Etymologies

[cimorene]

One thing I find annoying to impossible about Duolingo is that etymology isn't presented with the new vocabulary. I can't comprehend not wanting, or perhaps I should say needing, to see the etymology when you learn a new word. How are you meant to remember them all without the connections between them? Especially in a foreign language that's related to one you know - so any Indo-European one for me - but even with Finnish, since even if not for loan words from IE languages you'd need to make connections among Finnish words. I have actually had some trouble trying to look up etymology for the Welsh words I was getting from Duolingo. Wiktionary seems to have incomplete etymology info for Welsh.

Comments

[yvannairie]

Huh I wonder if that's why it was easier for me to learn Italian vocabulary in three years than it was for me to learn German in... like, nine.

[cimorene]

You mean because it came with a better etymology/cognate background for the vocabulary?

[yvannairie]

Yeah, like, my teacher liked teaching things by comparing how something was said in French or English (or Finnish! Finnish also has a bunch of Latin-root words) and that just made everything stick a lot more than German, because I had to memorise way more instead of being able to logically go "oh! Those words are related so this probably means that", which means that I both speak and read Italian better than I speak or read German.

[cimorene]

Yes, I feel all the best teachers do this - to some extent, or with related words in the target language at minimum if there aren't too many cognates available. Plus it's much easier to remember what a long word means if you know what the some of the morphemes in it mean and it's not just an arbitrary string of syllables.

[cimorene]

I often ask the nearest or most convenient native Finnish speaker 'is that word related to that other word' or 'what's the etymology of that word, why does it mean that, or can you think of some other words related?' and most of the time they can't answer me (with the exception of the blessed time in Finnish classes where the teachers could). Sadly I don't appear to be acquainted with any philology nerds.

[spark]

I am fortunate to be able to do that with Welsh. Cylchgrawn (magazine) for example, I knew cylchdro (roundabout) and asked my friend how magazines were related to roundabouts. He thought for a moment and said "circulars!"