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Originally Posted by Cloudgazer
That is really interesting! I so enjoy the variations in language. Now that you've jogged my memory, I do associate "comprehend" with teacher/student discourse. In my experience of it, which has been fairly hierarchical and formal, a teacher's use of "comprehend" was not surprising nor taken as pretentious but more along the lines of authoritative. Outside that venue the use probably still brings a hierarchical register to the statement for me.
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The funniest thing is that your typical writing style is very academic and you use a lot of "big" vocabulary words well. Talk about "formal".
Quote:
Originally Posted by pjt33
Interesting. I think of "comprehension" as a perfectly normal noun to use in language lessons, but I can't recall ever hearing comprehend used in the obvious cognate sense.
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Yes, a very teacher-y term. "The student has exceptional reading comprehension." "The student's comprehension of abstract mathematical concepts is less than what it should be for her age level." Etc. We use the word ALL the time in situations where "understanding" would not be quite adequate...