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Old March 17, 2009, 03:39 AM
lingos lingos is offline
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I agree, thinking of a situation, a context, etc makes the word written in memory easily, however listing (organizing) words does not have to lack this feature, for example in my lists I always use example phrases

but especially for english words that are the same in spanish and have the same meaning, there is no reason to try to memorize their meaning, since you already know it, so there is not that crucial to give an example phrase in order to try to remember it

ofcourse in case the word is used in other meaning or it is used differently (eg it's accompanied with a specific preposition, etc), then yes, an example phrase is essential, and seeing the word in a text would be better, but only in these cases, as for the english-spanish common words, in the other cases its advantage is diminished

texts surely add vocabulary and at the same time offer a way to learn to use the vocabulary, plus this may be mnemonic, especially for the people that use active way of learning (among the three types of learning, by hearing, seeing, or acting)

however one would wonder, if the mind remembers more easy a list of spoon, fork, knife, plate or if one sees each of these words in different texts in different time each others, in different text context, and given ofcourse the fact that it would be too inconvenient if he wants to do repetition

I often see people doing their own vocabulary lists from vocabulary that they extract from a passage and in most ocassions such vocabularies contain irrelevant words, eg fork and ball

if we accept that learning/memorizing vocabulary using passages, one would argue if remembering a word by the context, a whole phrase, would require more effort, time and memory than learning just the word, especially for nouns (for verbs, prepositions, etc may be more valuable to see in in use of a phrase) and moreover, it may be just indifferent to see the word fork in a phrase, eg 'he lfited the fork'

it would be very interesting if anyone know any research by linguisticians and learning psychologists (Psycholinguistics) about language learning, eg the article I once read about how fast one can forget a second language he learned

please don't misunderstand, I don't disagree that learning vocabulary from passages is both useful and essential, I just need to explore other learning toolsin order NOT to replace, but to expand and enrich the learning quiver

Quote:
Originally Posted by poli View Post
it's good to remember the ones that betray us
yes, that would be very useful, for example simpático means nothing like sympathetic and the fact that they share the same stem may mislead someone while he writes an essay for example

thanks
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