How do you guys learn/maintain vocabulary?

[Baron]

Thanks for the link Nathan. I'd say that's one of the more entertaining discussions I've seen here for a while.

 

I get your argument, and I agree on the limitations of flashcards in that respect. Believe me, I've been almost gouging my eyeballs out in frustration at the near-identical English translations given to Chinese words in Memrise courses.

 

But would you say that this is more of a problem in Chinese than any other language?

[jbradfor]

@Baron, I think the problem with discussing Chinese characters vs words compared to English characters vs words is that, well, English doesn't have characters.  I've been trying to come up with an analogy to explain Chinese to my non-Chinese speaking friends, and basically failed.  The closest I've come is to image that in English, every syllable has a meaning, and the meaning of words is something related to combining the meaning of the syllables that make up that word.

 

And yes, I absolutely think characters have a much much wider meaning than words, assuming you take the definition of the meaning of a character as something like "the overall feel of the all words that contain that character, weighted by the word frequency".   Take, for example, one I just picked at random: 發  What does that character mean?  Take a look at all the words that use 發, and I am at a total loss http://www.mdbg.net/chindict/chindict.php?wdqb=c%3A*%E7%99%BC*&wdrst=1 .  Yes, you can say it deals with things that emit, are shown, appear, increase, etc.   But that's pretty  broad.  And that includes some contradictory meanings.  For example (and you know the answer already, but assume you didn't), does 发财 mean to emit money (e.g. spend it), or does it mean to show money (e.g. a showoff), or increase money (e.g. get rich)?

[Guest realmayo]

Nathan sorry I wasn't clear in my #12. You took the time to write out the word "shrug" which implies you wanted us to know you disagreed and in a rather bored way. But then the first half of your #13 repeats what I say. So you do agree all along!

 

It's good you've stopped using flashcards because the way you think they have to be used -- testing yourself on all the meanings a single character can carry when combined with other characters -- would not be a good idea and I do not think is being suggested by anyone else.

 

发展中国家 is something everyone runs into once and finally works it out and then won't forget it. Knowing how 中国 is used in different contexts is completely irrelevant here. It's a grammar question. Are you comfortable with readily seeing V+中 in a sentence? Then you'll work it out. Nothing to do with how many contexts you've seen the word 中国 in.

[Nathan Mao]

@realmayo

[shrug] means "I don't know".

Not bored, not even disagreed.

[Guest realmayo]

ah okay thanks.

[Guest realmayo]

jbradfor, I completely agree. I've been thinking about this for a while and it's super-hard to articulate.
I think in some instances, dictionaries almost do us a disservice by giving certain definitions to certain characters. (But I can't blame them.)

 

An example of where is not the case would be something like 公, if you have in your head that this can mean something like 'public/official' -- 公开 公斤 公路 公共 公安 etc etc make sense.

 

But there are some characters where you see one of the definitions, and think 'hold on, that's a bit different from the other definitions, and I can't think of any words that use this definition'. Then the dictionary tells you that there is one two-character word which includes this character, and that word carries this odd-looking meaning.

 

In this case, it's like the dictionary has got it the wrong way around. Or, the idea that two-character words are 'built' out of the meanings of single characters is wrong.

 

Because in this case, it's the usage in a word that is informing the dictionary compiler of this extra meaning he's assigning to the character. It's not that the character originally carried this meaning and someone combined it with another character to make a word that is related to that meaning.

 

An example, might not be a good one, but Wenlin gives as meaning number 8 for 公: "make public" and refers us to 公开. But is there really a sense in 公 of make public, or is it just that the 公+开 combination delivers that sense?

[Baron]

@jbradfor

 

Here's an analogy for your friends - it's like Latin and Greek roots in English. What if you're learning English as a foreign languages and you start with roots rather than lexical units/words? Quite helpful to know that anti- means 'agains, so we can deal with anticlockwise or antidisestablishmentarianism. And de- has a kind of 'away from' or 'down' meaning, as in 'deter', 'descend', 'defend' 'defenestrate'. Bit then it gets a bit tricky with 'debate' and 'determine', it's not so obvious. The when you get to things like logo- (thought/word/speech), it gets a lot more hazy - it would take a bit of mental gymnastics to go from logarithm to logic to monologue. Like Chinese, it's all a case of basic concepts that get diffused and warped through use or time until they look like they have many distinct meanings.

 

I suspect the 'Chinese is really abstract' idea comes from the facts that characters focus the attention on the etymology and components of words, whereas the mushy varying forms of English words makes it less obvious that English words are largely based on component meanings (from various languages), and the fact that we have a handy more-or-less phonemic alphabet means we can get away with, and indeed be completely oblivious to word roots.

 

I'm not convinced that any language can be more abstract than another.

[Nathan Mao]

 

But do characters have many different meanings? They often have a basic concept which makes it fairly easy to get a general understanding understand a word you don't when it contains characters you do, it's just precise meaning that's lacking. An analogy would in English would be words like 'put' and 'get', that have a basic concept but different meanings in different contexts, especially when used with different prepositions.

 

@ Baron,

I agree with jbradfor.  I think that Chinese characters do have more different meanings than English words.

 

We have some that are confusing.  Run, for example, or bear.  Branch.

 

But look at the list I provided.

It is easy to draw a common connection between public and common for 公，but how do you work fair/just and male in a way that makes sense?

会 just gets crazy with its possible connotations as can by itself, or in combinations like 会议 社会 体会 会计 机会

Or the confusion of 阴 when you consider 阴历 阴谋 阴凉 阴湿 阴阳 阴门 阴性 阴险

Or how about 将？  Check out all the meanings here: http://www.chinese-tools.com/tools/sinograms.html%C2'> I can't think of anything in common that explains will/shall and military general and the formal version of 把 .

 

Others, just off the top of my head:

任

道

过

共

点

工

让

要

想

别

事

分

白 (this is a bad one.　consider: 明白  空白  白痴  白吃  白白地  雪白 白日  对白 清白  白字  白族 )

拉

位

长

破

表

青 (blue! No, black!  No, green! No, it's "young"!)

 

I could go on for another 30-40 characters, at least. All have at least 3 meanings that aren't clearly in common, and sorting out which is which in sentences where there are no clear delineations of how they combine into words add to the ambiguity.

 

If someone is able to use flashcards to reduce the ambiguity, I applaud them!  I wasn't able to.  I needed to use reading native materials to fully embrace the ambiguity and emerge linguistically unscathed. 

 

As such, I recommend reading native materials as the best way to acquire and maintain vocabulary.  I fully expect some people can and should ignore that as not personally helpful.

[Nathan Mao]

I think English might be as ambiguous as Chinese if we broke up all syllables separately with no indication of how one should combine them into words.

 

But the very fact that you can identify "in-" as a prefix instead of a separate word helps reduce ambiguity significantly.

[Guest realmayo]

I think that Chinese characters do have more different meanings than English words.

 

But given that most Chinese words are not single characters, I'm not sure how relevant this is.

 

If someone is able to use flashcards to reduce the ambiguity, I applaud them!  I wasn't able to.

 

As suggested earlier, you were using flashcards the wrong way and it's a good thing you stopped.

[Baron]

Most of the confusion and perception of ambiguity likely arises when learners try to tackle Chinese with reliance on the meaning of a character rather than the meaning of words. Much like English speakers can cope with new phrasal verbs like 'tap out when you leave the station', or the difference between 'clean out' and 'put out'. for a native Chinese speaker being confronted with 公鸡 and 公开 isn't going to be terribly unsettling.

 

Here's a fun link for you: http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/set

 

We're probably not going to agree on this until I dig out some dusty linguistic papers, which isn't going to happen anytime tonight.

 

But, I will concede that there's a particular ambiguity in Chinese that I haven't seen so much in English. It's not in the 'what does a character really mean' issue, but the context specific interpretations of certain words like '谁’, ‘多少’ etc

 

冬天：能穿多少穿多少； 夏天：能穿多少穿多少. (In winter wear as much as you can; in summer wear as little as you can.)

 

单身人的来由：原来是喜欢一个人，现在是喜欢一个人. (The reason why there are single people is that they used to like someone [else], but now they like to be by themself.)

 

NB I got those from here

[imron]

If someone is able to use flashcards to reduce the ambiguity, I applaud them!  I wasn't able to.

As others have mentioned, you reduce the ambiguity by flashcarding words, not characters.

[Guest realmayo]

Those are cool, the Chinese sentences and 'set' actually.
 

Most of the confusion and perception of ambiguity likely arises when learners try to tackle Chinese with reliance on the meaning of a character rather than the meaning of words

Definitely.

 

 

Classical Chinese is certainly more compressed and therefore more ambiguous, but I'm not sure how much less ambiguous it was to the people reading it at the time. Presumably some of that still comes through in contemporary writing.

 

By chance I saw this nice English ambiguity this morning:

‘Visiting relatives can be a nuisance.’ 

[AdamD]

I use a flashcard to make a unique and prominent definition of a word stick. Once that's stuck I work out how else the word is used. Panicking about all the alternatives is a great way to go mad.

[tysond]

Some interesting examples.

 

When people say "flashcarding" they really mean "learning vocabulary lists with flashcards" and what they mean is "producing a single definition from hanzi".   When there is a 1:1 mapping of hanzi to definition, this makes a lot of sense. 香蕉 = banana.  You don't need to know any context, everyone knows what a banana is and it cannot be anything else.  Nouns are pretty good for this in Chinese.

 

But for most verbs, particles, abstract kind of concepts (like 多少) and so on, I prefer sentence + context clozes so you are "producing hanzi from context".  If a character/word has multiple usages or meanings that are not obvious, but are likely to be useful, I just add a different context.  

 

And then my sentences sometimes have a banana as an object or a subject.  Why learn the word banana without learning how to peel it or count it or make it into a smoothie or something you are likely to do with a banana?

 

And I agree with those who say real word experiences (or emotional context like a film) are best for sourcing words that stick.  After every lesson I will go find examples of words I messed up badly, or had an "ah-ha" moment with, and add them to the SRS.  And anything I mess up in real life will be a discussion topic for lessons.  My mistakes are my best teacher.

 

(* edit: ok I lied a bit, banana has another meaning in English)

[renzhe]

I have a hard time understanding the confusion.

Just because you put the most common meaning on a flashcard as a quick memorisation aid doesn't mean that you will never do anything else whatsoever to remember or use that character for the rest of your life.

Why are there so many threads about flashcards OR reading OR something else? Use everything that you find useful and forget things you don't find useful. I had never used flashcards before learning Chinese, and have never used them after that either. But I found them extremely useful for learning characters in particular.

To stay on topic: I learned basic vocabulary and characters using heavy cramming with flashcards. Beyond that, I relied on lots of reading and listening and noting new/interesting vocabulary.

[mouse]

I agree with Renzhe. Flashcards are to be used as one element in a general study routine. Also, if you're not familiar with characters, flashcards are a nice way to gradually familiarise yourself with particular characters in a manageable way, rather than relying on randomly encountering them 'in the wild'.

 

Moreover, I don't necessarily think it's bad for beginners to drill individual characters that aren't words. For example, when I was a total beginner, I sometime found it useful to flashcard single characters not as words, but as a way of recognising visual differences and understanding general meanings associated with the character. So (to take an easy example) I might make a card for 眼 on its own, not because I thought it was the word for 'eye', but because its meaning is usually associated with the eye. Basically I was learning that the character was 眼睛的眼 before I knew what that meant. This approach doesn't always work, of course. For example, 机 is more ambiguous, and has been famously mistranslated in 危机 as being 机会的机. Nevertheless, getting used to characters takes time, and as long as you understand some of the basics of Chinese (what is a character, what is a word, etc) then I think this is as good a process as any.

 

Beyond that very beginner level, word flashcards (as opposed to sentence flashcards) are useful to make artificial reminders and build familiarity. Sentence flashcards are great for the grammar side of things and internalizing ways of expressing yourself. Anyone relying solely on flashcards at any stage however is wasting her time.