1. Misunderstood vocabulary
When we are learning a foreign language, we often hear a saying:
Words don’t mean everything in language learning!
Those who say this sentence are not wrong, because it comes from their years of experience in foreign language learning; many people have recited a lot of words without improving their language communication skills, and even many foreign language articles cannot be read.
Because people who say this must not have the most basic knowledge of linguistics; they do not even understand the true role of words or vocabulary in a language.
Before learning a language, it is really important to truly understand the status of vocabulary. It may completely change your understanding and perception of language learning.
Today we will explore from the perspective of professional linguistics - vocabulary is everything in a language! After understanding this sentence, we can truly understand what we need to learn to learn a language.
2. Vocabulary is a database of language information
First, let's talk about the definition of vocabulary.
Let's first quote the phrase "Lexicon" of Old Joe (Chomsky) to explain. The thesaurus is a dictionary and a repository in the brain. This dictionary contains all the information we know about every word: the meaning of a word, its pronunciation, the phrases that can be collocated, and so on.
For example: eat
Seeing the word eat, we know that it means "eat" in Chinese, it is a verb, and the initiator of this action must be a creature; the recipient of this action can be eaten.
In some specific contexts, "eat" has other extended meanings, such as "consumption"; at this time, there is no need for a creature to be the initiator of the action, and the recipient does not need to be eaten.
At the same time, the shape and sound information about "eat" is also stored in our brain. We know it is written as "e-a-t", and its pronunciation is /i:t/. However, since the thesaurus is an independent storage bank inside each person's brain, the pronunciation information of "eat" owned by each person is not exactly the same. So the same word will be pronounced differently by different people.
However, most language learners are misled by the "words" of vocabulary, thinking that vocabulary is the general term for words. In fact, this "word" is only a carrier of information modules in our brains. Behind it is language information, which is two completely different concepts from the "words" we understand.
All these kinds of information exist in our brains in some form and become the "lexicon" information database. When we need to use a word, we will select the word we need from the information database. What follows is its usage, pronunciation, and other related content.
3. Vocabulary is everything to language
Vocabulary is everything in a language. This view is not nonsense, but a theory put forward by Mr. Tarzan Chomsky in the field of linguistics in the 1980s.
In 1986, Old Qiao put forward the most important principles of modern syntactic research in The Knowledge of Language: Its Nature, Origin and Use (The Knowledge of Language: Its Nature, Origin and Use):
The Projection Principle
If we layer the structure of the brain's language processing, the deepest level is our information repository-thesaurus. Then, there are other conversion generation, speech, and logic processing steps until the language we output is formed.
The projection principle is that all the information contained in the lexicon—this brain information library must be reflected in all levels of syntax. The simple understanding is that no matter where your brain processes the language-choosing words, making up sentences, or making sounds at the end, it must carry all the deepest level of vocabulary information.
The vocabulary, in this way, is processed layer by layer by the brain, and finally becomes the words we speak and the words we write, but all the original information is retained.
Even if we want to say something that is not finished in half, or want to write a word that is not finished in half, as long as the brain helps you select the word from the vocabulary, its information will be projected layer by layer.
These messages are projected into the "air" of the half-sentence you didn't say, in the form of silent existence; projected to the "pen tip" of the word you didn't write, so as not to be written. The form that came down, existed invisibly...
Four: What do you need to learn to write when learning a language
When most people memorize words, they only memorize a certain sound, meaning and shape of the word, which is what we usually call translation, pronunciation and spelling.
Words memorized in this way usually carry incorrect or incomplete information. In other words, the small modules it carries are different from the small modules in the brains of native speakers.
Since words are not just words, they contain all the information of the language. When we learn vocabulary, we need to pay more attention to this information. In English, some things are natural to us, such as the combination of "you" and "are", we blurt it out, and we can never go wrong. This is because all the information of these two entries is in our brains.
People whose mother tongue is Chinese, even if English is good, will forget to add "s" to the third-person singular verb, or say "she" to "he". This is because these small information modules are not carried in the vocabulary of our mother tongue, and our brains have formed a habit. We often forget to check these small modules and just output them directly. Over time, wrong sentences are formed.
Therefore, to learn vocabulary, what you have to learn is: what does this puzzle look like, and it is the most accurate one.
The reason why memorizing texts is more useful than memorizing words is that every word puzzle we memorize will have a little more information: we slowly learn that the small modules of these puzzles can be put together with which small modules of the puzzle.
People with poor hearing can pay more attention to the voice information of words. In other words, we need to use our ears to listen to words, instead of using our eyes to see the spelling and use our mouth to remember words. Because of spelling and mouth shape, we are often associated with incorrect voice messages. Even further, we should pay attention to the different pronunciation of different words when they are together.
Of course, by memorizing a lot of words by rote, maybe you can become a more qualified language user. However, such a language will always have some shortcomings, and these shortcomings could have been compensated and improved through various correct learning methods.
These methods may have been taught to you before, and you may have already done so. But perhaps no one has told you that these methods are useful because they allow you to really learn a word, improve the language information database of your brain, and make your language calculations faster, more accurate, and more reliable.