Question:
English is a second language to me. I really think that there are
enormous amount of vocabulary in English (at least, it has plenty of
synonyms). Then, how do the native-English writers/speakers memorize
so many English vocabulary?
Answer:
We don't memorize English vocabulary any more than you memorize Chinese
vocabulary. People who read a lot of different types of books and who are
also interested in lots of different subject areas naturally learn (not
memorize) and then remember the meanings of the words they read. They
also write, speak, and hear these words often enough for them to be at
least in their passive vocabulary. You might as well ask how we memorize
all the rules of grammar we need to know in order to write and speak
fluent English. Except for a select (not used in any judgmental sense
here) few, native speakers of English don't know any more about their own
grammar than you know about Chinese grammar (unless that is your
specialty). None of my colleagues here in Taiwan know Chinese grammar,
but they know all the rules of English grammar and still aren't fluent
writers or speakers of English, only of Chinese and Taiwanese, and almost
nobody here knows the grammar of Taiwanese.
The best way to learn vocabulary is to read and write. My ex-wife (the
one from Shanghai) had a phenomenal memory and memorized a small English
dictionary as well as a small Japanese dictionary. She taught Japanese in
Shanghai and lived in Tokyo, so her Japanese was quite good, but only
because she used it every day. Her English was terrible until she had
spent enough time using the language. All those words she'd memorized
were stored somewhere in her brain and could not be retrieved for any of
the normal language functions. Oh, perhaps it gave her a slight edge on
the TOEFL test, but she would have scored very low on that anyway had she
taken it.
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