bilingual vs. monolingual dictionaries

The Antimoon website strongly encourages using monolingual dictionaries. I find them hard to use, even in languages I know fairly well. Either I miss part of the definition, or I end up with a translation that's not quite right.

The bilingual dictionary gives a straightforward answer (although not always the exact one for the context), but you miss the "immersion" you get using a monolingual one.

Any suggestions from successful learners? Start with bilingual, then switch at some point? Plunge into monolingual right away? Stick with bilingual all the way?

Use both.

I don't know which level you are at. I've never set a period in which I formally learnt English, but roughly I've been an autodidact since 3 years ago, and did not spend a lot of time on formal learning sessions (as what I do with German and now French, like reading an Assimil lesson/listening to Pimsleur... and there are no such programs for English).

At the stage of being able to write academic essays in English with ease and write forum posts to express very complicated ideas, I'd consider my English fairly advanced, but not very fluent. I now use Cambridge Advanced Learner's dict. most of the time, but I'd use bilingual ones when 1) there are no such entries in this dict., particularly some proverbs (!) and 2) like you, when I don't know the senses of an expression that might have one or more good Chinese equivalents or translations that would serve as very good memory hooks.

Yet, I'd still suggest monolingual dict. as better ones, because while you can find exact translations easily for easier words, like when you are acquiring the language in the first year or two, many words do not have direct one-to-one or more-to-more equivalents with your native language, for grammatical and cultural reasons, etc. I'd combine monolingual dict., for the antimoon style self-study (*to read that dict. for a quarter of an hour, etc), with audiobooks / graded readers.

Perhaps this rule of thumb might suit you: first try a bilingual dictionary. If the translation is simple (for example: "libro: book"), use that. But if it's complicated or there are many different shades of meaning, try a monolingual dictionary as well, and try to learn the word from context in sentences, too.

- Kef

I prefer a bilingual dictionary that gives examples of usage for each word. That way you do get a direct equivalent, but you also get the nuance of usage.

Here's a study on the effect of the 2 different types of dictionaries:

http://209.85.165.104/search?q=cache:GH67D_RTYHEJ:www.readingmatrix.com/articles/hayati_fattahzadeh/article.pdf+monolingual+bilingual+dictionaries&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=1&gl=us&client=firefox-a

It says that bilingual dictionaries are faster, but that monolingual dictionaries lead to better recall of vocabulary.

In my view, it depends on how much time you're willing to devote to the language each day, and for how long.

If you want to go with the standard 2 hours a day, 5 days a week, 3 months in the summer off, and 2 weeks on the edges of each the years, then probably a monolingual dictionary won't do much for you. Then again, you probably won't learn the language completely either, and you'll learn a series of survival phrases for which you will need responses that fit within the script.

And yes, not even a kid will learn the language to native level with this.

Then, if you're going to do at least a few hours a day, every day, for months and months and months straight, without taking any rest from this, then a monolingual dictionary is what you'll need. After all, you've set all this time aside for yourself, so you might as well not have a problem with taking a bit more time to read definitions in your target language. With repeated exposure to the language, you see the same words over and over within certain contexts, and over time you will come to understand.

This more mirrors how little kids effectively learn and no comparison of kids effectively learning to adults can be made, unless the adults are learning in the same way as the kids.

So, which you use will depend largely on your devotion to the language.

But monolingual dictionaries often give uselessly complex explanations of simple things when what's really needed is a simple 1:1 correspondence of words between the two languages. How would you explain what a "book" is in English? It surely will not be as simple as "book = libro". This problem will still exist when you get into advanced vocabulary, too.

OK, the monolingual dictionary is not your only resource; you can search the internet with the term, look at Wikipedia, look at a picture dictionary (for a concrete word), read or listen to a long poem with that word as the concept discussed, or simply put off knowing it for now. If you're getting hours of input a day and you will do it every day for the next x months/years, you're likely to see it again.

If you come to understand the word, you can even return to the monolingual dictionary and look at the definition and see words related to what you just learned. You see, learning a language is just like a long game of playing Sudoku--filling in the parts--you may be presently stuck on a part, so set it aside and come back to it later and fill in another parts that you can, and eventually you'll be able to fill in the other part.

Even if you don't understand the definition, you would have at least seen it and taken it as input. But if you use a bilingual dictionary, you're going to get input in your native language and it's going to tie to the word in your target language. In other words, you will have the input in your native language, when you could have been getting it in your target language.

As for abstract terms, there tend not to be direct translations between languages for these, so you might see an explanation of that in there, but you would have foregone input in your target language for that, and recall of the abstract word would be less likely because of that.

I think too many language learners are focused too much on the short/immediate term (I wanna know it now/use all the cool words now), instead of building a solid foundation of input and seeing as much input as they can. They also cannot learn to be satisfied with using simple words at first and allowing the fog of the unknown words to clear over time as they continue to hear it.

As they continue in the massive input, the fog will clear, but even with it being foggy, if the input they had been receiving is interesting to them in someway, whether it be fun or necessary information, the ambiguous words will tend to be less likely to get in the way, or even if those words do get in the way, their minds will find the mysterious word very interesting, and they will be extremely likely to remember the mysterious word and listen for it through all the other input for valuable information.

>>I think too many language learners are focused too much on the short/immediate term (I wanna know it now/use all the cool words now), instead of building a solid foundation of input and seeing as much input as they can. They also cannot learn to be satisfied with using simple words at first and allowing the fog of the unknown words to clear over time as they continue to hear it.

Cannot agree more. All we've got to have is a holistic approach. Everything, but except hair-splitting/drudgery work.

It's not surprising for me to see people in class struggling to find cool words or get desperate finding dictionary words for their next composition. That's why I'd love any course that allows me to know everything using my language (or any I know) but not beyond the literal translations.