I’ve had the pleasure to pick up French (for work) and more recently Spanish (for love). For me, both of these two adventures have been a great success. The other day, friends asked me for tips to learn some Spanish before a journey to Central America. Let me share with you what I told them:
The single unit of information is a phrase.
Let’s unpack this.
About words
In the beginning, I thought that the single unit of information in languages is a word. At school, we had to learn lists of word-to-word correspondences (“vocabulary lists”). You can buy dictionaries, that also translate word-by-word.
Yet, there are problems with this approach: Consider the word “date”. It can mean
- A day on a calendar.
- A romantic meeting.
- A fruit.
Most words have at least two meanings that are clearly not the same thing.
The situation isn’t any better with verbs: “to grind” might mean two mechnical pieces rubbing together with friction. It might also mean dancing very closely or working hard.
And then there are words that have only grammatical functions, like “to”. They are usually untranslatable.
Phrases
The meaning of a word almost always becomes clear when it’s being used in a sentence.
I was grinding at the office on that date.
Of course this person might have had a hot dance session while being on a romantic rendez-vous at their office or they might have danced with a fruit. But my best guess is that they were working hard at a specific day.
So, in this example the words by themselves are ambigous, while the phrase is (almost) clear. The phrase is the “single unit of information”: The person was working hard at the office on a specific day.
Take-aways
How does this insight translate to you learning more efficiently? I have a do and a don’t for you:
Do: Always learn full phrases.
Don’t: Never study vocabulary lists.
To add some nuance to this: Of course it makes sense to know which function each word has in a phrase. So just learning them by heart without even breaking them into words might not be ideal, because you can’t form new phrases if you don’t know word boundaries.
Yet, I stand firm behind my belief that vocabulary lists are fundamentally wrong and shouldn’t be used at all. The same goes for dictionaries. I’d suggest using a thesaurus instead. A thesaurus is a list of words and their (many) definitions.
Conjugations
Conjugations are a tricky case, because there can be many permutations and they might be quite systematic, which makes them a good candidate for tables / lists. Let me say this: I’m personally not able to use learned conjugation tables while speaking quickly. However, knowing them by heart helps me to correct myself when I’m making mistakes, so I guess there’s some merit to studying them a bit.