Posts
Comments
I had the same problem when learning English; at least when I had to learn vocabulary for school (my native language is Spanish, so English would be our foreign language class). Later on I had the chance to take a couple of classes in Latin.
For the last two years I've been learning French with great success. I've not yet found out how it is it was so easy for me; I suspect it came from it being close-to-isomorphic with Spanish. The thing is, when learning vocabulary I found that knowing a little bit about the use (not necessarily the definition) of English words helped me a lot to derive the meaning of new words. Whenever I had a little knowledge of the etymology of a word (for example, from the latin course), this "logical derivation" of the meaning or usage of words (or even the less-preferred pairing with a word on another language) got a lot easier.
I think there's a little learning curve about vocabulary, after which you get better and better about deriving meaning from context and memory of previous known uses. Actually, I believe this might be what we do with our native languages; in my case at least I know I wouldn't be able to define or precise the meaning or definition of most words I use.