A typical Thursday.
Sometime in the afternoon.
I was walking with the crowd between platforms.
And that’s when I saw her.
A young woman holding a large book.
As I passed I turned my head slightly to see the title.
She was reading…
(gasp!)
a bi-lingual dictionary!
For an enlightened teacher like me that’s the same as…
…an environmentalist gardening next to a Chinese chemical factory
… a vegetarian eating lunch in a slaughterhouse
… an orthodox Jew/Christian/Muslim vacationing on a nude beach
You get the point.
I was shocked.
(Sometimes I feel like it’s the year 900 and I’m trying to tell the Vikings about Jesus.)
So why is using a dictionary to improve your English such a bad idea?
Because it doesn’t work.
Simple.
It’s a complete waste of time.
One, as soon as she closes the book she won’t remember the words (We forget 80-90% of new information in 24 hours and nearly 100% in one week.)
Two, even if she does remember a definition, she won’t know how to use the word in a sentence.
Three, she doesn’t know which words are important and which ones no one ever uses (The Oxford English dictionary has almost 200,000 words. Native speakers know only 20,000 and every day we use only 5,000.)
But here’s the good news. You can know the secret to:
- Remembering words
- Using them correctly
- Finding the most useful words
All you have to do is read the research.
You can start with this book.
Tip: Drink a lot of coffee before. It helped me.
It shouldn’t take too much of your time…a few days, weeks, months…
Or you can discover exactly what you need to know to start building a rich, native speaker vocabulary right now.
