How I Use Dictionaries When Learning a Language Wie ich Wörterbücher beim Lernen einer Sprache verwende Cómo utilizo los diccionarios cuando aprendo un idioma Comment j'utilise les dictionnaires pour apprendre une langue 語学学習における辞書の使い方 언어를 배울 때 사전을 사용하는 방법 Como utilizo os dicionários para aprender uma língua Dil Öğrenirken Sözlükleri Nasıl Kullanırım 我在学习语言时如何使用字典 學習語言時我如何使用詞典

Yes, you can look through a dictionary, read through a dictionary. はい、辞書に目を通し、辞書を読むことができます。 Да, вы можете просмотреть словарь, прочитать словарь.

It's kind of fun, but my experience is we don't retain much. それはちょっと楽しいですが、私の経験では、私たちはあまり覚えていません. 這很有趣，但我的經驗是我們保留的不多。

Hi there, Steve Kaufmann here today to talk about dictionaries こんにちは。スティーブ・カウフマンが辞書についてお話しします。

and language learning.

If you enjoy my videos, please subscribe, click on the bell for notifications. 私の動画が気に入ったら、チャンネル登録をお願いします。ベルをクリックすると通知が表示されます。

Uh, if you follow me on a podcast service, um, which is a good thing ええと、ポッドキャスト サービスで私をフォローしてくれたら、ええと、それは良いことです

to do if you're learning English, because you can then study the lessons あなたが英語を学んでいるなら、そうすることでレッスンを学ぶことができるからです

on LingQ, but do leave a comment. ただし、コメントを残してください。

I do appreciate it. 私はそれを感謝します。

So dictionaries, I am a sucker for buying books and buying books on だから辞書、私は本を買ったり本を買ったりするのが苦手です 所以字典，我是買書和買書的傻瓜

things that are of interest to me, such as history, but such as language. 歴史など、私が興味を持っていることですが、言語などです。

So I have bought a lot of dictionaries. というわけで、辞書をたくさん買ってきました。

Way back when I was at school or when I was learning French or learning Chinese, 学生時代、フランス語や中国語を学んでいた頃、 早在我上學或學法語或學中文的時候，

we needed dictionaries, we needed... 辞書が必要だった、必要だった...

and I got Chinese dictionaries. そして私は中国語の辞書を手に入れました。

This isn't, I got many, many more I just don't know where they are right now. これはそうではありません、私はもっとたくさん持っていますが、彼らが今どこにいるのかわからないだけです.

So starting with Chinese, lots of dictionaries, and that's kind 中国語から始まり、たくさんの辞書、そしてそれは親切です

of the only choice we had then. その時私たちが持っていた唯一の選択肢の。

There were, there were no online texts with online dictionaries. オンライン辞書を備えたオンラインテキストはありませんでした。

The dictionary, the Chinese dictionary had the big disadvantage and to some extent 辞書、中国語辞書には大きな欠点があり、ある程度 字典，中文字典有很大的劣勢，在一定程度上

it shares it with other dictionaries that it's difficult to look words up, 単語を調べるのが難しいことを他の辞書と共有し、

it's time consuming, uh, even a, sort of a, a, a dictionary that's in the それは時間がかかります。 這很耗時，呃，甚至一個，有點像一個，一個，一本字典，在

Latin alphabet or in an alphabet where, you know, the order of the letters. ラテン アルファベットまたは文字の順序であるアルファベットで。 拉丁字母或在字母表中，您知道字母的順序。

Uh, and therefore you can look things up based on that alphabet. ええと、したがって、そのアルファベットに基づいて物事を調べることができます。

That's easier.

When I first started learning Chinese, we either had to know the 私が最初に中国語を学び始めたとき、私たちはどちらかを知らなければなりませんでした

stroke, the number of strokes in the character, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13. ストローク、文字のストローク数、7、8、9、10、11、12、13。 stroke，字符中的筆劃數，7、8、9、10、11、12、13。

And then go look for that character, you know, in that section of the dictionary. そして、辞書のそのセクションで、その文字を探しに行きます。 然後去找那個字符，你知道，在字典的那個部分。

And if we counted the strokes wrong, which as a beginner you're likely そして、ストロークを間違ってカウントした場合、初心者としておそらく

to do, then you never found it or it took forever, or they wanted you to あなたはそれを見つけられなかった、または永遠にかかった、または彼らはあなたに望んでいた 去做，然後你永遠找不到它或者它花了很長時間，或者他們想讓你

figure out the radical, the component. ラジカル、コンポーネントを把握します。 找出激進，組件。

And then characters would be organized in the dictionary based on these components. そして、文字はこれらのコンポーネントに基づいて辞書で編成されます。

Uh, that again could be, uh, a little difficult, but what is common to whether ええと、それはまた、ええと、少し難しいかもしれませんが、 呃，這又可能，呃，有點困難，但有什麼共同點

you're looking up Chinese characters in a dictionary or looking up words based 漢字を辞書で調べたり、単語を基に調べたりしている

on the alphabet uh, the problem is that very soon after you close the dictionary, アルファベットの問題は、辞書を閉じた直後に、

you have forgotten the meaning. あなたは意味を忘れています。

Now I should point out that Chinese dictionaries now tend to rely on pinyin. ここで指摘しておきたいのは、中国語の辞書は現在、ピンインに依存する傾向があるということです。 現在我應該指出，現在的漢語詞典傾向於依賴拼音。

In other words, the phonetic script, the Latin alphabet-based phonetic script, uh, 言い換えれば、表音文字、ラテンアルファベットベースの表音文字、ええと、

so that you can more easily look things up, but still the problem remains that

once you close the dictionary very quickly you're gonna forget what you looked up.

Therefore, a few things become important when it comes to dictionaries.

Number one, you have to have a purpose for looking a word up.

So typically I look a word up now if I'm reading or list reading a, a

particular, you know, piece of content, and I want to know what that word means. 特別是，你知道的，一段內容，我想知道那個詞是什麼意思。

So I look it up.

I get it.

Hopefully I haven't forgotten it by the time I get back to the text that I'm

reading, that's where online dictionaries are so good because you get the meaning

right away before you forget the meaning. 在你忘記意思之前馬上。

Um, so a purpose.

And I, I remember as a, as a child playing Scrabble with my, with my father

or with my brother or my mother, uh, we would look words up in a dictionary to

see if that word was legal in Scrabble. 看看這個詞在拼字遊戲中是否合法。

so there's a specific purpose.

Didn't even bother with the meaning. 甚至沒有理會這個意思。

I might have glanced at the meaning, but I wanted to confirm 我可能看了一眼意思，但我想確認一下

that that was a legal word.

So there's a purpose.

So you need to have a purpose for looking things up.

I'll get into later this idea of kind of viewing words in a

dictionary as a means of learning words, which I'm not a big fan of.

Uh, so you have a purpose.

The second thing is it should be as easy and effective as possible.

When I use a dictionary online, or even before that, you know,

Traditional dictionary um, I want it to come to my language.

I don't use monolingual. 我不使用單語。

In other words, target language to target language dictionaries, unless I'm 換句話說，目標語言到目標語言詞典，除非我是

very advanced in the language because I don't wanna find a meaning for that

word or a definition, which contains a lot more words that I don't know.

Okay.

And I have bought a lot of dictionaries over time.

I should show you these.

So I've shown you a couple of Chinese dictionaries here.

Uh, Korean learners, Korean English, Handbook of Korean Vocabulary.

Again, dictionary vocabulary, it's all part of the same thing.

Uh, what did I, and for every language that I study, I get these

dictionaries and I never look at them.

Frequency dictionary, I thought, wow, if I can learn the most, you know,

frequent words, that's gonna help me.

In fact, it doesn't because the most frequent words show up a lot anyway, you

don't need to find them in a dictionary ordered, you know, by order frequency.

So money spent to satisfy an itch, but didn't really amount to very much. 所以花了錢來滿足一個癢，但並沒有真正達到很多。

Uh, I have Farsi phrase book, which I don't look at very much.

Um, you know, I bought an Arabic-English bilingual dictionary, full of pictures. 嗯，你知道，我買了一本阿英雙語詞典，裡面全是圖片。

Okay.

Haven't really used that very much.

Uh there's this 15 minute Arabic, learn in just 12 weeks.

So 12 weeks, you don't know much I can assure.

And it's more or less the same pictures and words in Arabic.

Uh, yeah, whatever Spanish English for...

in fact, the beginning of LingQ was when I was reading books in Spanish

and there were so many words I didn't know, on every page 10 or so.

And so I was thumbing through the dictionary. Y entonces estaba hojeando el diccionario.

And then in the end, I figured that was not very efficient, beacause I would 最後，我認為這不是很有效，因為我會

forget them or I would list them all to look up later on and forget them.

So that was my Spanish English dictionary.

I've even bought a number of dictionaries where I go from one language that I'm

learning into another language, say Czech to, to Russian to kind of see

how, where they're similar or different.

As you thumb through the, this ... there are some aha moments, 當你翻閱時，這......有一些令人驚嘆的時刻，

but mostly it's not that effective.

I don't retain much and I don't do that much anymore.

So getting back then to this idea of the dictionary and how to make it useful.

Yes you can look through a dictionary, read through a dictionary is kind of Да, вы можете просмотреть словарь, читать словарь - это своего рода

fun, but my experience is we don't retain much or put it this way and I

should add actually a dictionary is just a collection of words with meaninig.

I prefer bilingual, so from the target language to a language that Ich bevorzuge zweisprachig, also von der Zielsprache zu einer Sprache, die das ist 我更喜歡雙語，所以從目標語言到一種語言

I know very, very well, uh, but it can be a dictionary of medical terms. 我非常非常了解，呃，但它可以是醫學術語的字典。

It can be a dictionary of, uh, agricultural terms.

It can be simply a vocabulary list at the end of a chapter in a book.

It's the same idea.

It's a list of words with meaning.

Uh, and so it's part of this whole language learning process.

So I think we should kind of separate...

and now of course, dictionaries have become online and there are sort of,

uh, flashcard systems and Anki, and there's a whole variety of things

that have been built around this idea of acquiring vocabulary or helping

us acquire vocabulary from our basic reading and listening activities.

But the basic way we learn vocabulary is through those listening and reading, uh,

activities so that the dictionary or other vocabulary learning assists are simply our

minor um, systems or resources that help us learn the vocabulary, which we learn 次要的嗯，幫助我們學習詞彙的系統或資源，我們學習的

primarily from our listening and reading.

So I do use these, uh, resources I use online dictionaries, obviously, uh, at

LingQ for every language there's, uh, an option of three or four or five online

dictionaries that we can use with LingQ.

Some of them for certain languages offer you conjugating uh, conjugation tables 其中一些針對某些語言為您提供共軛呃，共軛表

for the word that you're looking up.

Uh, some of them offer, you know, help you with, uh, writing Chinese characters.

Uh, so there's any number of other resources that are

bunched with these dictionaries.

And so that makes them even more useful as resources, uh, 所以這使得它們作為資源更加有用，呃，

in terms of review activities.

As I've said before, I prefer these matching pairs. 正如我之前所說，我更喜歡這些配對。

I've said that any kind of review activity should deal with a small

number of words or phrases, you should review them soon after seeing them in an

actual context and the activity itself should be as easy as possible to do so. 實際上下文和活動本身應該盡可能容易地做到這一點。

That's why typically I will go through a text in Persian, one sentence at a time

review, six or seven terms using matching pairs, which is the easiest thing to do.

Uh, and I do them right away, easy and not too many.

And so that is kind of my approach to using these vocabulary lists as

a way to acquire more vocabulary.

I really don't spend a lot of time reading the dictionary, however it's possible

to simulate reading the dictionary.

The advantage of reading a dictionary, if it's organized alphabetically, is

that you can see words that have the same prefix and that can sometimes

help you connect one word to another.

And we can do that at LingQ.

I can simply, uh, organize my, a vocabulary list.

Say the overall vocabulary list or vocabulary list are words that

I'm close to knowing, which is my status three, or from a particular

lesson and I can organize them by, uh, uh, in alphabetical order.

So I can see related words.

Uh, I think everyone has to sort of design their own approach to using dictionaries

and vocabulary review activities, to help them you know, to help accelerate the

process of acquiring words and phrases.

I should add again, at LingQ, you can save phrases.

That's also very important.

Uh, but by and large, if you review these, like I mentioned that I had a

somewhere here at Persian phrase book, when you review phrases or words, it em algum lugar aqui no livro de frases persas, quando você revisa frases ou palavras,

helps if they are already familiar to you so that the, the first time ajuda se eles já são familiares para você para que, pela primeira vez,

you encounter a word in a dictionary, it's to deal with a specific need.

What does it mean in this context? O que significa neste contexto?

But thereafter when you are reviewing them, I find that the more familiar you Mas depois, quando você os está revisando, acho que quanto mais familiar você

are with these starting to get a handle of these, of the meaning of these words, estão começando a entender isso, o significado dessas palavras,

the more likely you're gonna benefit from the vocabulary review activities,

including reading a dictionary.

If you know many of the words in this specific dictionary, chances are reviewing Se você conhece muitas das palavras neste dicionário específico, as chances são de revisar

it is gonna help, you know, really, uh, confirm your understanding of these words.

Uh, but uh, if you encounter a word for the first time in a dictionary, you're, 呃，但是呃，如果你第一次在字典裡遇到一個詞，你是，

you're not very likely to remember it.

And you're certainly not gonna have a good sense of the E você certamente não vai ter uma boa noção do

scope of meaning of that word.

So just a bit of a ramble on the role of dictionaries. Então, apenas um pouco de divagação sobre o papel dos dicionários.

I'd be interested in hearing your views on the subject and I'll leave you uh, Eu estaria interessado em ouvir suas opiniões sobre o assunto e eu vou deixar você uh,

videos that I have done on the subject of vocabulary and dictionary in the past. vídeos que fiz sobre vocabulário e dicionário no passado.

Thank you for listening.

Bye for now.