WORD POWER MADE EASY
上一篇 / 下一篇 2016-02-02 13:42:32/ 个人分类:知识共享
这本书挺不错的,虽然是1979年出版,内容依旧精彩,最关键的是不需要太高的英语水平就能看得懂,因为都是用非常常用的词汇写成。而且其中介绍的一些学习方法和观点,比如保持求知欲望、做任何一件事之前都要做好时间计划等等,都非常值得借鉴。
整本书总共有十九个章节,还包含很多测试,按照作者的阅读方法整个认真读下来的话,绝对受益匪浅。
以下是我照着原书录入的,我的计划是每天有空的时候录入一些内容,希望能够坚持下去。
HOW TO START BUILDING YOUR VOCABULARY
When you have finished working with this
book, you will no longer be the same person.
You can’t be.
If you honestly read every page, if you do
every exercise, if you take every test, if you follow every principle, you will
go through an intellectual experience that will effect a radical change in you.
For if you systematically increase your
vocabulary, you will also sharpen and enrich your thinking; push back your intellectual
horizons; build your self-assurance; improve your facility in handling the
English language and thereby your ability to express your thoughts effectively;
and acquire a deeper understanding of the world in general and of yourself in
particular.
Increasing your vocabulary does not mean
merely learning the definitions of large numbers of obscure words; it does not
mean memorizing scores of unrelated terms. What is mean-what it can only
mean-is becoming acquainted with the multitudinous and fascinating phenomena of
human existence for which words are, obviously, only the verbal descriptions.
Increasing your vocabulary-properly,
intelligently, and systematically-means treating yourself to an all-round,
liberal education.
And surely you cannot deny that such an
experience will change you intellectually-
Will have a discernible effect on your
methods of thinking-on your store of information-on your ability to express
your ideas-on your understanding of human problems.
How children increase their vocabularies
The typical ten-year old, you will recall,
has a recognition vocabulary of over twenty thousand word-and has been learning
many hundreds of new words every year since the age of four.
You were once that typical child.
You were once an accomplished virtuoso at
vocabulary building.
What was your secret?
Did you spend hours every day poring over a
dictionary?
Did you lull yourself to sleep at night
with Webster’s Unabridged?
Did you keep notebooks full of all the new
words you every heard or read?
Did you immediately look up the meaning of
any new word that your parents or older members of your family used?
Such procedures would have struck you as
absurd then, as absurd as they would be for you today.
You had a much better, much more effective,
and considerably less self-conscious method.
Your method was the essence of simplicity:
day in and day out you kept learning; you kept squeezing every possible ounce
of learning out of every waking moment; you were an eternal question box, for
you had a constant and insatiable desire to know and understand.
How adults stop building their vocabularies
Then, eventually, at some point in your
adult life (unless you are the rare exception), you gradually lost your
compulsive drive to discover, to figure out, to understand, to know.
Eventually, therefore, you gradually lost
your need to increase your vocabulary-your need to learn the words that could
verbalize your new discoveries, your new understanding, your new knowledge.
Roland Gelatt, in a review of Caroline
Pratt’s book I Learn from Children, describes this phenomenon as follows:
All normal human beings are born with a
powerful urge to learn. Almost all of them lose this urge, even before they
have reached maturity. It is only the few . . . who are so constituted that
lack of learning becomes a nuiance. This is perhaps the most insidious of human
tragedies.
Children are wonders at increasing their
vocabularies because of their “powerful urge to learn.” They do not learn
solely by means of words, but as their knowledge increases, so does their
vocabulary-for words are the symbols of ideas and understanding.
(If you are a parent, you perhaps remember
that crucial and trying period in which your child constantly asked “why?” How
often do you yourself do it?
The adults who “lose this urge,” who no
longer feel that “lack of learning becomes a nuisance,” stop building their
intellectually, they stop changing. When and if such a time comes, then, as Mr.
Gelatt so truly says, “This is perhaps the most insidious of human tragedies.”
But fortunately the process is far from irreversible.
If you have lost the “powerful urge to
learn,” you can regain it-you can regain your need to discover, to figure out,
to understand, to know.
And thus you can start increasing your
vocabulary at the same rate as when you were a child.
I am not spouting airy theory. For over
thirty-five years I have worked with thousands of adults in my college courses
in vocabulary improvement, and I can state as a fact, without qualification,
that:
If you can recapture the “powerful urge to
learn” with which you were born, you can go on increasing your vocabulary at a
prodigious rate-
No matter what your present age.
Why age makes little difference in
vocabulary building
I repeat, no matter what your present age.
You may be laboring under a delusion common
to many older people.
You may think that after you pass your
twenties you rapidly and inevitably lose your ability to learn.
That is simply not true.
There is no doubt that the years up to
eighteen or twenty are the best period for learning. Your own experience no
doubt bears that out. And of course for most people more learning goes on
faster up to the age of eighteen or twenty than ever after, even if they live
to be older than Methuselah. (That is why vocabulary increases so rapidly for
the first twenty years of life and comparatively at a snail’s pace thereafter.)
But (and follow me closely)-
The fact that most learning is accomplished
before the age of twenty does not mean that very little learning can be
achieved beyond that age.
What is done by most people and what can be
done under proper guidance and motivation are two very, very different
things-as scientific experiments have conclusively shown.
Furthermore-
The fact that your learning ability may be
best up to age twenty does not mean that it is absolutely useless as soon as
your twentieth birthday is passed.
Quite the contrary.
Edward Thorndike, the famous educational
psychologist, found in experiments with people of all ages that although the
learning curve rises spectacularly up to twenty, it remains steady for at least
another five years. After that, ability to learn (according to Professor
Thorndike_ drops very, very slowly up to the age of thirty-five, and drops a
bit more but still slowly beyond that age.
And-
Right up to senility the total decrease in
learning ability after age twenty is never more than 15 per cent!
That does not sound, I submit, as if no one
can ever learn anything new after the age of twenty.
Believe me, the old saw that claims you
cannot teach an old dog new tricks is a baseless, if popular, superstition.
So I repeat: no matter what your age, you
can go on learning efficiently, or start learning once again if perhaps you
have stopped.
You can be thirty, or forty, or fifty, or
sixty, or seventy-or older.
No matter what your age, you can once again
increase your vocabulary at a prodigious rate-providing you recapture the “powerful
urge to learn” that is the key to vocabulary improvement.
Not the urge to learn “words”-words are
only symbols of ideas.
But the urge to learn facts, theories, concepts,
information, knowledge, understanding- call it what you will.
Words are the symbols of knowledge, the
keys to accurate thinking. Is it any wonder then that the most successful and
intelligent people in this country have the biggest vocabularies?
It was not their large vocabularies that
made these people successful and intelligent, but their knowledge.
Knowledge, however, is gained largely
through words.
In the process of increasing their
knowledge, these successful people increased their vocabulary at a tremendous, phenomenal
rate during those years when their knowledge is increasing most rapidly.
Knowledge is chiefly in the form. of words,
and from now on, in this book, you will be thinking about, and thinking with,
new words and new ideas.
What this book can do for you
This book is designed to get you started
building your vocabulary-effectively and at jet-propelled speed- by helping you
regain the intellectual atmosphere, the keen, insatiable curiosity, the “powerful
urge to learn” of your childhood.
The organization of the book is based on
two simple principles: 1) words are the verbal symbols of ideas, and 2) the
more ideas you are familiar with, the more words you know.
So, chapter by chapter, we will start with
some central idea-personality types, doctors, science, unusual occupations,
liars, actions, speech habits, insults, compliments, etc.-and examine ten basic
words that express various aspects of the idea. Then, using each word as a
springboard, we will explore any others which are related to it in meaning or
derivation, so that it is not unlikely that a single chapter may discuss,
teach, and test close to one hundred important words.
Always, however, the approach will be from
the idea. First there will be a “teaser preview” in which the ideas are briefly
hinted at; then a “headline,” in which each idea is examined somewhat more
closely; next a clear, detailed paragraph or more will analyze the idea in all
its ramifications; finally the word itself, which you will meet only after you
are completely familiar with the idea.
In the etymology (derivation of words)
section, you will learn what Greek or Latin root gives the word its unique
meaning and what other words contain the same, or related, roots. You will thus
be continually working in related fields, and there will never be any
possibility of confusion from “too muchness,” despite the great number of words
taken up and tested in each chapter.
Successful people have superior
vocabularies. People who are intellectually alive and successful in the
professional or business worlds are accustomed to dealing with ideas, are
constantly on the search for new ideas, build their lives and their careers on
the ideas thy have learned. And it is to readers whose goal is successful
living (in the broadest meaning of the word successful)that this book is
addressed.
A note on time schedules
From my experience over many years in
teaching, I have become a firm believer in setting a goal for all learning and
a schedule for reaching that goal.
You will discover that each chapter is divided
into approximately equal sessions, and that each session will take from thirty
to forty-five minutes of your time, depending on how rapidly or slowly you
enjoy working-and bear in mind that everyone has an optimum rate of learning.
For
best results, do one or two sessions at a time-spaced studying, with time
between sessions so that you can assimilate what you have learned, is far more
efficient, far more productive, than gobbling up great amounts in indigestible
chunks.
Come back to the book every day, or as
close to every day as the circumstances of your life permit.
Find a schedule that is comfortable for
you, and then stick to it.
Avoid interrupting your work until you have
completed a full session, and always decide, before you stop, exactly when you
will plan to pick up the book again.
Working at your own comfortable rate, you
will likely finish the material in two to three months, give or take a few
weeks either way.
However long you take, you will end with a solid
feeling of accomplishment, a new understanding of how English words work,
and-most important-how to make words work for you.
这是开篇语,大意是说年龄不是阻碍学习的借口,虽然人的学习能力峰值出现在20岁左右,但是在那之后,学习能力下降是非常缓慢的,有研究表明,下降幅度最多不超过巅峰时期的25%。对于一个人来说,掌握的词汇越多,了解的知识、表达的方式就会更丰富,完整的学完整本书以后,作者保证你能够有很大进步。
学习要有效果,就要有如孩子一般的好奇心,保持这份好奇心,你每天都会不一样。我对此非常认同。
TAG:
标题搜索
日历
|
|||||||||
日 | 一 | 二 | 三 | 四 | 五 | 六 | |||
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | ||||
7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | |||
14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | |||
21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 | 26 | 27 | |||
28 | 29 | 30 |
我的存档
数据统计
- 访问量: 1384
- 日志数: 33
- 建立时间: 2007-10-25
- 更新时间: 2017-03-20