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Old March 16, 2009, 09:15 PM
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Rusty Rusty is offline
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Join Date: Aug 2007
Location: USA
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Native Language: American English
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Expanding vocabulary is often done by reading books. When you're just starting out, vocabulary building will be a daunting task, since you'll spend most of the time researching, and less time enjoying the story. But the really great thing about reading is that you'll apply semantics to the new words even before you look them up (this is actually how you learned your mother tongue). All of us assign meaning to a new word, even without thinking about it, by what we observe about it - how it is used - how it interacts with the words that surround it. We can't do that with a list of unrelated words!
If you can find books with pictures, this will help you learn more rapidly because more senses will be applied. For example, it's difficult to learn the meaning of ball if you see it in a list of unrelated nouns. It's hard to learn what roll means when it appears in a list of unrelated verbs. What's worse is that there is more than one word listed as a translation for each of those words! But if someone shows you a ball, says its name, rolls it to you and says "Roll the ball," you've learned a lot more than two vocabulary words. You'll associate those two words (they'll relate to each other). You'll have a phrase to use, based on what you saw, heard, touched and felt (emotion). If the story shifts gears and starts talking about the ball of your foot, or about a roll in the oven, you'll instantly recognize that the 'picture' is different, so new meanings will be crafted based on surrounding clues. The end result is much more than two unrelated vocabulary words in different lists, with more than one meaning each; it's three very different mental images - images that come complete with reusable phrases and all the grammar you'll need to convey the same 'picture' to someone else.

Items are certainly listed, and there are good reasons to have lists, but I personally think that the written word is the best 'list'.

Last edited by Rusty; March 16, 2009 at 09:33 PM.
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