Perhaps the following video will be of help to you
www.youtube.com/watch?v=jwOhS3e2iL4
In this I talk a bit about the problem with using dictionaries as
the source. The biggest issue is that you have common or already
known words alongside words which a native might go through life
needing to use only a handful of times.
<br />
There are frequentative dictionaries available which get around that
problem, and I show one of them for Russian language in the film.
Otherwise you can find frequency ordered word lists on the net for
many languages. You might also find glossaries showing wordlists for
specific needs, such as financial terms, medical terms, or whatever
work you have. These books are usually good-ish tools, although they
suffer from some inaccuracies as people working in finance or
medicine don't usually have the time to sit and write dictionaries.
maybe now, in the recession, some will.
<br />
In any event the beginner should always use the hold list with his
course. In the first case he might read the grammar explanations,
and goldlist the vocab as well as the standard sentences given. Or
even place explanations as gold list lines.
Example: "If a word ends in a vowel, an s or an n, it's final
syllable should not be stressed unless there is an accent". (Can
anyone tell me what language that is for, btw?) That's a rule you
can learn, and therefore can be included as a line item on a
goldlist. The first time you write it, it might take more than one
line to write it, whereas the the second time you might just
write "vowel/s/n rule of stress" and that would be an easy thing to
fit on a line.
The beginner can use the one goldlist even if using more than one
course, to link together the two sources. It is "clunky", as one of
my critics calls it, at first, but then it pays back, as you are
walking around while distilling with only one book, not a bunch of
books.
After one has worked a couple of course levels, at basic and at
intermediate levels, into the goldlist, you usually find that
courses are no longer available for many languages at advanced
level. Then you can progress to covering readers, or even
literature, and in the film I talk about using gold list with the
technique of reading original literature with a good translation,
whereby you read the original and list into the gold list the words
you didn't understand, and then take them from the translation,
rather than waste inordinate amounts of time with a dictionary,
which will also give less common meanings of words along with the
necessary one.<br />
Please keep me informed of progress. My book on the gold list method
is developing gradually.
--
- Moje wideo na YouTube -
:: Foreigners Living in Poland Forum
