Building Vocabulary: Response #7

Vocabulary is a necessity for anyone and everyone, no matter what they are learning. You cannot build a house unless you know what a foundation, symmetry, dry wall, concrete, brick, wood, drills, nails, hammers, etc are, and the same goes for teaching using vocabulary. It is the foundation on which you build a students knowledge. This is especially true in my subject are, foreign language –German-. You cannot expect a student to learn the language unless they get the proper understanding and exposure to vocabulary. In German, often when you are learning vocabulary, the task is especially daunting because nouns can be accompanied by 3 different articles (der –masculine-, die –feminine- or das –neuter-).

This chapter in our textbook offered many different approaches to teaching vocabulary that I found really awesome. Etymology and morphology can often be used with German words during translation, but German doesn’t lend itself as much to this method of learning and understanding as much as other languages. There are often a lot of false cognates in German that can throw many students off. With German, often the best method is simple memorization, and it is hard for me to explain this to my students, because some rules in German are just rules you have to know with no rhyme or reason (das Mädche “the girl” has a neuter ending). So having a personal glossary that you can refer to at all times is something that can be extremely helpful.