I want to talk a little about monolingual dictionaries. The background of this discussion is, of course, the method of the book Fluent Forever. That’s on the one hand, on the other hand, it’s my behavior looking in a monolingual dictionary sometimes, and sometimes in a bilingual dictionary. I had the following thought about it. Going back to the problem of looking for a German word also a word in my native language, and I don’t find it. What can I do? Do I find with help of the description of this word, and do I have then an access to this word, I don’t think so. With respect to the foreign language, why should help me the explanation of the word and understanding the word in finding much better? If I’m looking for a foreign word, for an English word, then I have a kind of description in my mind, but it wouldn’t help me to find the right word for it. And so I ask myself, if I’m a learner of a second language, would it help to avoid a translation dictionary? Would it disturb the acquisition process if switching to German. If I’ve got the description by the monolingual one, what will I do? I take this description and thinking, thinking, and thinking, not looking for an English word, but I will guess the corresponding German one for better and quicker understanding. So I think it doesn’t matter if I use a monolingual dictionary for progressing in my language. And I think, but the other hand, only to use monolingual environment, only immerse in the foreign language environment without looking for the native language, would also help. But that’s not my environment, my environment is a German environment and I have to switch back and forth for finding the right word. So I think it doesn’t matter which kind of dictionary I’m using, but using both of them will help. But only one, only the monolingual wouldn’t help so much as I thought up to now. Okay.
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