Jocelyne Rodriguez
Journal Entry 8
How many new words have you learned in your target language? How did you learn them? Do you have realistic goals for your acquisition of vocabulary?
It is difficult to keep track of how many new words I have learned since I am learning a language that is so closely related to my native language. Spanish and Portuguese have a lexical similarity of 89%; therefore, even when I had never studied a word in Portuguese, there were times when I could guess the word using Spanish and the patterns I had observed between the two. There are so many words I never formally studied as part of my learning plan but that I would hear in a song or in a TV show and know what they meant. Formally I would say I learned about 500 words through topic subjects that I would study every week and from where I would pick up a few vocabulary words to study. Additionally, there were other words that I was able to pick up through exposure to their constant use and Spanish cognates. I believe my vocabulary goals were realistic although I eventually realized that I was incorporating too much memorization of translations rather than spending more time studying the meaning of words under a cultural lens. I eventually decided to reduce the number of words I was studying every week so I could study them more in depth.
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