How to learn English vocabulary | The best way to remember new words

hello so yesterday I recorded a video in the middle of a very busy street in Torino and a lot of you thought that it was a very dangerous place to to record a video so today I'm in somewhere much much safer it's a very beautiful antique bookshop in Torino called Galleria ghillie bed and I mean as you can see it's it's the perfect place to to make a video and the owners very kindly allowed me to to film in here so now the the reason that I chose like an an antique bookshop is because I just had a visit at the are the archives of Torino the the archives of Turin where they have all of the original old books relating to to the city and I went there because yesterday I got an email from someone who works there called Isabel and she she emailed me with a question about false friends in English and it's it's it's such a great question because if I was going to make a class about false friends I would ask this exact question with with these exact pieces of vocabulary so Thank You Isabel for for your for your inspiration okay so false friends are these are these words in in in any language that that that in one language they mean something and in another language they mean something completely different completely different right that's that that's that's how it seems and the question is how can two words become so different like how is this possible and there's two two possibilities right so one possibility is that it's coincidence like the words look similar but actually they're from two different routes like maybe one's Greek in one's Latin you know they look similar but they're not but another possibility is is what I'm going to talk about today okay and so one of the examples one of the example words that she asked about was this word okay morbid now in English morbid is is normally what's an adjective okay and we use it to describe a kind of unhealthy obsession with things that are things that are kind of related to death or sickness or illness kind of disgusting things right it's like oh you you have a morbid sense of humor or he's a really morbid guy right so that's the English that's the English sense in Italian more to be though or more to be that it means soft soft now how can in English how can it be related to a disease in English and then in Italian it means soft so on the surface it seems like there's no relation but yes there is and the basically the answer to the question is is all about competition okay competition so and and and that's what I love about this question because it tells us not only it tells us about about about vocabulary how we can look at vocabulary in other languages when we're learning a new language it also tells us how vocabulary works in the brain right learning vocabulary is all about competition in Adele gold but Adele Goldberg's book she talks about she gives the example of a bowl right so when you're a child you learn the word Bowl and so anything you see that's round you say it's Bowl so you go moon is Bowl as a light a light is ball everything is ball cheese around cheese is ball but what happens is as you learn more vocabulary there's competition I had this competition you know that ah that's not ball that's moon competition it pushes out pushes out ball you know you know that that's not gee you know it's not ball it's cheese competition and so the same thing happens when we have words coming into language right so morbid it's it's from Latin okay and it means death so really it's about death so we could say that the English the English census is correct right it's about death and disease perfect but what about the Italian so what does death and disease do what does it do to us it it pounds you it grinds you down okay it turns your organs to liquid it eats away at you and this grinding pounding rubbing this this this metaphor for the process of disease that's why that's why it's soft in Italian okay that's what and the reason that this became soft and not associated with disease is because there was competition in Italian right so there's another word that talks about disease that was more powerful than this so this got pushed away this got pushed away to mean only one sense a specific sense of the word which was kind of related to disease about the pounding and the grinding okay so in in in her email she also gave another example which which is which is an English verb and it is this one right 10 okay pretend now again if you look at the English meaning and the Italian meaning they seem completely different but they're not different it's just competition made one have a specific sense and had the other one make a specific sense and other words took other the the other meanings the original meanings okay so what what is pretend what is pretend well pretend comes from Latin 10 daily right which means to stretch out to stretch okay so when I pretend what I'm doing is I'm I'm stretching out I'm giving you something this this was the original meaning to give you something right and what was I giving you I was giving you a claim I was saying you see this you see this that's mine or do you see this this this paper that I'm showing you this is this is evidence that that is mine okay so you're making a claim and that's the sense in Italian you can you can make a claim like you know you can claim that something is is yours or you can claim that he is right or he is wrongly you can't you can claim anything but what happened in English I mean what happened in English pretend became associated with one specific meaning of claim a false claim an imaginary claim you like you see you see that picture of the Mona Lisa yeah that's mine right I'm making a claim but it's a false claim and so in English pretend is all about basically lying so it's not that it's different it's just that it became more specific because of competition because in English we have this other word right which sorry not in English in Italian well actually I'm going to use Spanish as a I mean use Spanish as as an example this one thing here okay think here in in Spanish is is pretend in English right now what what did what what did did this mean in Spanish this means pretend where did this come from this comes from Latin finger finger means to mold okay to shape so it was about it had many meanings that you could mold you could finger the pizza you know you could thing go the truth you can mold and shape the truth so the truth becomes a lie right the truth becomes a lie so think here is about is about lying and so you can see that that in in in um in in the Spanish language similar to the Italian language because of the competition this one meant claim anything and this one meant false claim but in English it was the other way round because this word also exists in English this also exists in English but it's not popular because of competition I think that I've said competition like a thousand times in this video ok so this is the word in English ok it's same same exactly the same root exactly the same Latin root as the as as the as the Spanish word ok Fame to fame means to pretend to imagine right to mold to shape the truth so you can feign an injury feign a sickness and and and related to this and this this is something something important for you to know okay you know when you have your workbook if you have a workbook or if you have a maybe you're going to class okay or you you're looking on a website for four words right normally they give you a box of synonyms like you have this word means that and that word means that and that word means that and you should memorize all these synonyms that is and the science tells us this there's been evidence about this okay trying to memorize synonyms is the worst way to learn vocabulary the worst because of competition right so you're trying to remember this word and then this way is competing and they're all competing with each other and so your brain has no chance to remember this vocabulary right it's so what do you do what you do is you look for relations like you look for relations maybe you'll remember thing because you know it's related to thing here right maybe you'll remember more birds it's related to death and disease which makes you soft and maybe you'll remember pretend comes from Latin ten dating right it's about stretching the truth stretching the truth and maybe so because of that you'll also remember this this new this new word which is a noun and a verb which is faint okay let me show you I'm here faint okay so it can be a noun or verb and it means to pretend to do an action so if you're playing a game of football you can feint to the left which means you pretend to go left but really you're going to go right okay so you faint and again it's about pretending it's about molding the truth I'm you know you think the truth is I'm going here but really I'm going here so this is how you learn vocabulary okay looking at the relations between the words the relations how they are similar not synonyms which is all about how they're different anyway I hope you enjoyed this this video about false friends and about competition and about and about etymology and you should definitely come to Torino because it's an amazing city and right now because of the coronavirus they're suffering a little bit so you should come you should come to Galerie Gilbert and and buy a book and you should also definitely visit the archives and Thank You Isabel for showing me some some amazing things I'm Christian this is kangaroo English or seaman class

Channel: Canguro English

Views: 49,637

Keywords: learning english, learn english, english teacher, english grammar, grammar, english learning tips and tricks, English self study, study English alone, learn English at home alone, teach yourself english, How to learn English vocabulary, How to memorise English words, How to learn new words, Best technique to learn vocabulary, Best way to remember vocabulary, stop forgetting vocabulary, how not to forget English words, canguro english, kangaroo english, canguru english

Id: JyczE1XdT_8

Length: 14min 13sec (853 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 05 2020