The articles “How we mean” and “How we analyze meaning” explain exactly those problems that I had when I was learning a new language. My first language was Bosnian. When I think about it, Bosnian has a lot of same words that mean different things. However, I never realized that until I wanted to teach someone Bosnian. A native speaker can distinguish the meaning in context, but for someone who just started learning the language this can be really confusing. When I started learning English, however, I had a different problem. English has a lot of synonyms, hence I had a hard time understanding when to use which word when their translation is pretty much the same. Furthermore, Bosnian has genders for everything (objects) and when I started learning English it was hard to accept that objects are neutral. Moreover, words for some beings are feminine in Bosnian as opposed to English, and vice versa.
Also, I realized that learning the actual meaning (explanation) of a word is much more efficient than learning the translation. This is especially important when learning idioms, when the literal translation of every word does not lead us anywhere. It is the overall meaning of the sentence that we have to learn.
However, when languages are similar, sometimes it is easier to learn the translation. Bosnian and English do not share that many words, nor roots, however, since I also speak German, it was sometimes easy to memorize words in English using my knowledge in German. For example, “house” and “Haus” when pronounced sound identical and the meaning is identical too, although the spelling is different. But since I knew what “Haus” means, it was easy to absorb the English word. In general, I believe the more languages you know the easier it is to learn new languages.
Further, it is also effective to learn words based on the group they belong to. The way we structure these groups does not matter, as long as it makes sense to us. We can learn the words: “head, arm, leg” by grouping them into “body parts”, but we can also learn the words big and small by putting them into the group of antonyms. Grouping objects is in general a good memorization technique, so why not use it for learning new words.
That being said, to my mind, I need to learn new words by learning their meaning in a sentence, reading their description rather than translation, grouping them, but also relating them to words from languages I already speak.
Comments
The article "What is Learner Autonomy and How Can It Be Fostered?" gave me a better understanding of SDLC 105 / 110 and their principles. Moreover, it reinforced my existing understanding of how to learn a language as I was never properly suited to the "traditional" classroom setting when learning a language. My experience of learning a language, albeit within a minimal realm, witnessed many of the truisms in this article. Namely, the notion that the autonomous learner takes a proactive role in his or her quest in discovering a new language, actively trying to engage in the goals enumerated rather than trying to respond to a forced conversation presented in a classroom. The latter, in my opinion, saps a quality the author talks a great deal about: learner attitudes / motivation. The author references motivation to a certain ontology, where the two complement each other. "Affective variables," the author notes, are important to process. It dictates a range of success or failure. This, I believe, will be the deciding factor in whether or not I accomplish my goals.
Techniques I can use in order to help facilitate this process are directed attention, when deciding on broad topics, and selective attention, when specifying wishing a topic. Self-evaluation will also be a good tool to use. This ties back to motivation, as my process will be mine alone, and therefore it presents an idiosyncratic relationship. I will also incorporate cognitive strategies outlined in the article: repetition, use of resources, contextualization and inference.
My experience has aligned with constructivism. When I lived abroad, the streets were my "schooling." So, my understanding of Hebrew (although very limited) is the direct result of my "self-initiated" interaction with Israelis.
The article "How we Mean" offered salient advice. The author demands of us to study vocabulary within a sentence and its context so as to enable a reference and apply it to its real sense. The Hebrew language contains a great deal less vocabulary than does English, so this either means that it has more multi-meaning words, or the language Hebrew -- and by extension Israelis -- envisions a much different world than the one English tries to describe.