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Q: How do you increase your vacabulary when you learn a new language?
Feel free to share with me. Especially how do you increase your Chinese Vacabulary.Husband complains about me not practicing Chinese with him. LOL
Thanks.
11 years 29 weeks ago in Teaching & Learning - China
I used to use small, stamp-sized bits of card. On one side i'd put the English and the pinyin translation, on the other side i'd put the Chinese characters. Along with this I had a system of six cups, one of which i'd check every day, another every two days, another ever four, then seven, then two weeks, then monthly. All new vocab started in the every day cup, i'd look at the Chinese character, if I knew the meaning and could pronounce it correctly i'd move it to the two day cup and so on. If I got stuff wrong it would move back a cup. It proved effective for a long long while but I proved lazy in the end. Now I just have masses and masses of stuff on my phone that I open and study when i'm on a bus or have five minutes to spare.
by talking to your husband more, you can increase many things..
maggiegirly:
Yes,I do,But we speak English mostly,I found It's more convenient for me to speak English with him. Cause his Chinese sucks, a basic conservation would be a bit hard for him sometimes.
Each person will develop a favorite way of doing it. When i learned Spanish, French and Italian, what I did to increase my vocabulary was to buy a large pocket book in the language I wanted to learn, and start reading it. As I found a word I had no idea of the meaning, I would look it up on dictionary and write in English above it. As you can imagine, the first pages were full of my writing, and as I progressed, less translations were needed.
I saved the books, and once in a while I go back and read them again.
I am not saying it is the best, just that I enjoyed it doing it this way, because i like reading.
This is more general than vocabulary specific, sorry, but...
If his current speaking level is up to it allocate 10 minutes per day as "Chinese time". For example, the first ten minutes that you see him after your/his work, you can only speak Chinese. If he has something he wants to get off his chest immediately, like he wants to vent about his colleagues or tell you how awesome his boss thinks he is, he must do it in Chinese first.
Your overall communication will not suffer because it's only a small part of your conversation - but on the other hand, ten minutes of vital conversation in Chinese every day ought to make all the world of difference to his Chinese. Allow him the use of a translator/dictiionary while he does it, and he'll have motivation to seek out new ways to express himself.
maggiegirly:
What I really mean : at least you should have some words that you can talk to people,suppose a conversation about China,at least you should have a general idea about China, where is China?How big is the country?what's their first language ?something like that,so that you can handle a conservation well. If without,The conversation won't be going well I guess.Hope you know what I mean.
Thanks for sharing your way about learning Chinese and Now we decided to speak Chinese for half hour every day,he checks his dictionary first if any new words or some words he can not remember instead of asking me straight away.at the same time,I can check his pronunciation,and he's going to recite words as well,probably the similare way like MARTIAN said.
So I think his Chinese is gonna Improve.
Thanks,again,MissA,
