Min. Av. Max. vocab building
ayprof
April 26, 2010 at 11:21 PM posted in General DiscussionHello, lurking for a long time, thought I'd pop my head up and add something.
So, I was a reading of a pretty interesting technique to help build understanding of different "families" of words using degrees of distinctions. Using a dictionary to do this is pretty tedious (and probably not accurate as far as actual usage), so I thought I'd throw a post up and see if people wanted to contribute (I say this not yet having a contribution...yes, I know, lame).
The idea is to add words in an array of degrees of intensity, approval, disapproval, weight, or any other characteristic using the "minimum," "average," and "maximum" of that group or family. A few examples might be (in English):
creek, stream, river
pebble, rock, boulder
big, huge, gargantuan
dislike, hate, detest
pink, red, scarlet,
etc.
I'll try to add some some more later (in Chinese, of course).
What about it? Know any?
m8r7egy501
April 29, 2010 at 12:55 PM
It's one of the (wrong) myths of vocab learning: Words learned in semantic sets are retained better. But that's not true: read more... http://bit.ly/d0dHYv
xiao_liang
April 27, 2010 at 08:16 AM
It's an interesting thought. I've found in chinese, descriptors tend to be simpler, but you modify them more regularly. E.g.:
大 - big
很大 - very big
镇大 - really big
最大 - the biggest!
hamshank
April 29, 2010 at 02:18 PM1) 石 - Shí = Rock/Stone
2) 岩 - Yán = Cliff
3) 山 - Shān = Mountain
Also note what the Hanzi have in common. :)