Master of Memory: Accelerated learning, education, memorization - MMem 0429: Expand English vocabulary: Which words to learn

Episode Date: October 29, 2015

Shyam wants to improve his English vocabulary and doesn’t know what resources to use. I give some suggestions for finding the right words to learn. What do you want to learn? Leave your question at http://MasterOfMemory.com/. Music credit: Maurice Ravel’s String Quartet, 2nd movement, performed by the US Army Band.

Master of Memory 429. Welcome to Master of Memory. I'm Timothy, and I'm here to answer your accelerated learning questions every day and to inspire and empower you to learn anything you want to learn faster than ever. Shiam submitted a written question at masterofmemory.com slash question. Shiam says, I came across your website when I was looking for help with mnemonics to learn vocabulary. Now, I'm not a GRE or SAT student, but I just wish to learn new words to develop my vocabulary. Do you have any podcasts or courses to help with that? So, Sham, I don't have any courses at present except for the fact that I teach privately students to prepare for the SAT, but here's the podcast

episode that answers your question. So let's base everything that we do on a particular purpose, and you're describing not preparing for the GRE or the SAT, but just to improve your general vocabulary. I'm sure there may be more nuance to your reason for learning more vocabulary, so I'm going to base my particular answer here on a kind of specific assumption for your purpose for memorizing new vocabulary, because the fact is that the vocabulary that you choose is going to be based on particular topics. And just incidentally, this is something we do with our accelerated Spanish students. After they've achieved a certain level of fluency in Spanish,

where they're okay talking very generally on many topics, we dive into particular subjects that are, you know, more important to them and their lives. And that's no different when we're talking about English vocabulary. If you're thinking about vocabulary that'll help you with formal papers or for discussions on political subjects or something like that, a nice source might be actually the Federalist Papers, which include lots of great discussions and deep, you know, philosophical arguments and things like that in terms of the way that government should work, and specifically the US's federal government. So for the purpose of this episode, I'm just going to imagine that that is the purpose that you have in learning new vocabulary

in order to discuss topics like that in good detail, with clarity, and with eloquence. So what I've done, and just as a little bit of background, I actually did this before getting this question. I did this for my own purposes. But I've extracted a bunch of words from the Federalist Papers based on the frequency with which they occur in the Federalist Papers. So if you want to learn vocabulary that is in the Federalist Papers to be able to discuss similar topics, you can just go to masterofmemory.com slash fedvocabulary, all one word, fedvocabulary,

and you'll see a little page that I created there that includes all of the vocabulary and the techniques that I suggest for studying this vocabulary. So for example, some of the most frequently used words in here are very government specific, such as constitution, union, authority, public, and so on. But some of the others are, it's vocabulary that you might use in lots of formal discussions, regardless of what you're talking about. For example, the word, it's vocabulary that you might use in lots of formal discussions regardless of what you're talking about. For example, the word, let's see, the words latter and former, the word instance, the word render, the word establishment, and then going down to the more obscure vocabulary as we go down the list, expedient, hence, probability, secure, expressly, regarded, lots of things like that, where these are words you may use to be able to make arguments

in a very specific way. And the resource there does sort of categorize these words as far as which ones you would learn for which purposes, although the source is the Federalist Papers, and they are sorted by frequency based on, well, sorted by importance based on the frequency with which these words occur in the Federalist Papers. Now what I'd suggest doing is studying the first 60 words on this list, but studying them very deeply, as in don't just learn what the words mean, but actually study all of their uses and be able to use them yourself. So you can find a particular word like requisite, for example, a very, very frequent word in the Federalist Papers. And then you can just go and search the Federalist Papers at gutenberg.org

for the word requisite and see how it's used in each case. And then get really comfortable with that word to the extent that you would be able to construct similar sentences and use it in similar ways, very idiomatically and not awkwardly. So after that, you can learn the remaining vocabulary just based on what it means, but don't be prepared to use it yourself unless you study it as deeply as you did those first 60 words. Now, I've talked in other episodes about how you actually learn the words and what they mean based on using the stress syllable, turning that into an image, and relating that to the meaning, but there

have been plenty of the other episodes on that. In this episode I'm talking more specifically about how to find the right vocabulary and I'm providing this example with this resource at masterofmemory.com slash fed vocabulary. This is vocabulary that I teach to my SAT students, so I'm just giving it, you know, putting the list out there for other people to learn as well, because it's really handy vocabulary to have, and you'll find yourself coming across it more often than you might think. So thanks for the request, Shiam, and for everyone listening, what do you want to learn? The world's knowledge can be yours. Leave your learning request Thank you.