Language Learning: The Truth About Vocabulary Part II

Continued from The Truth about Vocabulary Part 1.

Lost Concepts
The first concept is that the pronunciation of words is not exclusively contained within the word. It actually changes depending on the sounds that come before and after them. The extent of this varies from language to language, but English is a great example.This explains why English is so difficult, because as words join together new sounds are added – these sounds are not written and never included in vocabulary lists
The words in the phrase “go away” are not pronounced “go . away”, its pronounced “gowaway”. Don’t believe me? If you’re a native speaker, say it slowly in front of a mirror and look at your mouth as you say it. Otherwise, get a native speaker to say it slowly to you.
What this means in practical terms, is that if you believe words are unchanging pieces of language, you won’t understand them when they have changed, or when you have to change them. Instead you have to waste your time completely re-learning the same word every time it’s encountered. By focusing only on vocabulary you also overlook the fact that the meaning of words is not fixed to the word itself, but the interaction of the word within the wider context. The meaning of an individual word changes depending on countless factors including speaker, volume, environment, other words etc. etc. If you say “I love my Mum” does ‘love’ mean the same thing when you say “I love cake”?
If you’re only focusing on the word, outside all contexts, you will never understand the often complex situations that words change in. You will be constantly confused about what words mean and don’t mean, and you will speak erroneously and unnaturally, even with the words that denote the simplest concepts.The phrase ‘take medicine’ is almost never said by speakers of Korean or Chinese. They say ‘eat medicine’ because instead of learning the phrase, they just learn to translate the individual word ‘eat’ which in their languages goes with medicine, and assume it’s the same in English.

The Translation Method
The main reason that language is so misunderstood is because the translation method is used almost exclusively in schools across the globe. This method makes the appalling assumption that language is just ‘vocabulary + grammar’ and then makes an even grosser misunderstanding and assumes that all vocabulary and grammar across all languages is the same, it’s just that the pronunciation is different.
This is complete nonsense, and in order for a learner to improve any language skill, the translation method needs to be rejected in its entirety. Translation should never be used to learn a new language, especially not vocabulary. Instead, always remember that individual words change in their pronunciation and meaning – there is no ‘vocabulary’ in a fixed sense and meaning is dependent on many factors, not just words, which are simply one way of dissecting language. If you are able incorporate this knowledge into your vocabulary learning, and use methods that exploit it, you will have tangible improvement in all your language learning, within weeks.