Maybe it’s the flu talking, but I think I’ve just had a good idea.
Morphing exercise:
Take the most common 50 words in your target language. If you can’t find them, get a list of common words and pick any 50.
Put them in a word document. I find creating lots of 6 row by 6 column tables handy for this.
If they are verbs, conjugate them in all their tenses; if they are nouns, decline them in all their cases; if they are adjectives, work out all the gender and number variations. At first you will need a grammer book or an online conjugator / morphological analyser to do this. Once you get the idea you can do it by hand. When you have finished, run it through a spell checker. This should pick up any mistakes you have made.
Import the list (copy and paste) as a LingQ lesson.
Click on I know all words.
Have a cup of tea.
If you feel like it, repeat with the next 50 most common words.
This puts all forms of the most common words in your target language into your LingQ known words, which achieves several objectives:
Spelling practice
Word building practice
Vocabulary learning
Increases your Known Words score
Reduces the number of Unknown Words in future lessons
Presumably it should reduce your Unknown Words fairly rapidy, especially in Russian where each word may have a dozen different forms and LingQ treats them all as different words.
I shall test my system for a few days and report back.
By the time I saw this thread in Recently Active Threads, it read “How to morph by SanneT.” I began imagining what the book with this title would be about, and whether the author was sharing her first-hand knowledge and experience with the readers or recapping what she had observed elsewhere. Images of all kinds of mythical creatures arose in my imagination and Mrs. SanneT morphing into them.
Morphing exercise may be effective and addictive like morphine, and could morph into a new style of language learning. It also should be recommended to anyone with an interest in morphological analysis or morphology.
Boys, glad to see you are going strong… “Morphing, I did it my way.” Here’s a grammar and stats addict’s dream on offer and I, for one, can see myself morphing in otherwise idle moments.
I got ticked off in a Russian forum once for talking about conjugating nouns. You decline nouns, I was told, but conjugate verbs. I have no idea what you do to adjectives.
Conjugating verbs sounds like putting a Mummy verb and a Daddy verb together to get some little baby verbs.
Declining nouns sounds like you’re on a diet and nouns have too many calories. Another adverb, Vicar?
You decline adjectives just like nouns. A little more vigorously and privately, perhaps.
I thought you called it Tylenol or Nurofen in the UK. Coincidently, I had a terrible headache a couple of days ago and it took two Ibuprofens to get rid of it.
Hello! Sorry to barge right in, but this is somewhat in my area…
Tylenol and Ibuprofen are different drugs. Ibuprofen is what we call an “NSAID” (Nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drug). In fact, it’s pronounced like “N” plus “said”. Other brand names are Motrin and Advil in the United States.
Tylenol is the brand name for acetaminophen, but I have read that it goes by Paracetamol in other places.
Ah, thanks. My bad. I meant to say Nurofen only.
And yes, we just call it paracetamol here. Although, it’s also available under various popular brand names.
At a time when Greek-Latin influencing each other there were created anagrammatized (??) words as:
“morph” (Greek) translates to: “form” (Latin)
(This is what amazes me in English, the way how they have incorporate in one language words that are the one the translation of the other in two other languages, and there are so many of them)
Morpheus: the god that takes shapes / god of dreaming
And this is where morphine takes its name. (Well, I presume that Ytaka was joking anyway!)
I just found a frequency list in my target language and imported the first 2100 into LingQ as a lesson. All the conjugations that are used frequently were already included int the list, leaving more space for common words by leaving out the more infrequently used conjugations. This way if I forget the imperfect subjunctive of “to masticate” it will still show up in blue and I can LingQ it.
Sorry for the double post, these forums really need a “delete post” option.
The positive of frequency lists (besides getting rid of a ton of little pesky blue words, leaving only the important blue words) is that early in your studies, learn a frequency list in order of frequency can quickly bring up reading comprehension. The downside is that you don’t get all the good morphing practice.
Thank you much, I agree. Studying frequency lists in the early days of my language learning career really helped speed up my reading speed, which meant more input right off the bat!
I cannot learn from lists. I need content .however if you are already fairly advanced importing lists to lingq clears up the blue highlighting and makes the stats more reliable.(from my iPod touch)
I do the majority of my learning from content as well, except personally I feel more comfortable having a bit of a “foundation” to start off with. I feel that knowledge of the words in a frequency list at the very beginning of a language helps me absorb and understand more content faster. This is just my approach, however I am still rather young and its relatively early in my language learning career, my style may change as I get older and mature in my languages.
(sorry, cant help it)