example sentences

One feature of modern dictionaries is the "example sentence." If you go to dictionary.com, you can find example sentences with the definition of a word. For example, here's an example sentence from the entry for "hamburger."

• That's a sad fact for hamburger lovers, but it's true.

Unfortunately, all of the example sentences for hamburger, and most other entries, are useless. My guess is, though, they didn't waste any time writing these sentences. They most likely use some code to pull them from a large corpus.

What's the problem with this and most other example sentences you get from dictionaries? These sentences are not really good examples of how to use the word. The sentences also don't give you any hint or idea as to what the word means. That means you can take the word in the sentence that's supposed to be the most important word and replace it with about a hundred other words.  For instance, "hamburger" in the above sentence could be replaced with any of the following: pizza, language, ocean, animal, young, paid, forgotten, new, old, lost.  The list goes on and on.

There's nothing about that sentence that tells you this must be talking about a hamburger. Basically, if hamburger were an unknown word to you in English, but you knew what a hamburger is, you would not be able to make any connections from what you know about hamburgers to the word in this sentence.

The best example sentences would be ones where you could fill in the blank.  In the example sentence above, if I left it blank, nobody, not even a native speaker would know what the original word was. But with an ideal example sentence, the blank could only be filled in by one word. And that word would be obvious to any native speaker from looking at the rest of the sentence.

 So the next time you think, "I need to see an example sentence," don't even bother.

 

what is fluency?

I'd like to take another look at what fluency is and is not.  Fluency is easy to define, easy to confuse, but difficult to achieve.

Fluency is, essentially, the ability to speak like a native speaker.  But that does not mean exactly the same as a native speaker. Speaking exactly the same as a native speaker is language mastery.  So, a fluent speaker need not be perfect, nor have as large of a vocabulary as a native speaker.

this is fluency in Japanese

I found a new hero for Japanese language learners. Watch this video! This guy is fluent in Japanese. His speed of speaking matches the speed of native Japanese. It is really impressive. In this, his first video on YouTube, he is speaking without a script. He pauses to think about what he wants to say, not how to say it, nor does he pause to recall any words. The second video he posted is much more impressive, however it is longer and is audio-only, with him and two other people. But if you listen to that one, you will think it is a Japanese guy speaking. Here is a link to that video.



So, what did you think?

does time-boxing work for language learners?

Do you use time-boxing for language learning? Does it work for you? I wonder how many language learners are time-boxing.

Time-boxing means to set certain lengths of time for working on tasks. You might have 30 minutes for your French and 20 minutes to work on another language and so on. You manage your time so you are able to work on all of the things you want to do instead of getting carried away with one and not having time for the next one.