The wrong question keeps us word poor
6sticks said:
Well I don't know about you lot but reading a dictionary cover to cover worked for me. But that's just how I trundle.
Learning is an interesting problem - and here we are interested in learning vocabulary.
And usually we have a problem because we are asking the wrong question.
And here we have the wrong question written in bold type above us, that is, "What is the best way to expand vocabulary?".
This is simply a trap - as long as we keep asking this question, we will have a problem - as long as we keep trying to learn individual words, we will remain word poor.
In fact we learn new words by first of all, falling in love with them, and then understanding them and finally assimilating them into our gestalt - that is, by assimilating them into our whole understanding - into our whole world view.
So we don't learn individual words for their own sake, but we learn individual words to increase our understanding.
So the wrong question is, "What is the best way to expand our vocabulary?", and the better question is, "What is the better way to increase our understanding?".
The wrong question is answered by the Readers' Digest in its section of, "Increase your word power". Or the wrong question is answered by reading the dictionary.
The wrong question gives the wrong answers - garbage in, garbage out. And the better question gives the better answers.
So how can we increase our understanding?
We can increase our understanding by reading books that are just slightly beyond us - just as we become better tennis players by playing with someone who is slightly better than us.
And as our understanding grows, so will our vocabulary.