How do You Use Native Material?

[sjintje]

Many thanks. Many many thanks. It took a couple of readings, but now I've got it. I had been thinking of weather. In fact, I vaguely begin to think I have probably seen this usage before. Now however, I'm disturbed by "tire", although it presumably means much the same thing as "prise" in this context, but I'm going to be feeling anxious until I go and look it up in the dictionary.

Incidently, there used to be a japanese girl on lang-8, who wrote the most beautiful, delicate, almost perfect, poetry in English and French, even though her actual language skills were quite limited. I think she spent quite a lot of time searching for accurate phrases on the internet, and reassemling them into poems. So an appreciation of the beauty of a sentence, even without full understnding, may be possible.

[rdearman]

Yeah. Though it's possible he also wrote some words he could figure out from the context, like Kató Lomb did.

I have to say that I always remember better the words I've figured out from context, rather than the words I just lookup. I suppose the effort of figuring it out pushes it down in.

I have literally never figured out a word from context. I know it's probably asking a bit much, but can you think of any actual examples of words that you did figure out from context, and how you did it? Or anyone else? Thanks.

Sure I'll tell you how I do it. It is a little pedantic, but systematic. It is diffiuclt to figure out some nouns, but other words types are easier. Lets take some examples in Italian where the underlined word is unknown. But you know the rest of the sentence.

il mio cane è marrone e bianco

So you can already translate this much.

my dog is XXXXX and white

You can work out this is an adjective and is describing the dog. You know lots of other Italian adjectives and you know marrone isn't big, small, old, young, etc.. You also figure that since the colour white is used that marrone is probably a colour. You might not know which colour, but through process of elimination you can eliminate, grey, white, orange, and a couple of others and you figure this is either brown or green because you don't know those colours, but there aren't any green dogs, so you figure it must be brown.

Ma la cisterna e la serra, quel giorno, non apparivano danneggiate.

You can translate this much.

But the XXXX and the XXXX, that day, did not appear XXXX.

In this example you'll struggle to figure things out from context. But if you look at the paragagh around this, you might get more clues. This example is taken from a book, and in the next paragah they talk about taking water from the cisterna, and it is similar to the English word cistern (waterproof receptacle for holding liquids), so you can guess this is probably correct. There isn't any other clues to the other words, so you just have to look them up or wait to see it again in another sentence.

[Bao]

I'd venture a guess that serra (it) roughly means the same as serre (fr) =D

sjintje, while I could do that - and when I have to write a report in my weaker languages I use that strategy - I really dislike doing it. Now, I can copy styles. It sometimes happens automatically to me - you wouldn't want to talk to me after I've been reading Kant - but when I do it in my weaker languages it feels like drawing a map when you're down in the deepest valley, copying from a map somebody else did before you, instead of climbing as high up as possible in order to get a good view of the area so that you can choose which topological features are actually important and will aid others when they use your map. (And maybe you don't understand that the Here Be Dragons sign was meant as a joke.)
(Interestingly a lot of the teaching here in France seems to be the first type. Ugh.)

[Serpent]

As a linguist I also see that marrone is similar to maroon and danneggiare is similar to damage. While we don't describe animals as maroon, it's pretty clear that this means brown
With cognates/transparent words, it's very much a spectrum to me. The two extremes are words you have to decipher actively, and words you can use effortlessly. With more exposure the words become easy to understand and eventually I learn to use them (this requires both listening and reading). In addition to what Prof Argüelles describes, I consider "unknown knowns" important. These are the words I've not seen yet, but would understand if I did. Some are so obvious that they immediately land in the middle of the scale and quickly become usable. Others take more exposure, and ironically these tend to be the common, "simple" ones. I can see many things far off, but many things that are close at hand I cannot see.
And when you can understand the transparent words, the rest also start to make more sense, if the language is close enough to what you already speak.

[Bao]

As a linguist I also see that marrone is similar to maroon and danneggiare is similar to damage. While we don't describe animals as maroon, it's pretty clear that this means brown

Interestingly it also follows the same logic as chestnut and kastanienfarben in English and German. We even have the word Marone in German for the edible sweet chestnut.
In a way, it feels like I'm on the way to learning some kind of supralanguage one might call Western European.

[reineke]

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