human thesaurus

when you’re first learning a language, you really don’t have a big pool of vocabulary to use to express youself. like for example, you want to say, „great! i’m excited“. but you don’t have a clue how to say „excited“ or even how to say correctly that – whatever it is gives you excitement. one might just settle by saying,“cool“. which is international.

so i’m challenging myself today on my DA translation homework, to not translate words in english (because i already know all the words & it wold take me 5 seconds to do the homework) but im going to translate them to other descriptive words in german. this way i can learn more vocabulary.

sounds good right? well actually it’s really hard to do. can you find me 2 synonyms for „warm“? so i broke down and used a thesaurus to help me with the task of explaination. it’s amazing how many ways a person can express themselves. obviously more words are common than others. and some cultures use words differently than the dictionary intends. like i can look up the literal translation for a phrase or word and my teacher will tell me, „sorry, but actually we just dont really say that“. hmmmm, ok so it’s impossible to become fluent in a language sitting at home learning all the grammer charts & memorizing a dictionary.  image