I am still on the hunt for the best - and easiest way - to increase my vocabulary. Over the Christmas period I have been reading fairly assiduously, drawing both on books for learners - which I've mentioned before, and are great - and have also been reading an autobiography which is not intended for learners but is by someone who had learn Welsh as a second language. The mix seems quite helpful but I do wonder what the optimum vocabulary 'difficulty' is. I have found reading the autobiography fairly frustrating and hard work at times because the proportion of unknown words has been just a bit too high and then I find myself wondering whether to just continue, using the context to guess the probably meaning or whether to stop and look up the words. This brings in another problem - there are words used in the language which are not in the dictionary (perhaps I need a slang dictionary?) and conversely, words in the dictionary which tend not to be in everyday use in the language.
I have also been reading more of the books for learners. There is a nice series which is a bit like the English Bridget Jones diary about a Welsh learner (may have mentioned this before..) about Blodwyn Jones - which is amusing, well written and does have unknown vocabulary - but not too much, so allows me to read through at a reasonable pace.So I do a mixture of highlighting the words or circling in pencil and adding them to my vocabulary book or just repeating them to myself. But I am not sure how much that really helps me to remember them - often I will recognise the words after a few encounters, but not know them enough to use them. This is the classic recognition/comprehension versus production gap.
I am trying a different system now though which is to set myself three new words to learn a day which I decide on in the morning and then come back to at a later point in the day and check that I have indeed learnt them. So far so good - but only on day two of this particular project!
I have also started reading children's books that have been translated into Welsh - in particular Roald Dahl's BFG - which I read years ago when our children were young and enjoyed again in the Welsh version (CMM - if you want to know! Cawr Mawr Mwyn!) Interestingly there is enough new vocabulary to make this a bit of a stretch and it turns out that a few of Dahl's books have been translated - and I so love Quentin Blake's illustrations (couldn't find one from BFG) so will look forward to that.........
