Lesson 26 of 40
Vocabulary Sprint w07 — school words, mostly assembled from parts you have
about 12 minutes
After this lesson you can
- Read a two- or three-character school word by reading its parts.
- Choose 高校 over 高等学校 and 辞書 over 辞典 when speaking.
Words this lesson teaches
- 小学校
- primary school — 小 small, 学 learn, 校 school; every character already taught
- 中学校
- junior high school — the middle one, 中
- 高等学校
- high school, in full — nobody says this; they say 高校
- 高校生
- a high-school student — 生 makes a student of any school
- 大学生
- a university student — 大学 plus the same 生
- 講堂
- an assembly hall — 堂 is a hall, and 講 is the one new character
- 研究室
- a research lab — in practice a professor's office, the room you knock on
- 会議室
- a meeting room — the same 室 as 研究室 and 教室
- 卒業
- graduation — 卒業する, and it takes を for the school you leave
- 予習
- study done before the lesson — 予 is beforehand, 習 is study
- 復習
- study done after the lesson — 復 is again, and the same 習
- 数学
- mathematics — 数 is number, and 学 makes a field of study of anything
- 科学
- science — sounds exactly like 化学, chemistry, which is a real nuisance
- 歴史
- history — two new characters, and both appear almost only in this word
- 辞典
- a dictionary — but say 辞書; 辞典 lives in dictionary titles like 国語辞典
- 翻訳
- translation, of writing — interpreting speech is 通訳, sharing the 訳
- テキスト
- the set course book — narrower than the English word text
- レポート
- a written assignment — リポート exists and belongs to news, not students
- 消しゴム
- an eraser — 消す's stem welded to ゴム, rubber, which came from Dutch
- 一生懸命
- with everything you have — used as 一生懸命に, so it behaves as an adverb
What it explains
学 makes a subject of anything
数学 is number-study, 科学 is branch-study, 歴史学 is history-study, and 言語学, 経済学 and 心理学 all work the same way. This is the single most productive suffix in academic Japanese and it costs you nothing: once you can read the first character, you can read the field. 生 does the same job for people — 高校生, 大学生, 学生, 先生 — and 室 for rooms, and 場, which you met in w05 in 駐車場 and 飛行場. Japanese builds long words out of short parts far more consistently than English does, and the parts are the thing to collect. Learn 予, and 予習, 予約 and 予定 arrive together.
The syllabus word and the spoken word are not always the same
高等学校 is what a form says and 高校 is what a person says, and the shortening is not slang: 高校 is the ordinary word and the long form sounds official on purpose. 辞典 is on the list and 辞書 is what you would ask for, 辞典 surviving mostly inside titles — 国語辞典 on a spine. This happens because a syllabus draws from written registers, where the full and formal forms live. It happened in w05 with 汽車 and 飛行場 too, and it will keep happening, so the habit worth building is to ask of any new word: is this what somebody would say, or what a document would print? For these two, the answer is a document.
The scene itself is in the app.
Lesson one of this track is free to read in full. From lesson two on, the story, the audio and the review are part of a free account.