"Copy the dictionary"

[Kelby]

One of my best Chinese friends here in Zhengzhou is a childhood friend of my girlfriend. He's an SAT teacher with going on eight years of teaching very, very advanced English. He's recently come back to ZZ from Chengdu and has found a mentor in the form of a new coworker who has two separate English related Master's degrees and reads Shakespeare for fun.

I recently invited this friend out to have a drink and discuss how he handles his SAT course, as I've recently started teaching the subject and don't have much experience with it. During the conversation we inadvertently got very deep into how his English got so good (it's honestly hard to think of him as a Chinese person when we talk, that's how 标准 this guy's verbal skills are).

As he's been teaching SAT reading for years, he's kept his tools very sharp, as it were. For those not familiar with SAT reading, it essentially has two question types; sentence completion which tests vocabulary and reading comprehension. He said the books he uses were very difficult at first due to his lack of advanced English vocabulary and inexperience with English literature and historical prose, however with more and more practice he got more comfortable. No doubt this has a lot to do with his English skills and extensive cultural knowledge base. These SAT books after all are designed to help increase a high school student's vocabulary and understanding of technical works and literature in preparation for college so spending years with a steady stream of this material is obviously going to take an English learner pretty far.

In our conversation he also mentioned a talk with his mentor, who gave him the advice "if you want to truly master a language you need to copy the dictionary."

He's taken this very literally and has decided to take to learning as much as he can by slowly dissecting an English dictionary.

I teach western college bound Chinese students, so I'm familiar with the whole copying the dictionary to build your vocabulary and "get good at English," but I've always been a skeptic. However, here are two people that, pairing their vocabulary study with readings of varying difficulty and varying topics have done so to great effect.

I thought i'd take this to the forum though, because I'm intrigued; what does everyone think of this "copy the dictionary," style for us learners of Chinese? What would you need to make it work? What do you think the main benefits would be? What do you think the main difficulties would be?

Given: let's take the fact that this exercise MUST be reinforced by reading and usage as a given and assume that whoever takes this on A) has already set up a good method for reinforcement and B) already has sufficient skills in place to understand to a greater or lesser degree the definitions they are learning.

[li3wei1]

I'd like to know more about exactly what he's doing. Is he literally copying everything in the dictionary by hand, starting from page 1? Or is he going through until he finds a word he doesn't know, spending 30 minutes finding example sentences and researching its various uses, and then trying to use it 10 times in conversation over the next 24 hours? Or something else?

[Kelby]

From what I guess, he looks for words he's unfamiliar with scattered about the dictionary (so he's not getting overloaded with A words for example) and learns them through cloze deletion cards so that he has at least one example usage in his memory. No idea how many words a day he does this way though. Then, he just reads a lot, watches a lot of western TV, and talks to westerners when he gets the chance.

I guess the only major problem I see is spending time on highly esoteric words, but if you're reading western lit. like he is I suppose you'll run into esoteric words a lot.

[realmayo]

Someone here already did (started) this:

http://www.chinese-forums.com/index.php?/topic/28025-how-many-words-does-an-average-native-speaker-know/

[gato]

It's all about relative usefulness: spending 10 hours a week copying the dictionary vs reading magazine articles vs something else, etc. You can't fully evaluate the useful of a studying technique in isolation. With that in mind, I think you'd be better off reading the magazine articles if you only had 10 hours a week to spend on vocabulary building.

[Lu]

he looks for words he's unfamiliar with scattered about the dictionary and learns them through cloze deletion cards so that he has at least one example usage in his memory. No idea how many words a day he does this way though. Then, he just reads a lot, watches a lot of western TV, and talks to westerners when he gets the chance.

If that's how he goes about it, it sounds feasible and useful enough. But how is it different from finding his daily new words from tv and books, instead of from the dictionary? Perhaps he already knows so much English that he doesn't encounter new words anymore, but in that case I'd say perhaps there is no real need for actively studying and he can just proceed with using instead.

[li3wei1]

The other day I was teaching English to a guy who's only been studying for about 6 months, and he taught me a word: bleb. He's in the construction industry, and it means (in that context) a small air bubble in concrete. So you never know.

 

I've done similar with frequency lists, and I think it's not far off what many self-studiers are doing.

[roddy]

"Then, he just reads a lot, watches a lot of western TV, and talks to westerners when he gets the chance. "

Why is that "just"? That's a massive amount of language input and practice. Sounds like this guy could throw his dictionary away and still be learning plenty. 

[Kelby]

Well, his career is teaching SAT, so I guess I feel like all of that is just par for the course (improving his English is like continuing education or job training).

What I'm seeing is that everybody feels this way; all of the practice could accomplish pretty much the same thing as the isolated dictionary practice.

However, I get the idea that he feels he has stopped growing. Maybe he's just incorporated his practice into his life to the point it no longer feels like practice, but I get the feeling he's doing this to break a plateau he feels he's reached. He is shooting for mastery, and not just proficiency or fluency because he's already gotten there.

[skylee]

Then, he just reads a lot, watches a lot of western TV, and talks to westerners when he gets the chance.

 

He must be a lucky guy who gets to meet western people in China who are willing to speak in English to a Chinese person. Somehow this very old thread has come up in my mind → http://www.chinese-forums.com/index.php?/topic/1584-dont-make-me-go-green-pea-all-over-you/

[gato]

However, I get the idea that he feels he has stopped growing. Maybe he's just incorporated his practice into his life to the point it no longer feels like practice, but I get the feeling he's doing this to break a plateau he feels he's reached. He is shooting for mastery, and not just proficiency or fluency because he's already gotten there.

He can start reading 19th century novels for a challenge. If he's able to finish all of Hawthorne, Melville, Dickens, and Poe, there should be no need to use the dictionary ever again.

[OneEye]

Somehow this very old thread has come up in my mind

 

That reminds me of why I don't spend any time over at Forumosa. 

 

My experience has been very different in Taiwan though. Of course, there are people out there who try to force bad English on me and will fight me tooth and nail on it, but they're pretty rare. I see it happen to other people all the time though, and 99% of the time, the foreigner has really bad Chinese. The Taiwanese person isn't being rude, but more likely can't understand the foreigner's Chinese and switches to English so that communication can actually happen. The foreigner generally takes it as an insult, then gets mad (and possibly goes to Forumosa to vent). It would be much more productive, however, for the foreigner to realize that his Chinese needs to be better if he's going to force it on other people when English would allow for much smoother communication. It's ironic that they get so upset about bad English when their Chinese likely much worse.

[skylee]

He can start reading 19th century novels for a challenge.

How could those novels be challenging for an SAT teacher teaching very, very advanced English? (I have no idea what SAT is but I suppose it is something very difficult based on #1.)

[gato]

It's the college admission test for US colleges and is meant to be challenging for American high school students. The vocabulary level is still easier than that of 19th century literature.

[Kelby]

In that case either things have changed or the ever growing expat community here in ZZ is lazier than the rest of China's foreigners. At any rate this guy has no issue finding people to talk to. Perhaps its because talk isn't a struggle, he doesn't dominate the conversation with English related questions, and he's a legitimately interesting person to talk to. My character references for him (His name English name is Dickey, by the way) are blocking out real discussion though.

Do we have any thoughts on whether this sort of practice is required for mastery of a language as these two friends say? Vast knowledge of esoteric words and usage is the realm of grammarians, literati, and other more academic studiers of language after all.

[Kelby]

How could those novels be challenging for an SAT teacher teaching very, very advanced English? (I have no idea what SAT is but I suppose it is something very difficult based on #1.)

Sorry, I might not have been clear. it's a college entrance exam used in the United States. It tries to see how students will do in college level literature, science, and math related courses by testing math skills, vocaubulary, reading comprehension, editing, and essay writing skills.

[roddy]

Define "mastery"

 

Runs, hides

 

Actually, you know what - invite the guy to join us. Let's hear from the horse's mouth (an idiom I'm sure you won't need to explain)

[Demonic_Duck]

He must be a lucky guy who gets to meet western people in China who are willing to speak in English to a Chinese person.

 

Really? At least 'round my neck of the woods, there are plenty of westerners who aren't too bothered about learning Chinese but are more than willing to make Chinese friends. In the more extreme examples, they'll have lived in China for a couple of years but can barely say more than "吃饭", "不要", "你好", "再见" (all with bad pronunciation, of course). Less extreme are those who take the odd lesson or do a little self-study, but still aren't capable of holding their own in conversation.

 

I'm sure every city with a decent-sized "expat area" is bound to have this phenomenon.

[Kelby]

Actually, you know what - invite the guy to join us. Let's hear from the horse's mouth (an idiom I'm sure you won't need to explain)

Well, I just asked him for more info on Wechat. Turns out I've got his method wrong. Turns out it's far more natural than I thought.

I had assumed that the dictionary was the material of study, but it's just a tool for study. He said he uses a dictionary for usage and then tries to construct ways to reinforce new words he comes across by speaking, listening, reading, or writing to make it stick. Really it's just good study habits, over a long time that have done it for him. He's a great case study for the effects of good habits over the span of years rather than months though.

Kind of too run of the mill for good discussion though. I do suppose it's interesting to compare how Dickey learned his English to how the guy in the thread posted earlier about learning specifically from the dictionary for med school or whatever. Same destination, just different methods. I'd personally choose building a massive vocabulary by following my interests and never putting down my reinforcement of what I learn rather than cramming vocabulary from a dictionary for 5-7 years though.

[Gharial]

Provided the dictionary is a good one, containing plenty of reasonably authentic examples, well-phrased definitions, and frequency indications, working through it shouldn't exactly hurt vocabulary learning and acquisition, and I'd even say it could save having to study too many more or less random (and potentially atypical) texts. The shortness of the contexts (in dictionaries, usually mere sentence-length examples) would however obviously somewhat limit the learner's exposure to the discourse factors and processes of 'cohesion' (see e.g. Halliday & Hasan's Cohesion in English) at play in longer texts. Still, this could all be old hat to many (but if so, sorry, no refunds! ).