I didn’t really realise what I was doing in Chinese until I came to repeat the experiance in learning some basic Japanese. I learnt a few words and phrases from podcasts and then watched some Japanese movies, tv and listened to some radio. Of course I could hardly recognise anything but I leant a lot more about the words I had learnt. Then I was in the ridiculous situation of talking to a couple of people who were learning Japanese, from classes and textbooks. One had been studying for over two years and of course knew a lot lot more vocab, however we ended up arguing about the possible usages of some simple words. Turns out I was right, they knew the initial meanings I they had picked up from their classes but weren’t aware of the extended/alternative meanings/flavours I had picked up from the movies. Japanese is on hold for now, I want to concentrate on Mandarin and Cantonese. But it was very instructive, going through that process.

The flattened and lifeless words in dictionaries and textbooks, have much less to teach us than the vibrant colours of real words. In reality context and idomatic speech can twist things in unexpected directions.