I once asked a non-native colleague about expanding one’s
own vocabulary. She expressed a certain
frustration as she commented that it is a never-ending challenge and for this
very reason she enjoyed grammar because it was from her perspective, a more
finite system that could eventually be mastered whereas vocabulary, beyond the
high and mid-frequency words that you are likely to come across in general
reading, the rest, low-frequency words or those limited to specific fields, are
more difficult to learn. Her point was
well taken. Although I no longer am
particularly interested in grammar, (read more about how I learned Spanish here), we agreed that acquiring vocabulary beyond the
words needed for most everyday conversations can sometimes be frustrating. Her comments prompted me to share with her my
personal dictionary project which I had begun not long after graduate school.
This project originated with the realization that I was
lacking vocabulary which started in my first college Spanish literature class. I was
already very comfortable with grammar, conversation, understanding the
professor’s lectures and speakers on the radio (DJ’s, commercials, news). So when I made it to literature, I naively
accepted this new challenge as a way to learn more language in general,
specifically vocabulary.
The first selection we had to read was from the 18th
century about scientific discovery in Spain.
I could only understand about 50% and had to look up most
of the rest because little was guessable from context. It was up to us to figure out the
meaning. Of the 20 students in the
class, 75% were native speakers. There
was little incentive for the professor to give us non-natives any assistance. So, I looked up words and wrote the
translations on the pages. It was
time-consuming so I did what my classmates suggested and read without a
dictionary and tried to guess meanings from context. That was frustrating too because really there
wasn’t enough to support contextualized guessing and overall it seemed
imprecise and inefficient. What I
sometimes thought a word meant was at best, only a vague and superficial
understanding of it, not to mention its other uses, register or collocations
(natural combinations with other words that form common or accepted
phrasings).
As I continued with this approach, it got easier. The more I read of a particular author, I became more familiar with certain
vocabulary he or she tended to use. For
example, I learned the word “talante” (will) from reading different works by
Unamuno because it came up repeatedly in many of his writings dealing with
conflicts between faith and doubt. Read more about this experience here.
My last two years
of university went on like this-looking up words as I needed to in order to
understand a piece of literature. I know I acquired some incidental vocabulary,
at least for reading some literary texts but it was quite random and what’s
more a lot didn’t stay with me not only because most of the time I only had one
encounter with a particular word but also because I didn’t do anything with them beyond mere recognition. During the two years between college and
graduate school I continued to acquire vocabulary (individual words and
phrases) as I had done before studying literature- mostly listening to radio
(talk shows, news, songs), some TV (this was before the internet and wide
availability of Spanish-language stations on cable) and interacting with people
in different situations (friends, boyfriends, people in the community).
Graduate school was mostly more of the same but a bit
easier because my vocabulary had grown and I had became a better reader. Now I was focusing on deliberately learning
new words I found myself needing in writing, particularly synonyms. I relied a lot on a Spanish thesaurus I had
bought just before school started and on my experience listening to the
language to feel how natural a phrase or sentence sounded. Both during grad school and just after when I
went to live in Puerto Rico, I found myself in situations needing and not
knowing how to say words like hose, handle, slice, bucket. Read more about this here.
The project
Dissatisfied with the gaps left in my vocabulary, I
decided to pull out all the stops in an effort to immerse myself once again in
learning more vocabulary. By vocabulary
I don’t necessarily mean individual words but rather anything other than
grammar itself. I began reading newspapers and magazines and
writing down any word or phrase that wasn’t part of my active vocabulary even cognates
or things I could easily recognize the meaning of. I’d also write the sentence in which I found
the word or phrase to remember the context or the other words that it combined
with. After several months I had
gathered a couple of legal pads filled with words. From time to time I’d look over what I had
accumulated; this was my only “study” of these items. Nonetheless, it helped me remember many of
them. I also continued listening to a
talk station and music on the radio for several hours a week. About every month or two I’d go to Miami for
a weekend to stay with my dad where I‘d spend time studying and collecting more
vocabulary. Read more about my bilingual weekends in Miami here. There I had more access to
Spanish-language materials and TV and radio.
I’d rent videos of American movies with Spanish subtitles (especially
those with a technical or legal theme), read the white and yellow pages (which
were bilingual), read El Nuevo Herald (including advertisements), and county
documents my dad received that were bilingual or trilingual (Haitian Creole is
the 3rd language). My dad and
other family members would also give me bilingual owner’s manuals for anything
they bought. All of these materials were
very helpful in learning practical but also more specific vocabulary. After I had filled several legal pads with
words, I found reviewing them problematic. Since there was no order to these pages I had
created, I began categorizing the words by topic in order to be able to look up
an item that I recalled seeing but couldn’t remember. So far, I only had random words. I had begun to broaden my lexical base but it
was still full of holes. Why wasn’t
reading as effective as I thought it would be?
In analyzing this process of acquiring vocabulary I realized I was only
picking up what others happen to write.
If I kept doing this I’d forever be dependent on what other people wanted
to say. Although I was reading what I
could about the most practical things for me, it always seemed that I still was
missing words I thought I needed and didn’t come up in reading. The solution was to decide what I
wanted to learn and purposefully look for it.
It was difficult before the internet but at least I was focusing on what
I was missing. In an effort to
compensate for not having primary education in Spanish, as well as to round out
commonly taught semantic fields like colors, sports, professions and family, I created
some 175 categories to include ones such as names (popular and historical), car
parts, tools, math phrases, geographical terms, countries and
nationalities. This last one I
researched as much as I could and ended up with about 8 pages of them.
No doubt a lot of people maintain lists of new vocabulary
words or create their own personal dictionary at different stages of learning
but perhaps one difference is the scope that I intended it to be. It’s still a work in progress but no longer
encyclopedic. However, I have been able
to actually to use it to look up words I couldn’t find in a conventional
dictionary or vocabulary book. Through this project I significantly increased
my active vocabulary which I feel helped me reach a higher level of
proficiency. Do you have a story about increasing your
vocabulary? Please share it in the comments section below.
