I find them in the least-expected places. One with the word chladnicka on one side and refrigerator on the other turned up between my sheets several days ago, and another (operavat'/to fix) was found inside the sleeve of my sweatshirt. These little scraps of notebook paper showing up here, there, and everywhere are my flashcards, and memorizing the words on them seems to be my only shot at ever being able to communicate in Slovak past the "coffee, please" stage.
As teachers of language learners, my colleagues and I spend countless hours discussing and strategizing about how to increase our students' vocabularies, both in their native language and their second language. Despite the amount of time I've thought about this topic and the amount of articles I've read about it, it truly hasn't been until now, that I'm starting a language from scratch , that I can understand both the importance of building a deep and wide vocabualry base early on and the the real challenge that language teachers face when it comes to helping students develop this word bank.
My frustration lies in the fact that, despite the compelx grammatical struture of the Slovak language, I kind of get it. I just don't have any words to plug into that structure. So, I know that to say that I have a pencil or a purse or a crazy idea (like moving to Slovakia to study Slovak?), the ending of the words need to change based on their placement in the sentence. I just have no clue how to say pencil, purse, or crazy idea. Thus the scraps of notebook paper, whirling around the room when I forget to pick them up before turning on the hairdryer, a vocabulary cyclone of sorts.
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That "chladnicka" card shouldn't be up your sleeve; it should be taped to your apartment fridge. And the food in your chladnicka should be appropriately labeled as well as the other various household items for which you'd like to be able to identify in Slovak. Please post that picture, once you've finished your assignment. :)
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