Vocabulary at the center, Visual Thesaurus and such.

I received a comment on my wall at Facebook about an interview that discussed vocabulary, in which it was stated that vocabulary is at the core of all learning.I agree that vocabulary is at the core of a lot of our knowledge, at least our academic knowledge. It does not affect other kinds of knowledge, such as being a good carpenter or understanding nature, or the kind of practical knowledge that comes from observation. Words are just one form of experience that we can give our brain.

The people interviewed had written a book about words called Vocabulary at the Center, The table of contents suggests, to me, that this book contains more unnecessary complication on the subject of word learning. The book is part of a promotional exercize by a group promoting a visual thesaurus.I also do not believe in these word mapping or visual aids to learn words.

To me words have to be met in context, over and over. Seeing them on a chart does not do anything for me. To me, you are better off to spend your time reading more.

But then that is just me. Others may have a different perspective. So have a look if you are interested and tell me what you think.

Comments

[Patricia]

Hola steve!!....primero que nada quiero decir que me encanta tu pagina t las ideas que expones, pero tengo una pregunta, que opinas del metodo presentado en el curso: French in action??

Gracias de antemano
Saludos

[Israel]

Thanks Steve for your opinnion.

I agree with you about the important role of the context in learning words. Moreover, I think that using these unknown workds in your writings makes a great diference, a netx step ahead in your brain, synapses of whatever scientist say. After that, reviewing my corrected writings reinforces the learning closing the loop.
In that sense, I think Lingq offers a great added value espousing a proven methodology.

Best regards,
Israel.

[BM]

Vocabulary is king. If I waited until I'd heard a word before I used it in a sentence, I could wait around forever. I think you need to listen to decode the grammar, but once you have the grammar pattern, using a word from a thesaurus or dictionary is fine, as far as I'm concerned. After all, native speakers do it all the time, don't they?