Incidentally
A friend asked me a simple question today:
How might I translate incidental vocabulary acquisition and intentional vocabulary acquisition into Chinese?
There are obviously a number of expressions out there, as a quick Google search will confirm, but can anyone suggest a pair of expressions which they feel are either well enough established to exclude other possibilities, or particularly pleasing in their ability to convey the same concept?
This first question raised a couple of others:
- Are intentional and incidental opposites?
- Might the expression vocabulary acquisition be translated into Chinese in such a way as to allow modification by a single additional term?
- How much of our vocabulary acquisition, either mother-tongue or foreign-language, might be incidental?
This final question led to an observation, which might require some modification or qualification:
In a Chinese primary school, every child is required to have a Chinese dictionary on his or her desk: in an English-speaking country, no child at primary school is required to have an English dictionary on his or her desk.
Is this a reasonable claim?
All vocabulary acquisition is incidental. Some of it is just incidental to going to school.
On a more serious note, intentional and incidental don’t seem to be exactly opposites, but they’re ok.
On a most serious and grave note, I remember having to buy a dictionary sometime during my primary or secondary education. I also remember never using it. *shakes fist at the sky*
-Peter
词汇附带习得 vs 词汇学得
Maybe the reason why they must have a dictionary on their desk is that they have to look up hanzi very often.
Based on my (limited) experience in school in Taiwan, looking up words was part of the curriculum. I think practicing looking up words in a dictionary helped with remembering the character and the corresponding radical. It also gave us the habit of looking up words for meanings and correct usage. I don’t remember using the dictionary in the classroom so regularly in the U.S. in English class.
So, about your final claim.
I think the interesting thing to note is that Chinese has this concept of “words known”, which means you can pronounce the word (and possibly know what it means.) That is to say, your vocabulary, in the strictest sense, is the words you can read aloud correctly. Other words you can understand when heard, or even say yourself (without knowing the character), don’t count as words you “really know” if you can’t actually pronounce them when you see them written. English doesn’t have anything like this. There’s no test for one’s vocabulary based on pronunciation or on whether one can write the word correctly. The concepts are pretty much diametrically opposed. If they entered the same room it would be like matter and anti-matter colliding to annihilate each other.
My conjecture is that this lack of one’s to truly learn new vocabulary “incidentally” is what is causing the trouble here in finding an appropriate word (outside of a translated word from the field of education.) In theory, all words would have to be “acquired” through reading/studying/checking dictionaries, etc.
Peter’s observation about what incidental really means is not trivial, I think. Vocabulary is obviously acquired, re-inforced and maintained through a number of activities. First contact with a vocabulary item is unlikely to result in immediate competence in the use of that item. Even comprehension might only be achieved after encountering an expression and attempting to use it a number of times. For the foreign language learner, this process is probably much more likely to begin with the memorisation of lists of expressions, but this is only the beginning of the acquisition process. One element which I think is sometimes overlooked is simply time. One needs time for new expressions to settle and, whilst this is partly about having more chances to encounter the expression in natural settings, I feel there is simply a necessary lag between learning something new and actually grasping it properly.
What constitutes knowing is, as transliterationisms points out, not straight-forward. Testing someone’s ability to read aloud does offer some indication of the extent of their vocabulary, however inadequate a test it may be. Spelling tests were traditionally part of primary school education and, I imagine, still are. My own recollection is of the teacher writing about 20 words on the blackboard, the students copying them down and taking them home to memorise/practise. A day or two later, the teacher would then read the words in class and we would have to write them all down correctly. Gold stars for getting them all right. I don’t recall these words ever being new to me as such. I’m pretty sure I never used a dictionary to check them. I just needed to make sure I could spell them. Of course, Chinese kids (as well as foreign learners of Chinese) have to go through pretty regular 听写 exercises. Are 听写 and spelling tests not pretty much the same thing?
YT, I feel that the process you describe was very important to me as a foreign learner of Chinese. The fact that looking something up in a Chinese dictionary was not simple or convenient actually seemed to help. I would rarely have to look the same thing up twice. Whilst I’m sure “dictionary skills” were somewhere on the curriculum when I was at school in the UK, I suspect it was just a single class squeezed in as an afterthought. Afterall, who needs to learn how to find a word in an English dictionary?
Over the past couple of weeks, I have informally surveyed a hundred or more native Chinese speakers. Something of the order of 90% said they had a dictionary on their desk (either by choice or by compulsion) by the latter stages of primary school. Some of these people though said they certainly didn’t consult the dictionary every day. Among the remaining 10% or thereabouts, one comment really interested me. When asked how they learnt new words if they didn’t have a dictionary, the person responded, “Well, we learnt by talking and listening and reading stuff. Learning your native language is not like learning a foreign language.”
Papa Huhu’s translation is interesting in that it doesn’t attempt to match the components of the original. I’m not sure whether that’s a problem or not. Does anyone feel there should be a consistency of form which would allow vocabulary acquisition to remain unaltered in both of the extended expressions?