The Use of Dictionaries in Language Learning

My Blog: My Facebook Page: My Twitter: Visit Transcript: Hi there, Steve Kaufmann. Today I want to talk about the use of dictionaries in language learning. But before I get to that subject, I would like to ask you what it is you would like to see me talk about in these videos. I used to make longer videos, more rambling videos eight-10 minutes long, now I’ve gone to a shorter formula. Some people have told me they would rather see some longer ones. Some people say they’d like me to talk about politics, the U.S. primaries, or the refugee situation in Europe, the Middle East or the Ukraine. I know some people use these as a source of encouragement for their own language learning, but some people who are not native speakers of English use them to improve their English as listening and reading materials since we provide transcripts. So please let me know what you would like to see in these videos. I’m going to try to do them twice a week. I could do one short one and one long one. Anyway, I’m interested in hearing your opinion. Now, let’s get to dictionaries. A lot of people place a lot of importance on the dictionary. They like certain dictionaries. They read dictionaries. Some people like monolingual dictionaries. So if they’re learning French, they want the dictionary to be French-French, monolingual, the explanation in the same language as the language they’re learning. Personally, I’m not that interested in dictionaries. Dictionaries are a resource to help me get through my content because, as you know, I’m a content-based language learning, input, listening and reading. Historically, before the age of the internet and online dictionaries, I would look words up in an ordinary dictionary and, as I’ve said many times, no sooner do I close the dictionary then I’ve already forgotten the meaning that I found there. Now by reading online, especially at the beginning stage in a language, we can immediately access the meaning with online dictionaries. That’s a lot better because if you have to spend 10-20 seconds, or in the case of a Chinese dictionary even longer to find the word and then you forget it very quickly, that’s not very efficient. To me, the only requirement of a dictionary is that it contains an explanation for the word that I’m looking for. I recognize that the explanation there will not tell the whole story. It may not even be relevant to the text that I’m reading. I find that particularly the case for Korean where very often the dictionary explanation in Naver, which is a very good Korean dictionary, in fact doesn’t correspond to the context that I’m reading. So, to me, the dictionary definition is often just a hint to get me through, hopefully, in many cases, not always, the text that I’m reading. I know that if I meet that word again and again and again, eventually, I’ll form a picture of the scope of meaning of that word and how it’s used. So I don’t really rely on the dictionary. At times, I have opened a dictionary to kind of read through it and see how many words I know. It seems very interesting to discover new words in the dictionary and the dictionary has the advantage that they’re in alphabetical order, very often, so that you can see related words lined up one behind the other or below the other, but the point is not very much of that sticks. If I can’t remember a word that I looked up in the dictionary which is related to a context, I can’t even remember it for 20 seconds, how much am I going to retain of what I read in a dictionary. Not very much, so I don’t think that’s a very useful way to spend my time. The same is true of the monolingual dictionary. If I look something up and the explanation is in Polish and the explanation contains two more words in Polish that I don’t understand, then I’m going to look up those Polish words and that explanation will have more words in it that I don’t understand and some abstract concepts are very difficult to explain, so I’m not a fan of monolingual dictionaries. To me, the ideal dictionary is the online dictionary. If I’m reading away from the computer reading a book and I come across words that I don’t understand, in most cases, I just move on and forget about it, hoping that one day I will come across that word in my online reading and be able to look it up. I have, on occasion, saved up lists of words, then looked them up and put them into LingQ, but I never continue doing it. It just doesn’t seem to be worth the effort. So that’s my picture on how I use dictionaries. I’d be interested in your comments and also would like to know what you would like to see in my videos. Thank you for listening, bye for now.