Context vs. Definition
Battle to the death! Well, more accurately, it is a matter of a balance between both context and definition. Inspired by a thread on the Reviewing the Kanji forums that went a little off topic, I thought I’d talk about this issue in a little more depth.
If we break the viewpoints into extremes, it seems there are two camps: those who advocate learning words exclusively from context and those who suggest that you can’t learn words without a dictionary. Oddly enough, both sides use the same argument for why their way is better. The supporters of context say that if you don’t learn a word in context, your usage of it will be unnatural, and the supporters of definition say that if you don’t learn a well-defined meaning, your usage will be unnatural. There are other arguments, but I’ll leave those for another day.
In reality, both definition and context are necessary to some degree and that varies with the word. Some words are very well defined and as such are well suited to being learned from their definition. Others have very vague definitions and are difficult to understand even if you look them up.
Technical terms are the extreme of well defined. Take the term “divergent series” from mathematics. It has a very specific meaning that is well defined: A series which is not convergent. Series may diverge by marching off to infinity or by oscillating. This concept is tied more closely to math than language. There’s no need to learn the term of divergent series in Japanese from context. In an English-Japanese dictionary, you can look up divergent series and you’ll find 発散級数. That term will be right 99% of the time.
For a Japanese to English example, consider 文部科学省. In English it is the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT). That will again be correct 99% of the time. No context is necessary.
On the other hand, we have words that are not well-defined at all. They are generally words that are tied to the language itself more than to biology, philosophy, government, or any other external field. Consider the word 君. You look it up in a dictionary or ask a friend and learn it means “you”. But if you base your use of 君 just on that information, you’ll end up using it when it would be inadvisable, unnatural, and rude. There’s much more contextual information that you need to know in order to use 君 naturally. There are words far less defined than 君, but it is an easy to understand example.
Most words require both context and definition to some degree in order to understand and use words and phrases naturally. Sometimes a simple, one word definition suffices; other times you need a page explaining the word. Similarly sometime a single sentence of context is sufficient to understand; other times you need to see the word 50 times in 50 different situations before you get a good grasp of it.
I hope you all have fun learning Japanese! As always, I welcome any further discussion, questions, comments, or criticism.
Tags: context, definition, How to learn Japanese, learn to speak Japanese
This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 28th, 2008 at 06:45 and is filed under How to learn Japanese. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
