As promised, the next article is about vocabulary building. The reason this is about vocabulary (and not grammar) is because, essentially, vocabulary is the thing that carries the most meaning in language (intonation also carries a lot of weight, especially in speech, but we’ll leave it for another day). Considering that I want to divulge some of the secrets why some people learn faster than others, and a large part of learning languages is still vocabulary, I can’t get around not discussing how vocabulary learning works and how we can make the most out of one of the most difficult tasks in our path to competency (I rather say competency than fluency, since the latter is a loaded term and we can define competency as the level we need to be at for us to do the things we need to be competent enough to do in life. That level may vary, but it’s usually the one where you finally plateau out).
Now, when it comes to vocabulary, there are a bunch of things that we notice are variable and make learning words harder or easier, and these are things most of us learning a language have dealt with at some time or other. These are:
– degree of relatedness to a language we know (usually our native tongue, but it may also be a second tongue that we master very well)
– degree to which morphemes stack logically in that language, and/or affixes are used systematically to add meaning to a vocabulary item
– degree to which we can use memory hooks or other techniques in order to memorize these words
– plain old usefulness in our daily lives (which is very important!)
– degree to which they’re easy to spell or write down when heard in aural form, and vice versa (converting from the spoken to the written form and back)
…and probably a few others you may want to suggest. I think these are the main points though.
The thing is that most languages actually have very clever techniques for building new words from smaller components. English does not really do much of this, but many language families work almost like Lego bricks. Because of the various forms that this Lego system can take, their word formation may be a lot easier to remember. This is why vocabulary work can be approached smartly. Know the bricks you need to use, and you can build the house you want.
Some languages supplement this with loans. Loans are especially common for words that aren’t necessarily expressed well by the native tongue, and may also end up being lego bricks in themselves (English is rather odd in having them stand alone so often). If you speak English, you’re in luck – most languages have loaned from English at least once in their lifetime, and some, like Dutch or Swedish, just can’t stop loaning. You’ll find these words useful and in some cases they’re so common you’re going to breathe a sigh of relief whenever you see one of these popping up.
In related languages to your own, you’ll also find cognates, words that come from the same root and usually mean more or less the same thing – these are another bunch of words you’ll get for free and you’ll recognize them immediately. This is common if you’re learning a language from the same family – say you’re an English speaker learning German, you’ll soon find out “Boot” and “boat” are cognates. And mean the same thing.
Okay, so how do we harness all this information (and the words we may not yet know) in order to build our vocabulary?
Ok, so we know that we usually have words that:
– we know a priori, because they’re the same in our own language, give or take a few spelling/pronunciation differences
– we know a priori, because they were taken from our language but are used in the foreign one
– we know a posteriori, because we can figure out what they mean because we know the bricks.
That’s a lot of words you get for free, and words fall in those categories in EVERY LANGUAGE YOU LEARN. No, it doesn’t matter if you are learning Vietnamese or Hungarian, you will still see them. The number of cognates will be zero in non-related languages, but loans from English may be very frequent, especially in Japanese for example. You will always benefit from this and never start from zero.
Now, how does this work?
Let’s take a simple example for English speakers, where all three cases apply (cognates, loans, and word building). To do that we need a Germanic language (to get cognates and loans, and because Germanic languages are good at putting lego bricks together).
Let’s read the following Dutch sentence (it’s the closest to English so it’s the easiest language to demonstrate the various options):
In het ziekenhuis is vandaag een baby geboren.
Now, at first sight, if you don’t know Dutch, this will probably look like a lot of hooplah to you. And that’s normal, if you don’t speak Dutch. However, the astute reader will see a few similarities, and even three words that are exactly the same!
Let’s break it down:
– In is a cognate. It means what it does in English, it’s just the same preposition popping up in its Dutch guise, where it means… “in”. Well, that’s easy.
– Is… is also a cognate, and means… “is”. Hey, that word is exactly the same again!
That’s a quarter of the words that you’ve gotten for free! 25% of the words an English speaker should know by default and they haven’t even had to look in a book for Dutch knowledge. These are cognate words that are the same.
Then we also recognize the word “baby” (pronounced more or less the same in Dutch without so much gliding on the diphthongs). Surprise! That also means baby in Dutch. Ok, 37,5% done now!
“In … … is … … baby …”
Can we find more hints? Yes, we can. But to do this you need to know something about Dutch pronunciation rules. “Het” actually sounds more like “ut” in common speech, a bit like “it”. However in Dutch it’s a definite article (one of two). It would also make sense to have an article after “in”, so there we are, it’s “in it + noun…”, so “in the”. Een is pronounced almost like “an”, so it’s an indefinite article. (It’s another cognate, but in disguise this time). Having “a baby” also makes a lot of sense, even if you know that een is also the way to write “one” in Dutch. Considering het and een are two of the most common words in Dutch, it’s extremely likely you will know these.
Ok. Now we have…
“In the … is … a baby …”
In some place, a baby did something at some point. Geboren is another cognate, it means “born”. It’s obscured because of the extra ge- prefix, but it’s there (and if you speak German you will definitely know that one). There’s a little e in there as well, but it’s still the same word in a more complex guise. Yahey, I needed to think a bit, but you can also figure out this one.
That leaves two words: “ziekenhuis” and “vandaag”. Both are very common words as well, but they are typical Dutch Lego-brick words.
Ziekenhuis is made up of two words, “ziek” and “huis”. Huis is obvious – it’s a house. Ziek is also a common word and it means “sick” or “ill”. (The -en is a connecting infix that often gets thrown into compound words in Dutch, usually because there’s a plural). A sick-house is called a hospital in English (French loanword), but it’s extremely logical to see it as a house where sick people go. And that’s how it’s constructed in Dutch (and actually, in most of the Germanic languages).
Vandaag is a bit tricky, as it’s a turn of phrase, but “daag” comes from “dag”, and van means “of/from”. Of the day is simply the expression for today. This is a word you will probably have to learn separately because it’s not a very logical construction.
So the sentence reads: “In the hospital is today a baby born”. Mix up the words to make it sound more English and you get a nice translation: “A baby was born in the hospital today” (because in English past tense is preferred to the present perfect tense that is used in Dutch).
Dutch gives you a lot of clues (some obvious, some not so much), but as you could see three words in that sentence were the exact same, two were basic articles any beginner will know, one was a clear cognate, and two were made up of cognate words used in a different way to English. None of these words were truly unknown – you just needed to puzzle them out.
In the same way, you can form Chinese words even though they are not cognates. For example, the types of meat are simply animal name + meat in Mandarin:
猪肉 = pig-meat = pork
羊肉 = sheep-meat = mutton
牛肉 = cow-meat = beef
鸡肉 = chicken-meat = chicken
And so on.
You can build vocabulary like this in every language. Find out what patterns they use for building, and you’re all good to go. Good luck hunting words!
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