Learning Vocabulary

by Amorey Gethin and Erik V. Gunnemark

Erik V. Gunnemark of Gothenburg (who used to translate from 45 languages)

Learning Vocabulary 1 from The English-Learning and Languages Review

part 47. This writer’s personal failure and success at learning vocabulary

I learned the wrong way and the right way to do it when I first went to Sweden. I still have the book, a volume of historical essays, where the first thirty pages or so are full of the English translations I found in the dictionary and pencilled in against every Swedish word I did not know. After a few months I realized I was getting nowhere. I abandoned the book and the dictionary and started reading a fat Swedish daily newspaper. Every day I read practically the whole paper apart from the advertisements – and sometimes some of them too. Within about six months I was able to understand without effort practically everything written in Swedish that was not fiction or technical. A complete mastery of the vocabulary of fiction took me somewhat longer.

Almost forty years later I started to live periodically in Italy. I spent a total of nearly four years there; I can now understand almost everything in an Italian newspaper or magazine except the most elaborate writing. In those four years I have looked up less than ten words in the Italian-English dictionary, except for official vocabulary and the names of animals and plants. I looked up official words when it was important to understand them immediately for bureaucratic or legal purposes. Words for animals and plants one often has to look up because the context more often than not cannot help one to understand them. This applies to the vocabulary of some fiction, but to a far lesser extent.

I must, however; put my experience with Italian in perspective. When I started to learn it I could already read non-fiction in both French and Spanish without much difficulty, and to French- and Spanish-speakers a great many Italian words are transparent. A large number of Italian words are transparent to English-speakers as well.

On the other hand I was very busy doing other things while I was in Italy and did not do nearly as much reading of the local language as I had done all those years earlier in Sweden. Instead of a whole newspaper a day I read part of just one newspaper and most of a magazine each week. Undoubtedly the many years of being involved with foreign-language learning in one way or another had given me experience that enabled me to learn vocabulary quicker than before.

I ought also to record the fact that I have never in all my life written a single note about the vocabulary of any language nor ever made a list, however short, of equivalent words for any language. I regard it as a waste of time, and have always wanted to get on instead with the real job of observing the living foreign language as it is actually used. It seems to me pointless to start writing one’s own dictionary, when dictionaries as good as anything one is likely to produce oneself already exist.