What is lexis? What are lexical items? How are they different from vocabulary? Are you learning vocabulary or lexis when you study foreign languages?
1. The problem with learning vocabulary, rather than lexical items
There are just so many words to remember!
This article was requested by one of my readers. When I asked, “What do you struggle most with when trying to learn a language?”, one of the answers I got was how to learn vocabulary.
Let’s think about the challenge of learning vocabulary. Look around you right now. Everything you see – literally everything – every item of furniture, every object, every material it is made out of, everything you can see out of the window, every word you read on this screen, there’s a word for each of those thigns in your target language. Every thought you’ve had today and, in fact, every thought you’ve had ever, and every feeling you’ve had – there is a sound or set of sounds, and spelling, for every single one of those things in your target language. All of them. Sometimes, with all of these new ways of identifying everything, it feels like a foreign language is a secret code and everything that everyone is saying is completely encrypted.
Now, if you ask me, that’s a pretty overwhelming realisation. How am I supposed to memorise a sound and a visual symbol – for every single thing ever, that has ever existed? Think about how long it took you to memorise all the answers to the multiplication tables up to 12 (if you ever did). Now imagine having to memorise something like that for everything, ever. It’s a herculean, mammoth task that seems utterly ridiculous and impossible.
2. How do we make it easier to learn all these words?
This problem comes with three key aspects:
- expose yourself to a new word you’ll actually understand,
- get it to stick in your head, and
- learn it so that you can actually use it.
Through my own experience, it turns out that (2) doesn’t automatically lead to (3). Just because you have the word memorised, doesn’t mean you can actually use it in conversation. Today I’m discussing (3).
3. What is the difference between “vocabulary” and a “lexical item”?
In short, vocabulary is a word, whereas a lexical item is a bit of language, and sometimes a bit of language can be a series of several words that you usually find together. For example, in English, we have a lot of ‘phrasal verbs’, such as:
- “give in”
- “carry on”
- “blow up”
Phrasal verbs are exactly what they say on the tin: they’re verbs, but not just one word like most verbs (‘sing’, ‘shout’, ‘read’). Rather, they’re phrases. These phrases are bits of expressions, and so they’re more complex than just memorising a word and its meaning. Lexical items also include filler-words, linking expressions, adjective phrases and adverbial phrases:
- “kind of” / “sort of”
- “to sum up”
- “all the time”
- “like…”
Natural languages are almost never tidy. So, they are not made up of vocabulary, but rather they are made up of lexical items. So, to sound natural when we use our target language, we need to start playing with lexical items rather than memorising individual words. (If you’re keen on finding out more about the nerdy-grammar of lexis, I suggest starting here.)
4. Why learning lexical items (not vocabulary) in romance languages is so important
(languages like Spanish, French, Portuguese, Italian, Romanian)
If you’re learning a romance language, one of the biggest obstacles you’ll probably face as a learner is the many tenses and many conjugations in the grammar. So, if you memorise the infinitive, this isn’t going to be enough to actually use the term without doing some very fast mental gymnastics to conjugate it (provided you’ve also memorised all the conjugations for all the tenses). One way to start thinking less about technical proficiency and instead more about fluency is to think about each conjugation in context as a lexical item. That way, from the get-go we’re focussing on how to use the term.
Main takeaway:
Language is not made up of individual words in isolation (vocabulary). Instead, language is made up of strings of words that are usually found together (lexical items). We should aim to remember these lexical items, rather than focussing on individual words.
If you’d like to read more, check out other blog posts I’ve written if you’re interested in reading whether you can really learn a language by binge-watching Netflix, or the inherent weirdness of actively studying a language, or perhaps why it is that we feel the urge to learn foreign languages we don’t need.