks slowly often with professional clarity and partly since you may already be familiar with the diction used. In this stage, I look for aha moments as I am listening. The more of those I find, the better the rating I give it. I then springboard from that audiobook to others like it ensuring the next one is equally rewarding. When I notice those aha moments, I don't care if I miss the next sentence. What matter is that I latch onto an awesome use case. Sometimes you can get a rhythm going and strike gold with resources like that, pulling your entire vocabulary set up a notch. Podcasts like that can be tougher to find but can fit the same bill. In ES, I found a very rich source of such podcasts from Argentina.
There are also plenty of esoteric options available now to handle dictionary study. I am not necessarily recommending it, but you can purchase/download almost any dictionary, convert it to text using Calibre, and parse out what you need if you don't want to read/skim/study the originals. That allows you to quickly do things like highlight or eliminate classes of substantives based on preference.
It may be that your passions in life are not as strong for vocab (I actually think yours are very strong, jmo), however, I like to remember that ability begets interest. The mountain I will need to overcome personally is grammar rather than vocabulary, but I know I will get there remembering the relation between interest and ability. Perhaps my favourite trick for learning vocabulary and what underlies most of my motivation is a basic search for novelty. I tend to avoid repetition and seek novel reading experiences. I also look for great prose. From a web browsing standpoint, you can expand novelty to the limits of what you can absorb by letting yourself go off on browser-based vocabulary tangents. Also, don't forget to use extensions such as Transover to add new vocab on the fly as well. You can pick up vocab in multiple languages like that. As a side note, in many/most of these scenarios, you will likely get plenty of monolingual reading experience as you are picking up new words. You can also blend these ideas with ''normal'' reading. I have little Italian experience, but I know one of the first authors I would go for is Umberto Eco (Name of the Rose) since I love the way he handles vocabulary and what content he uses. Reading one author can actually move your language vocab way forward. In Spanish, I would offer Miguel Delibes as a 20th-century example and Emilia Pardo Bazán as a 19th-century example. One author, big vocabulary boost. Part of the trick is the admin time required to find such authors (with a nod to Goodreads).
So in sum, more than just choosing vocab or reading a lot, I think it is a shift in priority.
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