Mr. Vig

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When I was a kid I wanted to be black belt in karate.

So I signed up for lessons. Read More >

Prague 2005.

February.

A Monday morning. Read More >

Greetings from the US!

I went home to Virginia for the holidays this year.

And while visiting my sister, I decided to check out a local book store.

Of course, I went right to the language section.

What did I find?

The same boring grammar books and lists of idioms I see students in Europe reading!

If you know my blog, then you know that one of the basic ideas I teach is that you should run away from anything boring.

And run away fast.

Because boredom is the enemy of  learning and remembering.

We pay attention to what’s interesting and forget and avoid whatever is boring.

And if you choose a boring book – like A Dictionary of American Idioms (zzzzzz) – that’s a bad idea because you’ll quickly become bored, you’ll stop reading, and your English will get worse.

So what’s the solution?

Every bookstore sells books which can improve your English vocabulary.

Just reading one of these books will help you learn and remember useful, native speaker vocabulary.

But these books are not in the language section…

Where are they?

They’re everywhere else!

They’re fiction books… biography… humour… personal growth… fantasy… yoga for mothers…

In fact, any book that’s not in the language section!

Why?

Because although reading is one of the best ways to improve your English vocabulary…

(According to one research study, adults learned 45 words from reading just one short novel. *)

It MUST be something you’re interested in.

If it’s not, then you’ll become bored, stop reading, and your English will get worse.

Make sense?

Good!

Two Book Recommendations From My Sister

Because I stayed with my sister and her family last week, and because she’s a school teacher, and because your reading should also be easy, I asked her to recommend some books.

These are her top two choices for easy reading:

Little House On The Prairie

One of my sister’s favorite books. All her kids read it, and I read it too when I was little. (I liked it, but I think it’s more of a girl’s book.)

It’s the true story about a girl who moves with her family to the American frontier (out west) before there were railroads or electricity.

The TV show based on the book was something my family watched every week.

Old Yeller

This one, I remember, I liked more. It’s definitely a boy’s story.

In the 1860s, when Europe still had kings and queens, a boy and his dog hunt in the wilderness of Texas.

 

Happy reading!

*Saragi, U., P. Nation, and G. Meister. 1978. Vocabulary learning and reading. System 6: 70-78

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(NOTE: The link for the words is at the bottom of the article. Or click here to get them now.)

How many words are in the English language?

The answer: a lot!

171,476, to be exact.

(At least that’s the number of words in the Oxford English Dictionary.)

And that’s a little depressing for any non-native speaker who wants to improve his or her vocabulary.

But here’s the good news.

You don’t need to know all those words.

You don’t even need to know half…

or 25%…

or 10%…

If you want to read about business, talk about business, and do business in English, you only need to know less than 3% of the English vocabulary to understand 97% of business communication.

How is that possible?

A Strange Fact About Native Speakers

Native speakers like to repeat themselves.

We say the same words over and over again.

When it comes to choosing our words, we’re all vocab environmentalists recycling our words.

So while this is how most people think of the English language:

 

In fact, it’s more like this:

 

And it’s the same in the business world.

A Recent Discovery

Earlier this year, a team of English language researchers in Japan discovered that if you know only 2,144 English words you can understand 92% of conversation.

And an additional 1,700 business words will buy you 97% understanding.*

But…they have to be the right words.

Here’s the story:

The researchers took a lot of business magazines…

They took a lot of business books…

They took a lot of  business newspapers and websites…

(And by “a lot” I mean 64 million words in total.)

And they dumped all these business words into a blender.

(Or maybe it was a computer…)

And they asked the question:

“What are the words that rise to the top?”

They wanted to know the most common…the most frequent…the most valuable words for business in the English language today.

The Answer

A list of the only English words a businessman or woman could ever need.

Researches call them “frequency lists.”

But I call them “super words.”

Ready to find out how many you know?

Click here to get you Super Business Word Checklist.

*https://www.newgeneralservicelist.org/

Image of The Economist by Lynette taken from Flickr, under Creative Commons licence.

Image of The Effective Executive from Harper Collins.