Notes on learning

Notes on Vocabulary Learning

Thor May

These are the main steps in learning new words and expressions :

1. Awareness -> you realize that this is a useful word to learn.

2. Dictionary meaning -> the dictionary will give you some general meanings for a word. Dictionary meanings are always approximate because a) language is always changing; b) every small group of people uses words with slightly different meanings.

3. The contextual meaning -> this is the real meaning of the word in the speech or writing where you meet it. You usually have to guess its real meaning from the other words around it.

4. The collocational distribution -> this is all the contexts where a word can appear. Collocation especially means which other words can occur next to a word, or near it. You can¡¯t speak a language until you know this.

5. The collocational frequency -> this is how often one word occurs next to another word. You learn this as a probability. You will make many social mistakes until you know the collocational frequency of a word.

6. Practice in using the new word, especially putting steps 3, 4 and 5 together. Just learning a list of words with the Chinese meaning will only bring you to steps 1 and 2. When you only know a word to steps 1 and 2, usually you cannot remember it when you need to use it in communication !

7. Long term memory for vocabulary -> Vocabulary usually has to be used again and again in real contexts over time before it is really remembered. Just memorizing a list of words for an exam is not very effective language learning.