Vocabulary

Some words are easier to learn than others.

I remember what happened to me when I was living in Sweden where I learned Swedish and little Russian vocabulary, I lived with my father and my stepmother who was Russian. I had to go to the school to learn Swedish and in my house we spoke spanish and my stepmother spoke Russian, I was living in Sweden so that I studied Swedish at school, in that time I could remember easier some words that I used in Sweden and Russian for instance Chair in Swedish is “stol” in Russian I “ стул (styl)”, I had to use this words several times with the same meaning, I could identify the similar sounds in two languages at the same time in my house, in the school, at the cafeteria wherever I was, today I remember clearly this words and their meaning, I think so that the use in a real context is very important to memorized the vocabulary, but I  think I learned this words in a natural way, in that moment I need to understand and communicate to other people.

Denotative and connotative meaning

If a word has reference to an object, or event in the physical world, this can be described as its referential or denotative meaning.- If this term relates to the attitudes and emotions it is connotative meaning (Hedge 2008) This is one of the most difficult task  that the students have to do, when they need to select a correct word in a specific situation whit a special intention. It is really interesting to notice this particular phenomena, the most of the time they have a high degree in difficult to find an appropriate word, even when there are studying their natural language.

Connotative meaning is term relates to the attitudes and emotions of a language user in choosing a word in the influence of these on listener or reader´s interpretation of the word (Hedge 2008) In the expression “ It is raining cats and dogs”  I have a good example of this use,   when I listened it at the first time, I get in my mind an image of cats at dogs falling down from the sky, it was really funny, I have never imagined something like this but I understood the meaning easily.

I know it is possible to speak a foreign language but it is not easy to understand the meanings like a native speaker, a lot of language is given by the context surrounding. We can discover a meaning an associate it to a real thing in the world but the “semantic weight” won be exactly the same that you feel when this real thing is in your own context. This is a big problem that we, as foreign language teachers have in the teaching-learning process, the most of the time we have to invent an artificial context to offer to our students a very close real meaning; this is a huge challenge that we have.