Ditch Your Dictionary for Better Diction
From 10 Things to Do Now to Up Your Fluency
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1: Ditch Your Dictionary!
I should heed my own advice. A lover of learning languages, I adore making vocabulary lists. I stash them everywhere: words in spirals, pretty notebooks, scraps of paper, even in the book margins. I write down every word I don’t know, underline it, look it up, and pen its definition, all in hopes of learning said new word. While I do believe that the act of writing the unknown word and its definition down can be helpful– especially for those who learn kinesthetically, – if I am honest with myself, this method has not helped me all that much.
Donkeys’ (y)ears ago when rote learning was thought to be the best method for studying vocabulary, we were given vocabulary lists, both in our native language and in the foreign language we were learning. Perhaps this method worked to some extent back then because I was forced to look back on them, stare at them, repeat them out loud, write them down over and over, in hopes of remembering them for the quiz or test, but in the busy digital lives we have today, I rarely, if ever, look back on these lists. Ever. In fact, I began to throw away my lists from the French article I read weekly. At first, I would print out the article and write down the words and their definitions in a pretty notebook. Realizing that I never really looked back at the notebook, and it was just gathering dust, I next began to underline every word I read in the article and write its definition in the printout of the article itself, and later, to save paper, in the digitally, in the document itself. I was wasting a lot of time going back and forth and writing the article down in the margin. Precious time that I did not have.
On one occasion I had very little time to prepare for my French lesson, so I read the article, and just underlined the unknown words, but with little time left before the lesson, I only had time to choose only a couple of words. I was able to read the article and answer the questions without looking up every word. I could figure out most of the words from context and was forced to forgo looking them up despite my OCD desire to do so. And so, I ended up looking up maybe 1 or 2 words, the ones I really could not work out at all from the context, the words whose meaning I needed to understand the sentence. And so it was that I was able to read the article, answer the questions, and have a successful lesson without having to look up every single unknown word.
Learning from context is what we do naturally. As humans, we naturally fill in the blanks. This is a self-protecting instinct that we have in order to survive. We see a tail in the Savannah landscape and imagine the rest of the lion’s body and run for lives, but it doesn’t always work for us because we may see things that are not there or hear things that were not said, but this reaction has nevertheless preserved us through the generations.
And so it follows that if we are hardwired to fill in the blanks, we can probably ditch the vocabulary lists. Reading an article, for example, we can extrapolate the meaning of a word from the other words around it, and this is the best way to learn a language, because you learn it organically and as a larger unit of meaning. For example, you may not know what up your fluency in the title of this article means, but you can figure out that it means something positive, and maybe you can even come up with a substitute or approximate word in English or your own native language. You don’t need to look up the word up in order to understand the meaning of the sentence. You could say that you would like to know precisely what this word means, how it differentiates from other words, and to that I say, great! Go for it! Study the word, but know that, unless you dedicate a daily practice where you study the words – which most people don’t, wont, or can’t do, you will not learn those words. Not to mention that would negate the point of this article.
In whatever you are reading, choose the words you look up wisely and economically. For the rest of the words, first try to establish whether the word is negative or positive, then try to substitute another word in English or your native language. On your next exposures to the word, you will naturally get a more specific understanding of the meaning of that word. You may even notice that you begin to notice that word being used by others or in your readings, over the course of the next few days after your first exposure to that word. This is part of the natural learning process, where your exposure laid down like thin coats of paint before the final meaning of the word is understood. To this day I find myself refining my knowledge of words in my own language as I see them used in different ways.
With all the distractions around us these days, reading is hard work, and purposely interrupting yourself to look up a word is yet another interruption, even if it is just another tab on your computer. Did you know it takes us up to 23 minutes and 15 to refocus ourselves when we are interrupted according to a study conducted by UCI? Add that to the difficulty of reading an article in a foreign language and you are making your work that much harder for yourself.
As a child we learn language and acquire vocabulary in a different way than we learn it as adults or as foreign languages. I believe that, as children, we learn words in a different, much more organic, metalinguistic manner. I remember when my son started to say “Carry You” when he wanted me to carry him. Besides being super cute, the point is that he heard me say “Do you want me to carry you,” and understood that “carry you” meant me carrying him, he did not understand, or care, about pronouns, he just wanted to be carried and thought that “that” mean getting carried. But it got the job done. And that is the end point of language, to communicate, to understand and to be understood.
But I thought this was an article about improving my fluency, you say, slightly annoyed. To which I respond, yes, you are right. But spending time looking up articles can get in the way of your learning and your fluency. I say read the article and try to look up the least words that you can, focus on the larger message of what you are reading instead, and don’t sweat the small stuff: ditch your dictionary. I dare you.
This article is part of a series on how to improve your fluency more efficiently. If you enjoyed reading this, please make sure to check out some of our other blogs Here
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