Sharing vocab clusters
goulnik
October 22, 2007, 07:18 AM posted in General DiscussionI was wondering how best to share our own vocab around and beyond the CPod lessons, as I've personally been gathering for my Practice Plan session every morning for 5 months.
I start from the dialogue and other chunks from the Conversations, add what's relevant to the topic from the Expansion, and bring in what's of specific interest to me or topics likely to be discussed in the call. I then organize everything into clusters (on paper at this stage, using different colours), to which I will add after the call based on additional input from Vera.
This morning for instance we did Godzilla in Shanghai, so I added stuff about the movie itself, WWII 二战 (Èrzhàn), the atomic bomb 原子弹 (yuánzǐdàn), King Kong 金刚 (jīn gāng) then 9/11 九一一 (jiǔyāoyāo) and courage(ous) 勇敢 (yǒnggǎn) came up in the discussion etc.
I could obviously use lesson comments, but there's often lots more stuff there, not always relevant and can be quite lengthy. I know there's the dictionary too, but I'm somehow lacking the clustering / grouping.
What do you think?
goulnik
October 22, 2007, 11:23 AMyes, and tags so I would have monsters, animals, emotions, news, etc. on my clusters
rich
October 22, 2007, 11:47 AMThis morning I learned how to say "boob job" from the Beauty pageant episode, haha. I'm surprised it wasn't just "breast enlargement" in the vocab. Well, now I know how to use 隆 and filter out Chinese spam.... ha ha. Don't know if I want to know other vocab for that though.
goulnik
October 22, 2007, 12:19 PM我也看不出来为什么 John 说了 'boob job/nose job'。 do 隆胸 (lóngxiōng) / 隆鼻 (lóngbí) carry the same derogatory connotation, and if so, what are the proper terms for such enlargement surgery 手术 (shǒushù) ?
Kyle
October 22, 2007, 01:40 PM隆胸 / 隆鼻 don't carry any derogatory meaning. They're quite 标准 ways of saying someone's had some work done. I asked around and didn't find any concise way of adding a derogatory feeling. The best we could come up with was 她长的不太自然, or, 她是人造的很明显. I'm sure you could say something a lot worse if you wanted.
christian
October 22, 2007, 05:12 PMGoulniky, I know this is not exactly what you were suggesting, but it's in the neighbourhood so I thought I would mention it: Maybe it would be a good idea to enable tagging of lessons by users, and adding a tag cloud to the front page. Groups of lessons grouped around specified tags could have user generated vocabulary lists attached to them. I expect something like that wouldn't be too difficult to implement. Perhaps user created play lists are not a bad thing to consider either. Just a few thoughts..
henning
October 22, 2007, 05:46 PMChristian, reminds my of the old CPod tag-clouds...Looking back I never really missed them... http://blog.praxislanguage.com/2006/09/20/tag-clouds-what-are-they-good-for/
christian
October 22, 2007, 08:37 PMI didn't either now that you mention it, but they weren't reflecting vocabulary but lesson function. Maybe the problem is they weren't the right tags.
henning
October 22, 2007, 07:25 AMGoulnik: I also would support the idea of having user-based vocab lists for the lessons. Maybe even add fields for each user vocab item for additional info, e.g. links to the dictionary, grammar guide, Wikipedia, story websites... Another idea for the long-term future: Select Expansion lines and vocab from various lessons to compose your individual Fixes.