Learning A Foreign Language \"without\" Vocabulary

Dakatsu · Post by **Dakatsu** » Tue Dec 30, 2008 3:45 am

How easy would any of you say learning a language (grammar, structure, etc) is without learning a lot of vocabulary? Yeah, seems useless to learn a language without vocabulary, but it's a thought I had.

CDN_Merlin · Post by **CDN_Merlin** » Tue Dec 30, 2008 6:23 am

I would think it's much harder. Trying to learn words and not knowing how they intereact with other words to form a sentence would be hard. Take French for example. It's almost the complete opposite of English in terms of sentence structure. But there are exceptions and you won't learn this without learning vocabulary.

Dakatsu · Post by **Dakatsu** » Tue Dec 30, 2008 7:33 am

I don't mean not learning any words, but maybe 100-250. Some verbs, a few nouns, etc, for the sake of learning it.

Edit: I'm asking because I'm interested in learning a few languages, but I am currently taking spanish for school (5th year). I suck at vocabulary (I'd consider it low sized at least), but I'm pretty good at grammar. I basically would want to learn the language/grammar/etc (with a small list of words of course), then pile up the vocab.

Floyd · Post by **Floyd** » Tue Dec 30, 2008 7:57 am

if you just want to talk, you may be able to only know the most necessary words and describe everything else with these. but that won't help you if you want to read a text or listen to someone, unless it's always kept simple at your level. while this may work for a person you talk to, i doubt it would be possible with books etc. or movies.

snoopy · Post by **snoopy** » Tue Dec 30, 2008 8:30 am

Yeah, I think the point of vocabulary is to be able to communicate more efficiently. If you were to try to \"learn\" a language with minimal vocabulary, you'd probably find that you really couldn't communicate. I'd argue that the measure of knowing a language is how well you can communicate in it... of which I consider a decent vocabulary a necessity.

Dakatsu · Post by **Dakatsu** » Tue Dec 30, 2008 8:50 am

My plan is instead of learning the vocabulary as I go along, I learn a few words (once again, 100-250), and learn vocabulary for the languages together.

Example:
The Sun - El Sol - Die Sonne - Le Soleil
I think it would, besides learning me sum wurds, strengthen my spanish vocabulary, which I severely need

CDN_Merlin · Post by **CDN_Merlin** » Tue Dec 30, 2008 9:30 am

I would think learning the same words for different languages at the same time would be more difficult because yuo would get mixed up in the languages.

d3jake · Post by **d3jake** » Tue Dec 30, 2008 12:26 pm

Well, I've found that the best way I've found to improve my grammar was by using a language. Though to be honest if you want to know a language, what's the point of having a severely limited vocabulary? For me knowing a language lets a person communicate efficiently with others, and read it. If you only know enough words to get the grammar, you won't exactly have any uses for the language, defeating the purpose, and slowly letting the language dribble back out of your head.

Dakatsu · Post by **Dakatsu** » Tue Dec 30, 2008 3:55 pm

d3jake wrote:Well, I've found that the best way I've found to improve my grammar was by using a language. Though to be honest if you want to know a language, what's the point of having a severely limited vocabulary? For me knowing a language lets a person communicate efficiently with others, and read it. If you only know enough words to get the grammar, you won't exactly have any uses for the language, defeating the purpose, and slowly letting the language dribble back out of your head.

Once again, vocab is of course going to be learned, just later on.

d3jake · Post by **d3jake** » Tue Dec 30, 2008 5:48 pm

Fair enough.

I was and never will be one for sitting down a memorizing lists of words. The majority of the words I learned in German were just from be using them. In sentences for practice or talking with any of the German D3 guys. You'll be better off if you can use your vocabulary. At the very least it can let you write interesting senteces for practice beyond \"I run through the park. I run in the street.\"

Firewheel · Post by **Firewheel** » Tue Dec 30, 2008 9:23 pm

I must be a total weirdo for preferring to learn words from lists - it's too hard to actually remember what a flurry of new words means without being exposed over and over again for a long-term period. Of course, this can work quite well if you're immersed in the language/culture.

Since I'm learning Japanese, writing words down and memorizing them from lists helped me a lot with learning kanji, but I realize this isn't rally any issue with most European languages (or ones with a sane writing system) since you should already be able to read it.

Back on topic, I think it'd be far better to have a basic knowledge of grammar and a big vocab rather than vice versa.

Krom · Post by **Krom** » Tue Dec 30, 2008 10:48 pm

Proper balance is the most important, you can't learn the grammar without a vocabulary, you can't learn a strong vocabulary without also learning the grammar. They should be done together or it becomes much harder than it should be to learn a new language. As your vocabulary grows, your grasp of the grammar structure should grow with it. And when you are doing it right learning a language can be great fun especially if you have some use for it.

Firewheel: 日本語が楽しいね
I really need to get back on my own studying and practice... Kanji is a royal pain at times. But then again memorizing 3000+ Kanji is not all that different from memorizing the proper spelling for 3000+ different words in English, it just takes time, patience and practice. Spoken Japanese is simply short changed for not having enough syllables compared to English and sometimes almost needs Kanji to differentiate many words that sound exactly the same.

Duper · Post by **Duper** » Wed Dec 31, 2008 2:10 pm

Dakatsu wrote:I don't mean not learning any words, but maybe 100-250. Some verbs, a few nouns, etc, for the sake of learning it.

Edit: I'm asking because I'm interested in learning a few languages, but I am currently taking spanish for school (5th year). I suck at vocabulary (I'd consider it low sized at least), but I'm pretty good at grammar. I basically would want to learn the language/grammar/etc (with a small list of words of course), then pile up the vocab.

I'd say not a problem if you want a 5 y/o education. Language is ABOUT vocabulary. Knowing the structure isn't enough to make it useful. Find a good learning tool. There are plenty of methods out there. Memorization is more about practice. There's a trick to it.

Firewheel · Post by **Firewheel** » Thu Jan 01, 2009 11:53 pm

Krom: I'm one of those freaks who just loves kanji. I get all giddy every time some crazy-looking character pops up in my vocab lists or whatever.

Listening is a pain in the butt, though. I'm so used to recognizing words through reading the kanji that sometimes stuff flies over my head in conversation.

Krom · Post by **Krom** » Fri Jan 02, 2009 10:13 am

Yeah, that is perhaps the coolest thing about Kanji, it is one of the most \"art\" like writing forms I have seen. I'd put it right up there with Egyptian hieroglyphics.

Back on topic. When I was learning some spoken Japanese, after getting through all my tapes I had a vocabulary of roughly 600-700 words and a basic understanding of grammar. Honestly it was useless for practically every sort of Japanese you could be exposed to regularly, the only good it did was helping you to have better pronunciation and breaking the ice to actually get somewhere for real by using other resources. You need to know thousands of words before you can easily and comfortably tackle widely used daily conversation.

Sirius · Post by **Sirius** » Fri Jan 02, 2009 2:30 pm

漢字有些類似。。。

(if I even got that right...)

Learning A Foreign Language \"without\" Vocabulary

Learning A Foreign Language \"without\" Vocabulary

Re:

Re: