Memorizing English mistakes

文/芳梓烊

2018/11/29        周四          晴朗微风

可爱不是长久之计

Don't tell me how many words you can memorize in a month, and remember all of them. Fool yourself, fool yourself!

I will ask you: out of the 50 words you have memorized, how many can you tell me exactly the part of speech, pronunciation and fixed collocation?

And most importantly, can you use these 50 words? If you don't know how to use any of these words, within ten days you will most likely have lost all or even all of them.

Before we figure out how to memorize words, I think we should first make clear the following cognitive misunderstandings that often occur when we Chinese memorize words:

1. Each person's vocabulary is not a numerical value, but contains four different vocabularies.

Namely listening vocabulary, reading vocabulary, writing vocabulary, oral vocabulary

Listening and reading vocabulary are generally referred to as input vocabulary.

Writing and speaking vocabulary, we can collectively refer to as output vocabulary.

And almost all people have different vocabularies in these four parts.

For example, for most Chinese people, reading vocabulary is the highest, and we often mistakenly believe that our reading vocabulary is the whole vocabulary. Secondly, listening vocabulary (often ignored by us), and finally, speaking and writing vocabulary (generally ignored). And generally everyone is different.

So, for a word, you have to be able to look at it, recognize it, hear it, make a sentence out of it, and then express it orally or in writing to really master the word.

A word or expression should be memorized in four parts.

So you might just look at the word experiment and realize that if you listen to the sound of the word you won't necessarily recognize that it is the word you are using. Do you know how to make a sentence?

And listening vocabulary, oral vocabulary, writing vocabulary, through the word book, can you improve?

The answer is: NO! Word books improve your reading vocabulary at best.

In many cases, the smallest unit of English is not the word, but the expression.

For example: call, the verb means to make a phone call

To call off something is to cancel something. Hang out, pick up……

Shot is a noun that means to shoot,

But a long shot is a long shot. It means something completely different than just taking it apart. Shotgun wedding is often called shotgun wedding.

Examples of this are: silver paper tin; dressing room; Adam's apple; an Adam's apple; no longer an Adam's apple.

There are also some common idioms, like tell me about it! Exactly! (instead, tell me about it!)

suit yourself 随便你

do me a favor 帮我个忙

sth is around the corner 某事即将来临

out of your league 你比不上／配不上某人

还有一些俚语，比如：not my cup of tea 不是我的菜

kick the bucket 一命呜呼

buy the farm 死于非命

spill the beans 泄露秘密

screw the pooch 把事情搞砸

give up the ghost 驾鹤西游

hit the fan 遭遇麻烦

go bananas 精神错乱

一些谚语，比如：never look a gift horse in the mouth 建议某人不要拒绝别人的好意

the apple never falls far from the tree 有其父（母），必有其子

Like these phrases, idioms, slang, idioms, proverbs we can collectively refer to as expressions. Only when they are joined together can they express a complete and fixed meaning. Now, when you break it down, it changes the meaning.

But like these expressions, words are rarely listed in the book, or summarized for you.

So that's why I say memorizing word books is not a good idea!