E
veryone has threevocabularies in every language he or she speaks: a
reading vocabulary , a listening vocabulary , and a speaking vocabulary.
You’ve read words you have never heard, and heard words you’ve never read. Your
speaking vocabulary may ignore many words you have either read or heard but do
not use. As you explore the vocabulary in this book, think about bringing these three
large sets of words together into a rich and useful database that will serve you well.
Discovering words you don’t know may send your anxiety level soaring, and
nobody does their best work when they’re anxious. With practice, though, you can
learn to take unknown words in stride. Here’s how to start.1. Start small. Don’t tackle the whole sentence at once. There are several tech-
niques for breaking sentences into smaller units. One way you can do this
is to find a verb (an action word that tells you what’s happening) and grad-
ually incorporate the words around it into an increasingly longer phrase as
you decipher its meaning. The verb provides an anchor for the meaning
because it tells you what is being done.
You can also use trial and error to find islands of meaning in a sentence.
Find a word or a phrase you understand and start adding a word or two on
either side. As you discover several such islands and gradually enlarge each
one, you will eventually see how they fit together; and then you will under-
stand the dynamics of the whole sentence.
2. If the vocabulary in a sentence is a problem, look at the words around it.
Usually you can figure out what function a word is serving in the sentence.
Ask yourself if it’s an action word. If so, it’s a verb. Is it describing some-
thing? Then it’s an adjective or adverb. Is it the subject —the person, place
or thing performing the action in the sentence? It’s a noun or pronoun.
Use the surrounding context to help you guess the meaning or at least the
part of speech of an unfamiliar word.
3. As you are reading a sentence with blanks or with words you don’t know, it
can ease your anxiety to substitute words or sounds of your choosing in
place of the unknown words. The words something and whatever work well
Introduction
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