Is it possible to learn your language with no dictionary?

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lowsocks
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Re: Is it possible to learn your language with no dictionary?

Postby lowsocks » Sat Nov 13, 2021 11:11 pm

If the target language is close to one you already know fairly well, and there is "useful" material available in the language, then yes, you probably can learn the language with no dictionary or translations.

An old example, from 20 years ago, was the "Norsk Experiment":
https://www.apronus.com/norsk/
https://www.apronus.com/norsk/method/method.htm
https://www.apronus.com/norsk/reports/reports.htm

The author is Michal Ryszard Wojcik, a native Polish speaker. He mentions in the fifth report that he has been learning English and German for more than eleven years. So those certainly helped with Norwegian.

He began with a catalogue of Norwegian textbooks and dictionaries, written entirely in Norwegian. After studying this for about a month, he found he could understand almost all of it, without ever having consulted a dictionary. And so he continued. For example, he did eventually study Norwegian grammar, but it was from a grammar book written in Norwegian, for the use of Norwegian speakers.

It looks like most of his progress was made in the first 18 months. At that point he had to deal with two different varieties of Norwegian, Bokmaal and Nynorsk, and may have become a little frustrated with the project... ;)


EDIT: Upon reflection, I now wonder if he would have been so successful if he had instead chosen, say, Icelandic, with all its inflections and (so I am told) irregularities. Could he still have understood an Icelandic catalogue with no outside help? Perhaps it is an experiment waiting for someone to try ;) In any case, rather than saying that you can "probably" learn the language, as I did above, I think it would be better to say, that you can "possibly" learn the language.
Last edited by lowsocks on Sun Nov 14, 2021 4:36 pm, edited 2 times in total.
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Re: Is it possible to learn your language with no dictionary?

Postby Iversen » Sat Nov 13, 2021 11:34 pm

Well, why should you? It would be like Celtic warriors fighting naked in order to gain glory, and we all know what happened to them - they lost.

But lt's take a concrete example. Norwegian is one of the languages I don't speak, and the reason is that I don't have a something-into-New Norwegian dictionary, and I don't like to write in Bokmål because it is too close to Danish - but I thoroughly relish reading in New Norwegian whenever I get the chance. I can understand practically everything I hear at NRK in any of the dialects they use there, and I could probably also do a decent travesty on some variant of Norwegian if I listened exclusively to that variant for a couple of hours, but I haven't tried to learn i systematically, and the sole reason is my lack of a suitable bilingual dictionary for New Norwegian. My wordcounts from Bokmål dictionaries are quite sufficient too (59 to 98%), but without good dictionaries in both directions (or one combination colume) I don't even care to add Norwegian to my language collection, even though it is spoken by our highly estimated neighbours the Norwegians (or "de norske nordmænd fra Norge" as we jokingly call them in Danish).
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Re: Is it possible to learn your language with no dictionary?

Postby IronMike » Sun Nov 14, 2021 6:30 pm

Yes.
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lowsocks
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Re: Is it possible to learn your language with no dictionary?

Postby lowsocks » Mon Nov 15, 2021 1:17 am

Monty wrote:Why do you ask?
Since no one else has answered you, I will try. Though my answers are not very deep:

1) Pure curiosity. Is it possible for an adult learner, who has only books, audio, and video recordings in the target language, to learn it, with no feedback from another human? Can the human brain sort this out on its own? At least for some of us, this is an interesting question.

2) On the practical side, there is the hope that analyzing the language on your own, rather than learning from a textbook someone else has written, may give you a much better grasp of the language. I don't know if this belief is true, but it may be one of the reasons that some people use Lingua Latina and other Nature Method courses. (The other reason, of course, being that some people just enjoy the stories in these books.)

3) And of course, given human nature, something to boast about ;)
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Re: Is it possible to learn your language with no dictionary?

Postby Remarkablemusician25 » Thu Dec 09, 2021 4:02 pm

I'll browse websites I am very familiar with in my native language. Even if you do not know the language you'll be able to understand a lot of the words if you go to H&M website : women, men, favourite, Jeans, shoes, add to cart, search, size, colour, ...
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