Strategies for learning: Clustering / Breaking (English)

 

This series is prompted by reader Valerio's comment on https://piccola-chinita.blogspot.com/2026/04/chinese-is-learner-friendly-language-in.html about what a challenge the Chinese script presents to the learner, with no gaps between the characters -- what I call breaking up and clustering.

    I've raised some English-equivalent examples of this in the blog covering German (https://piccola-chinita.blogspot.com/2026/05/strategies-for-learning-clustering.html), so what's here are further instances of how one does need some basic knowledge of how the language works.

    I wish I'd been directed more at school to look at English and Mandarin in this way, which would've made it much more illuminating, not to mention fun.  Knowledge of how a language works, to a certain extent, is very useful, something not every learner is taught, from what I've seen (mainly in students who'd done their Beginner level elsewhere before coming to me, either privately or my evening programme classes when I was teaching them).

    Further to the Jonathan Smith vs Jon Athansmith example in the blog on German, here's something to illustrate how it could be done.

    There was a phone company advert on TV in the 80s featuring a grandma talking to her grandson on the phone, asking about his exam results.  He was not particularly pleased, saying he'd only passed one subject: Sociology.  The grandma said proudly, something like, "He's got a pass in an ology and he's not happy."

    That was clever, I thought as a language teacher, guiding the learner of English to look at the language from the angle of patterns in the language, something I use a lot in my teaching of both Mandarin and English.  Some examples:

* It would help the learner enormously in delineating the reference if s/he knew that words that end in ology denote "the study of", e.g., zoology, biology, psychology, sociology.

* Like -ology words, those ending in -ment, -tion, -ness, e.g., are abstract (development, contentment, entertainment; irritation, agitation, imagination; happiness, weariness, dizziness).

    Once you start applying these principles and learning the vocabulary in groups of related words, the burden will be lightened.  You can even begin playing the game of looking out for the next -ology / -ment / -tion / -ness words, to see if the general rule applies, thus making the learning more fun than sheer memorising without seeing some kind of pattern to help identify future unknowns that crop up.

    Remember:  rules are never 100%, just use them to your advantage, and forget about the irregulars for now.