狎昵 and other vocabulary that Chinese themselves don't know

[djwebb1969]

Hello. I am learning the "supplementary" HSK vocab - an additional 1018 words in a book called 汉语水平考试词汇自测手册. The author aims to take HSK vocabulary and add a further 1018 characters to give a grand total of 3925, as a good working vocabulary for a foreigner. The trouble is that many of these words are so off beat many Chinese do not know them. I have asked many Chinese what 狎昵 means. The book says "improperly familiar", but I am wondering how it is used. Is it used for a teacher being "improperly familiar " with a student for example? I frequently come across the situation where words I have read in the dictionary are not recognised by any Chinese person I know. Do you think there is a greater variation among Chinese in their vocabulary size than there would be among correspondinig people in England?

[Strawberries513]

The only thing I can say is that, unless you are at a very advanced level, if a native chinese doesnt know a word. Then you dont need to know it.

[in_lab]

I wouldn't put a lot of effort into learning rare words, but if you do, I don't think it would be wasted. I haven't seen the word 狎昵, but I have seen 狎, which meant the same thing in the context I saw it. If you learn four words like this, you'll probably come across at least one of them.

There are big variations in Chinese people's vocabularies, but also big variations in English speaker's vocabularies. If you are interested in Chinese literature, you might want a larger vocabularly than a Chinese person who doesn't read at all. (But it would be very difficult to compete with a Chinese person who likes to read.)

[sjcma]

A teacher getting too close to a student can be considered 狎昵. You can also translate it as intimate. Just search the term on google and you'll find plenty of modern day uses as well as classical uses.

I found one news headline that read: 意总理“暧昧狎昵”挑逗俄总统 (Italian PM "inappropriately intimate" with teasing Russian president.) The pictures that followed has the Italian PM playing a joke on the President Putin by pretending to be lovey-dovey with him. Just one possible usage.

[randall_flagg]

The only thing I can say is that, unless you are at a very advanced level, if a native chinese doesnt know a word. Then you dont need to know it.

I totally disagree! Why shoudl that be? Does that also mean that a foreign learner of English shouldn't have a bigger vocabulary than your average American?

[HashiriKata]

I totally disagree! Why shoudl that be?

I think Strawberries513 is quite reasonable in saying that if you're not at an advance level, then you don't need to know words that native speakers don't already know.

By the way, I personally don't believe that 狎昵 should be among the 4000 most essential words a learner should know (My dictionary of 8000 words for HSK Proficiency Test doesn't have it).

[djwebb2004]

By the way, I personally don't believe that 狎昵 should be among the 4000 most essential words a learner should know (My dictionary of 8000 words for HSK Proficiency Test doesn't have it).

Can I clarify? The HSK people have produced a list of 8840 words, using 2907 characters. In the book I cited above, the professor thought that only 2907 characters was not enough, so he added around 1000 extra words in a supplement in order to take the foreign learner up 3925 characters (=9800 words). So the word is not in the HSK list of 8840, but is in an additional list drawn up by this professor. I am not trying to learn really out of the way vocabulary, but as know most of the HSK words, I am using this book to fill in the blanks, by learning the words from the back, starting with the supplementary vocab, then checking that I know the D, then the C, then the B, then the A words. Why this professor thought 狎昵 was an important word that needed to be added as a supplement to the HSK escapes me. Another wierd one was 贲门, translated in the book as "preventriculus", and translated in the Contemporary Chinese Dictionary as "cardia", it apparently refers to the gateway between the oesophagus and the diaphragm! But many of the supplementary words are useful, eg 浏览 , to browse, which it is surprising was not in the HSK list itself... My basic problem is that I am learning words from a list, and many of the words I only know from the list and have never heard them used.

[HashiriKata]

I see the problem now. An addition of 1018 words is quite different from an addition of 1018 characters. One can come up with very obscure words by using even common characters.

[gato]

1018 words in a book called 汉语水平考试词汇自测手册. The author aims to take HSK vocabulary and add a further 1018 characters

It seems that the book's goal is to teach an additional 1000 characters on top of the 2900. Some of those 1000 characters are probably very obscure ones, so it's not surprising that the words made up of those characters are also obscure. I think once you get above 3000 characters, you should be focused on reading books and articles in your interest area and the vocabulary you see there. Working with a character list isn't as helpful at that stage.

Here's the book, by the way.

http://www.china-pub.com/computers/common/info.asp?id=586057

HSK汉语水平考试词汇自测手册

Though if you read want to work with word lists, I would recommend these two below. The first is particularly good because it also lists synonyms and antonyms of words.

http://www.bookschina.com/1055854.htm

小学词语9用词典

http://www.bookschina.com/1055854.htm

学生分类成语词典