Learning new words

Sometimes figuring out new words is easy. You point, you ask for the word, they give it to you. But sometimes it's more confusing than you think it should be. Here's a sample conversation:

"What's this?" (motioning to an apple in a box)
"This is _________."

Ok, great. You just learned the word for apple! But wait, are you sure that's what they said? Did they give you the word for apple? You asked, wanting a word for apple, but here are some other things they might have said, based on the contextual clues you gave them:

"This is a fruit."
"This is food."
"This is something I'm eating."
"This is the apple peel."
"This is a box of apples."
"This is something I'm selling."

At the beginning of language learning, you can end up with all sorts of vocabulary that you know how to use it in its original context, but you have no idea whether it works in other situations. Is this "apple" or "fruit"? Is it "fish" or "meat"? Over time, though, you learn what sort of questions to ask about new words.

Recently I was checking words for a dictionary and asked a native speaker to explain the difference between two words for what I understood to be "shovel."

Are they the same, or different?
"Oh, they're different."
What's the difference?
"This is used for digging, that one is used for moving things and mixing cement."
I look up a picture of a shovel on my phone and ask which it is.
"That's the second one."

Happy to learn!

So then I ask him to draw the first one. He draws a picture. I ask how big it is. I look up another picture of a shovel that's shaped like the drawing. He identifies it as the second word again, not the first.

So then I ask, "What's it's made of?" That was the ticket. It turns out that this digging tool is made from recycled truck parts that are welded together and then sharpened.

So will I find an actual English equivalent for it, other than "digging tool, shaped like a shovel"? Who knows. This will require some more research....