This podcast episode centers on the notion that the meaning of a word is the concept it conveys; vocabulary meaning is discovered in word combinations. We’ll approach this through a word combination exercise that can help you begin to grasp the wider meaning of words you are learning.

If you’ve been listening to the podcast for long, you already know that I wholeheartedly believe in a language strategy that pays close attention to word combinations. The idea of memorizing lists of vocabulary words and their translations is quite outdated in the field of second language acquisition. Everything in linguistics now is about language in context. Famous researchers and linguists have been stressing this for some.  John Rupert Firth, considered the grandfather of the history of linguistics, said that the meaning of a word is always contextual, and no study of meaning apart from context can be taken seriously. In previous episodes, we’ve explored the fact that vocabulary meaning is discovered in word combinations, and I’ve introduced the concept of collocations, or the co-occurrence of words. We’ve discussed the idea that the meaning of a word is heavily dependent on and influenced by the words around it. If you aren’t yet sure what I mean by this, you can revisit a previous episode entitled Words are Not Islands. In that episode, we discuss how relationships between words rather than words in isolation are actually what is worthy of your attention as you pursue learning Arabic.

I want to show you how knowing all this or developing collocational knowledge, can help you flesh out the meaning of the language around you more completely. Today’s episode was actually inspired by one of our Arabic learners who approached me one day to inquire about the difference between two words, قطعة and حبة. He had them slightly confused in his mind, which is understandable as they have an overlapping conceptual inference. They both mean piece. Though a piece of cake uses one of these words, and a piece of fruit uses the other. Many words are like this. So what can we do when we feel like we are never sure which word to apply? The key is in the connection to other words. If you brainstorm with someone who speaks that language proficiently they will be able to come up with a list for you of all the combinations that are used with those nouns, or all of the nouns that follow that verb, or all of the prepositions that can follow a certain verb. This will help you develop collocational knowledge and will actually help you retrieve language more easily once you are giving attention to the word partners each lexical item has. That is what I advise this learner to do with حبة and قطعة. This exercise is especially helpful in filling out the application of all these words so that we could identify which are used and when. In which situations do we use one over the other? So if you’re listening at home and you know Arabic, go ahead and stop the episode and see how many words connect now with حبة. When you finish exhausting the combinations you know, hit play again. OK. Did you make your list? If you did, check it against all that we. Up with. If you didn’t, don’t worry. I did it for you. Here we go. 

We came up with more than 30 examples of how to combine حبة with other nouns. Now take your list or mine and look back through all of those examples and think about what word you would use in place of حبة in your first language.

This is an interesting exercise because if I come up with something, I’ve got all kinds of things in Arabic that this works for a single round of falafel is حبة falafel. A pill in medicine form? حبة. An almond, a cashew, a walnut. It’s حبة before we say the name of the nut. Also, did you notice a few in there like “a cold sore” or “a piece of chocolate”? Or a single fruit or vegetable. Even a potato chip. For one potato chip you use حبة. A grain of rice is also a حبة. Now one other interesting is that not only is the pomegranate fruit حبة رمان, all of the individual seeds inside are also حبة.

Let’s see how قطعة works. Go ahead and pause the recording and write out every instance of every noun you can think that partners with this word. And again, here’s our list. 

Can you see how doing this actually helped us fill out the concept of قطعة? It’s a piece of clothing, a piece of pizza, a piece of cake or a slice of cake. A piece of wood, a piece of land, a piece of cloth. But it also can be a part like a part of a car or a part for a printer. It can be also a piece of meat or something that’s cut away from a whole, like a piece from a whole tray of كنافة. When we do these exercises side by side, we better fill in our understanding of how قطعة and حبة work. When we juxtapose those words and make a list of all of their word combinations we come to understand their meanings more completely. We have a better idea of which nouns follow one or the other. By doing this exercise–which can work with verbs or descriptives or nouns–we widen our understanding of how Arabic works.

To understand vocabulary words, we need to learn more than what a single word means in our first language. We need to explore its combinations in our new language, the new language we are learning, because what it means is how it occurs. What it represents in a new language is often nothing like what it represents in our first language. Each culture has its own beautiful way of describing its world.

I hope this inspired some new ideas for working with Arabic. Acquiring a new tongue is about so much more than just hearing and learning the new. Sometimes we have to revisit basic vocabulary and try to build new understanding of it within new contexts. It’s a process of exploration and discovery that makes life more interesting as you learn that your perspective, both on language use and on the world in general, has been somewhat limited until you bring into your soul another language and another culture to broaden your sense of what it means to be human.

Learn language by allowing yourself to relearn the world.