After many years of being a student of EFL, there are some words that are not new to me but which I find so extremely difficult to acquire and thus put into use both on my oral and written production. This happens to me at the level of pronunciation as well as at the level of semantics. Fortunately, I have a visual memory so spelling has never been hard for me, neither in English nor in Spanish.
Take for example words as 'rise' and 'raise'. Oh my God! I never know which one is pronounced with each dipthong ei and ai! I always have to look them up in the dictionary. Besides their meanings are quite similar so I find it very hard to know in which situations to use them.
What about all those verbs of seeing, walking and shining? We don't have such a variety in Spanish, do we? Glance, glimpse, stare, peek, peep, peer; gleam, glint, glisten, glitter, glow, sparkle; stagger, limp, crawl, march, wander, stroll, stumble, ramble, stalk... Oh my God!!! Imposible to remember ALL of them! Most of them are almost synonyms to me! I have always thought that the best way to learn vocabulary is by using the words in meaningful sentences that are more or less easy to remember. But this strategy isn't that useful in this case!
Another pain in the neck are phrasal verbs. Some of them become part of your active vocabulary because I've tried to use them as much as possible or because they are meaningful to me (e.g: look after, take up, talk somebody into, catch up with) but others...I used to study them by creating mind maps with the preposition in the middle and arrows with all the verbs it can be combined with. Still there are some I can never remember!
What about you girls? Do you have problems with any of the ones I have mentioned?? Share your experience with us!!!
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I have problems with all the ones you mentioned! LOL
ReplyDeleteWith "Rise" and "Raise" I've given up. I have no hope whatsoever of differentiate them.
And as regards those shades of meaning and phrasal verbs, I've seen in practice what we've seen in the theory in didactics: the best way of learning it is teaching it. I have totally incorporate everything that has been the subject of my classes, so it's great!