Have you heard of commonplace books?
From Wikipedia:
Commonplace books (or commonplaces) are a way to compile knowledge, usually by writing information into books. They have been kept from antiquity, and were kept particularly during the Renaissance and in the nineteenth century. Such books are similar to scrapbooks filled with items of many kinds: notes, proverbs, adages, aphorisms, maxims, quotes, letters, poems, tables of weights and measures, prayers, legal formulas, and recipes.
It’s the antique equivalent of a personal knowledge base.
And it seems like a perfect thing to keep for people learning languages.
Now I don’t know about you, but usually whenever I read a book, I would stumble upon a few sentences that really jump out at me, but don’t fit the normal use-case of sentence mining or i+1-ing.
Maybe it’s that the sentence uses old words in a new way. Maybe it’s how the sentence seems to flow better than anything I would be able to think of on the spot. Maybe it’s the way that the writer describes something that calls out to me.
Either way, it’s something that I would want to integrate into my normal lexicon; more tools on the toolbelt in a way.
For example:
I was reading Atomic Habits by James Clear (the Japanese version, of course). This sentence jumped out at me:
さらに遠い道のりがあることを痛感するようになった
(Roughly) “I became painfully aware of the long road still ahead of me”
Does it contain words I don’t know? No. Does it contain grammar I don’t know? Also no. From the perspective of a language learner counting his deck of vocab cards, this has nothing.
But there is something there. This sentence describes a feeling that I’ve had multiple times that would take me some time to articulate as precisely as that. So I saved it. Wrote it down. Have it on my toolbelt. How often would I actually use a sentence like this? Probably never. But if you compile an entire book of uncommon but rich word combinations, you’ll eventually see yourself pulling phrases from there often.
