{"id":377,"date":"2011-12-11T00:00:52","date_gmt":"2011-12-10T23:00:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.hackingchinese.com\/?p=377"},"modified":"2020-11-10T16:23:00","modified_gmt":"2020-11-10T15:23:00","slug":"mapping-the-terra-incognita-of-vocabulary","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.hackingchinese.com\/mapping-the-terra-incognita-of-vocabulary\/","title":{"rendered":"Mapping the terra incognita of Chinese vocabulary"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Terra<\/a>How do you fill gaps in your Chinese vocabulary? How do you know which words you don’t know so that you can learn them?<\/p>\n

The terra incognita of vocabulary<\/h3>\n

Learning Chinese is like exploring a foreign and exotic land. If you’ve just started, the explored territory is very small, but the more you study and the larger area you have covered, the likelier it is that you have missed important things that are actually quite basic.<\/p>\n

Just to give you an example, I had studied Chinese for three years before I learnt how to say “light bulb” (\u71c8\u6ce1). I just hadn’t encountered it or needed to use it until then, but it was a bit embarrassing not to know such a basic word at an advanced level.<\/p>\n

The illusion of advanced learning<\/h3>\n

It’s easy to fool yourself and believe that because you can read a text at a certain level, it means you master everything below that, which is never the case<\/a>, not even for native speakers. Your map might reach far and wide, but there will always be hidden caves and valleys that you haven’t visited, sometimes really close to home.<\/p>\n

In other words, dropping the metaphors for a while, you might know how to say “claustrophobia”, “recession” and “promulgate” in Chinese, but if you haven’t been exposed to enormous amounts of Chinese, it’s very likely that there are fairly easy words that you don’t know (“light bulb” for instance). The problem is that you don’t know that you don’t know them.<\/p>\n

Finding and mapping unknown terrain
\n<\/strong><\/h3>\n

There are basically two ways to improve your map:<\/p>\n