Learn vocabulary in context? Absolutely. But, what is “context?”
Everyone who I’ve heard talking about learning vocabulary agrees that you should learn it in context. But, what does “in context” mean, exactly? For me, it includes finding memorable example sentences. I have two favorite sources for these, and the one that’s OK for those of us who are under 18 years of age is the extensive œuvre of zombie film and literature. For example, if you’re trying to memorize the French verb déchiqueter, you could memorize a sentence about using a shredder–or, you could memorize something like …pour pas que je me fasse agripper, déchiqueter, et dévorer par une cohorte de morts-vivants.
Déchiqueter: (1) mettre en lambeaux–un tissue, papier; mettre en pieces–un corps
If you’d like to work on your oral comprehension of American English, you could do worse than this video. The narrator speaks quite naturally, and the quality of the transcription (the subtitles) is pretty good. Scroll down past the video, you’ll find a list of low-frequency but completely natural English words and phrases that you might not already know. If the transcription does not show, mouse-over the video and click on the small icon labelled CC that will appear in the lower-right corner of the window. C’est parti !
Note that there’s a totally incorrect past tense in the first comment that you’ll see at the time that I’m writing this. It should read as follows–I have bolded the places where I’ve corrected a mistake.
If all the survivors were friendly and stuck together, imagine how long they‘d survive.
to flee: to run away. Fuir, in French, I think.
to get out of Dodge: to leave. Very colloquial. Also to get the hell out of Dodge (do not say in front of my grandmother) or to get the fuck out of Dodge (definitely do not say in front of my grandmother).
convenience store: a small store that sells ready-to-eat food, cigarettes, drinks, candy, and the like. The most widespread example in the United States is 7-11. Closest French equivalent: alimentation générale, which incidentally is also the name of a play about the zombie apocalypse that I saw at the Théâtre des Béliers a few years ago. OK: that I saw twice at the Théâtre des Béliers a few years ago, ’cause how often do you get to see a play about the zombie apocalypse, right?? (Note: I have no fucking idea whatsoever why the narrator says the nearest gun store and eventually raid other empty convenience stores, since a gun store is most definitely not a convenience store, empty or otherwise. Confused? See Hearst pattern.)
to hunker down: something like French se retrancher, but the implication is that you will stay there for a relatively long time. Merriam-Webster defines it as to stay in a place for a period of time–bear in mind that you would be most likely to use it in response to something negative. You might hunker down to survive a winter storm, but probably not to celebrate your birthday. Note: this can also mean something like to squat, to crouch.
FEMA: the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Wikipedia will tell you more than you ever wanted to know about it, or follow this link to get to their web site.
The featured image for this post is from the movie Day of the Dead. It comes to us courtesy of the Den of Geek blog.
I can’t quite read the cartoonist’s name, but can tell you that I found this on the Hoosier Times web site. (Vocabulary note: a “Hoosier” is a resident or native of the American state of Indiana. Why? No clue whatsoever.Figure courtesy of the Regulus Star Notes blog.Photo courtesy of the Tin Hat Ranch blog.
This post contains material from the New York Times article Anguish and Anger From the Navy SEALs Who Turned In Edward Gallagher, by Dave Phillips, published on December 27, 2019. The post will help you learn to use irregular past-tense verbs in English, and to understand why the US military voted for Joe Biden, 50%-45%.
So, one day I land at an airport in the US, and I jump in a taxi, and the driver is an Oromo guy. He’s listening to some American talk radio program, and as we get to chatting, I see that he speaks excellent American English. One thing, though: he gets lots of common irregular past tenses wrong. Eated, speaked, seed–stuff like that. And I wonder: you listen to American English radio all day, you speak to anglophones all day, you’re totally immersed in the language–how do you still mess up common irregular forms? Not in a critical way, right? Non-rhetorical question: how does one manage to speak a language pretty well while still fucking up really common aspects of the language?
Six years go by, and I go from having taken one semester of French in college in the early 1990s to speaking French well enough that when I meet a Frenchie for the first time, I typically have to convince them that I’m an American. (No French person ever thinks that I’m from where they’re from, but, yeah–I usually have to tell them that I’m an American, and I usually have to insist.)
About 80% of French verbs form their past tense (participle, actually, but whatever) by adding é at the end–the past participle lu of the verb to read is highly irregular.
And yet: yesterday I’m talking to a francophone friend, and I ask him the French equivalent of Did you readed the article that I sent you? (T’as li le reportage que je t’ai envoyé, rather than T’as lu le reportage que je t’ai envoyé). I watch YouTube videos about every subject under the sun in French, I read Wikipédia in French, I occasionally go up to two weeks without speaking anything but French–in other words, I am every bit as immersed in French as that Oromo guy is in English, but I still fuck up really frequent irregular forms.
From Wikipedia: “The United States Navy Sea, Air, and Land (SEAL) Teams, commonly known as Navy SEALs, are the U.S. Navy’s primary special operations force and a component of the Naval Special Warfare Command. Among the SEALs’ main functions are conducting small-unit special operation missions in maritime, jungle, urban, arctic, mountainous, and desert environments. SEALs are typically ordered to capture or to eliminate high level targets, or to gather intelligence behind enemy lines.[6]“
French speakers have been incredibly kind and patient about correcting me for such things for several years, and as a measure of respect and thanks, I offer herewith a little exercise on English verbs that are irregular in the past tense. As material, we’ll use an article published by the New York Times just under a year ago. It’s an excellent piece for this exercise because it includes a number of irregular past tenses. It was published on the occasion on Donald Trump’s interference in a military trial. The circumstances: a US Navy SEAL murdered a prisoner. His own troops turned him in. In a surprise twist, one of the witnesses claimed that he, not the SEAL in question, had murdered the prisoner, and the SEAL was acquitted on most charges. He was convicted on a relatively minor charge, and was demoted as punishment. President Trump reversed the demotion–an excellent way to weaken any military force is to destroy its mechanisms of discipline, and Trump socked the US military in the gut with that move. It wasn’t the end of the story, either, but we’ll get to that later. With that context: let’s get to some verbs.
Present
Past
Past participle
break
broke
broken
say
said
said
be
was (singular), were (plural)
been
can
could
been able to
tell
told
told
Irregular past tenses and past participles of several common English verbs
The Navy SEALs showed up one by one, wearing hoodies and T-shirts instead of uniforms, to tell investigators what they had seen. Visibly nervous, they shifted in their chairs, rubbed their palms and pressed their fists against their foreheads. At times they stopped in midsentence and broke into tears.
“Sorry about this,” Special Operator First Class Craig Miller, one of the most experienced SEALs in the group, said as he looked sideways toward a blank wall, trying to hide that he was weeping. “It’s the first time — I’m really broken up about this.”
Video recordings of the interviews obtained by The New York Times, which have not been shown publicly before, were part of a trove of Navy investigative materials about the prosecution of Special Operations Chief Edward Gallagher on war crimes charges including murder.
They offer the first opportunity outside the courtroom to hear directly from the men of Alpha platoon, SEAL Team 7, whose blistering testimony about their platoon chief was dismissed by President Trump when he upended the military code of justice to protect Chief Gallagher from the punishment.
“The guy is freaking evil,” Special Operator Miller told investigators. “The guy was toxic,” Special Operator First Class Joshua Vriens, a sniper, said in a separate interview. “You could tell he was perfectly O.K. with killing anybody that was moving,” Special Operator First Class Corey Scott, a medic in the platoon, told the investigators.
OK, we’ve seen the examples: now let’s practice using these irregular past tenses. We’ll practice using a technique called a cloze. It involves filling in a blank; it’s a common testing technique in foreign language teaching, and 40+ years ago when I was a young sailor, it was used for teaching pretty much anything via programmed learning. I’ll give you the material from the original article, but with the past-tense verb under test replaced by its infinitive form; you will replace it with the past tense form.
The Navy SEALs showed up one by one, wearing hoodies and T-shirts instead of uniforms, to tell investigators what they had seen. Visibly nervous, they shifted in their chairs, rubbed their palms and pressed their fists against their foreheads. At times they stopped in midsentence and break into tears.
“Sorry about this,” Special Operator First Class Craig Miller, one of the most experienced SEALs in the group, say as he looked sideways toward a blank wall, trying to hide that he was weeping. “It’s the first time — I’m really broken up about this.”
Video recordings of the interviews obtained by The New York Times, which have not been shown publicly before, be part of a trove of Navy investigative materials about the prosecution of Special Operations Chief Edward Gallagher on war crimes charges including murder.
They offer the first opportunity outside the courtroom to hear directly from the men of Alpha platoon, SEAL Team 7, whose blistering testimony about their platoon chief be dismissed by President Trump when he upended the military code of justice to protect Chief Gallagher from the punishment.
“The guy is freaking evil,” Special Operator Miller tell investigators. “The guy was toxic,” Special Operator First Class Joshua Vriens, a sniper, say in a separate interview. “You could tell he was perfectly O.K. with killing anybody that was moving,” Special Operator First Class Corey Scott, a medic in the platoon, tell the investigators.
Vocabulary notes
midsentence: How it was used in the NY Times article: At times they stopped in midsentence and broke into tears. More examples:
“Trump has provided a dark, dank hole into which these folks can dump whatever it is they’re mad about. Even contradictory views, since Trump frequently changes viewpoint in midsentence, can happily nest there, swelling and breeding like poison fungus.” (Source: Twitter)
Giuliani is literally trying to backtrack midsentence as he’s realized what already came out of his mouth? (Source: Twitter)
trove: How it was used in the NY Times article: Video recordings of the interviews obtained by The New York Times, which have not been shown publicly before, were part of a trove of Navy investigative materials about the prosecution of Special Operations Chief Edward Gallagher on war crimes charges including murder. More examples:
While clearly using Trump-friendly words here, Kelly knows national security agencies have a trove of incriminating information on Trump & Co. which will be revealed during an orderly transition. The walled-in White House is burning up the shredders… (Source: Twitter)
The BP Senate Report provides a treasure trove of new details abt Donald Trump’s relationship with Moscow, & says that a Russian National, Konstantin Kilimnik, who worked closely with Trump’s presidential campaign in 2016 was a career intelligence officer. (Source: Twitter)
blistering: How it was used in the NY Times article: They offer the first opportunity outside the courtroom to hear directly from the men of Alpha platoon, SEAL Team 7, whose blistering testimony about their platoon chief be dismissed by President Trump when he upended the military code of justice to protect Chief Gallagher from the punishment.
Leading health experts have delivered a blistering rebuke of Donald Trump’s decision to halt U.S. funding for the World Health Organization. (Source: Twitter)
Conservative Judge issues blistering rebuke of Supreme AG Barr (Source: Twitter)
freaking: In this context, it is a euphemism for the adjective fucking. How it was used in the NY Times article: “The guy is freaking evil,” Special Operator Miller told investigators. Some more examples:
John McCain already told everyone he graduated last in his class but look at a war HERO he became. You do not deserve to lick the dirt on John McCain’s boots. Trump, you are filthy disgusting lowlife and an freaking TRAITOR. You whine like a little girl. (Source: Twitter)
Just saw Giuliani on Wolf Blitzer. ….what a freaking idiot. (Source: Twitter)
Zipf's Law 