Do reading books improve your writing skills?

[Prestidigitweeze]

Originally Posted by Dee Q

I also heard that some people even learned by heart the sentences or even paragraphs they liked. Have anybody here ever done that?

https://www.mobileread.com/forums/sho...d.php?t=235606

Some of us have done it, but others have questioned the need. I'm in the first group, but a fair number of people on MR are in the second.

A third group seems to have been forced (apparently at knife point) to memorize excruciating passages in middle school. A few of those have never forgiven the odd teacher for the tedium of the experience, which makes me worry about their class reunions.

Personally, I've never understood why anyone would be bitter over having to learn something when they've got lifetimes in which to be autodidacts and forget it all, but sobeit. Different smokes for different strokes.

A poet named Robert Gluck has said that, as a young man, he transcribed passages by John Keats because he wanted to know how it felt to write "those lines." That seems a tad Karoake-literal to me -- it's not really flowing out of you, is it? -- but the exercise must have felt good to Gluck, since he's never stopped writing (or worshiping Keats). Why does he still do it? Because of his Keatsian desire "to make a beautiful object with language."

[kacir]

Originally Posted by HarryT

Learning half a dozen new words every day is the best way to build your vocabulary in any new language, in my experience. It's always worked well for me. I find flashcards a great way to practice vocabulary.

This is how I learned my core vocabulary. Little pieces of paper with English word on one side and my Mother language equivalent on the other.
You can shuffle them, discard ones that you learned quickly, carry-over the difficult ones to the next week batch. Great system. I had about 50 new ones every week.
For sentences I had slightly bigger cards. They were not difficult - they only used words that I already knew. And I did not have to memorize the content of sentence - I needed just to translate it correctly from the different-language equivalent on the other side.

[Dee Q]

Originally Posted by crich70

My mom did that with me often when I was young. If it was a word I didn't know she'd help me look it up in the Dictionary.

Mom sweet mom! I'd definitely do that for my kids.

[Froide]

Flashcards are good. They're even more effective when supplemented by the following exercises, which my foreign language teachers always required of me and which I now always require of my test-prep students:

For each new vocabulary word and idiom:

• Write a series of sentences that use the word/idiom in its various contexts (e.g., I prefer NOVELs to non-fiction; and mixing chocolate and peanut butter was a NOVEL idea.)
• Use those words in conversation that week

[Froide]

Originally Posted by Dee Q

Mom sweet mom! I'd definitely do that for my kids.

+1 My mother (who taught English, Espanol, and maybe Francais) did the same for my brother and me. She also bought us the entire Encyclopedia Britannica (which, back in the day, came in hard copy) and taught us to look things up there, too. I remain impressed that she NEVER caved in and just told us what a word meant or where a place was located.

[Dee Q]

Originally Posted by Froide

+1 My mother (who taught English, Espanol, and maybe Francais) did the same for my brother and me. She also bought us the entire Encyclopedia Britannica (which, back in the day, came in hard copy) and taught us to look things up there, too. I remain impressed that she NEVER caved in and just told us what a word meant or where a place was located.

So, basically, as you grew up, you had to look things up quite often to get more vocabulary, right? Here in my country, English is only a foreign language, but I would like my future kids to be bilingual. This information might just help!

[shalym]

Originally Posted by Dee Q

So, basically, as you grew up, you had to look things up quite often to get more vocabulary, right? Here in my country, English is only a foreign language, but I would like my future kids to be bilingual. This information might just help!

I think being forced to always look things up also helps children learn to figure out the meaning of words using context.

Shari

[Froide]

Originally Posted by shalym

I think being forced to always look things up also helps children learn to figure out the meaning of words using context.

Shari

Yep. So in addition to getting answers to their immediate questions, kids who are forced to look things up benefit by:
(1) Doing what Shari described
(2) Better remembering what was learned because of #1 as well as because of the effort expended, and
(3) Developing the useful skills and habit of using reference materials to look things up
(4) Beginning to learn to conduct research

Give a man to fish, and he'll eat for a day. Teach a man to fish, and he'll eat for a lifetime. - Chinese proverb

[Sweetpea]

Originally Posted by Mivo

The reason, I believe, was (partly still is) the lack of "application", need, and exposure. Until ten or fifteen years ago, it required actual effort to get undubbed movies, and even importing games was a hassle or cost extra. The average person just didn't need to know English and there wasn't much incentive to learn and actively use it.

So many good series on the German tv channels and all dubbed...

I did notice a change though. Before, if we went on holiday in Germany, nobody would speak English, now, at least in public offices, most do speak English (I can speak German, well enough, but I'm horrible at languages, I always mix up the words (unless I speak in English or Dutch), so when I speak German, it becomes a jumble of Dutch/German/English... And when the deed is done (about a minute later), I know exactly what I should have said in German

[Mivo]

Originally Posted by Sweetpea

... so when I speak German, it becomes a jumble of Dutch/German/English... And when the deed is done (about a minute later), I know exactly what I should have said in German

This reminded me of an American friend. Some seventeen years ago, she was learning German and eager to practice her new vocabulary with native speakers. She walked up to a German guy, intending to strike up a conversation by complimenting him on his pants, and said, "Ich mag deine Hoden." The guy looked baffled, then grinned and responded, "Thanks, my girlfriend likes them, too."

I only let her live it down a few years later.

[Freeshadow]

*rofl*

[shalym]

Originally Posted by Mivo

This reminded me of an American friend. Some seventeen years ago, she was learning German and eager to practice her new vocabulary with native speakers. She walked up to a German guy, intending to strike up a conversation by complimenting him on his pants, and said, "Ich mag deine Hoden." The guy looked baffled, then grinned and responded, "Thanks, my girlfriend likes them, too."

I only let her live it down a few years later.

For those of us who don't speak German, https://translate.google.com/#de/en/...0deine%20Hoden

Shari

[Loosheesh]

Originally Posted by shalym

For those of us who don't speak German, https://translate.google.com/#de/en/...0deine%20Hoden

Shari

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by shalym

For those of us who don't speak German, https://translate.google.com/#de/en/...0deine%20Hoden

Shari

What should the word have been?

[Freeshadow]

or, plainly without googling around:

I like your testicles.

Pants would have been Hosen