Vocabulary Booster - Display

DON'T MEMORIZE, RATIONALIZE!

(Attention: we strongly recommend to download our latest app "Vocabulary-Fill in the Blanks". It has a larger and reviewed database with fill in the blanks exercise from sentences taken from the web. It is a matchless exercise to help you to develop your vocabulary.)

Thousands of words in modern English vocabulary are simply derivations and combinations of less than four hundred etymological stems that originate from 1000 to 5000 years-old Indo-European languages. This application aims to teach these limited number of "semantic stems" as the original bearers of meanings, to enable user/student to conceptualize thousands of English words, thus using etymological roots as leverages to expand vocabulary knowledge.

The main page consists of displaying a main stem and its definition in the middle row (blue), its combinations above (yellow) and below (orange) and the word examples (green) that are formed from these combinations. Clicking on the word example sounds pronunciation. Dictionary definitions are avoided at first hand, but instead, a long press on the word example sends user to Google News to show the usage of the word in a sentence. This method encourages the user to capture the meaning within the usage of the word in a sentence.

Why Dictionary Definitions are not recommended for learning words?

A word’s meaning never stands on its own. It is always “de-fined” as opposed to another definition within a mixture of descriptive and performative order of expressions where each symbol endorses another symbol. This mixture makes human language an unstable, dynamic, evolving symbolic order which has to “claim” it stability in every speech. Every speech is thus a discoursive practice seeking to stabilize its meaning, which on the contrary makes the symbolic order to re-evolve. Since human brain has developed to learn language within this dynamicity, the words that are once understood through dictionary definitions are usually forgotten and thus foreign language students often find themselves looking at the same words again and again in the dictionary. Therefore, rather than referring to frozen dictionary definitions, it is recommended to capture the meaning within the word's actual usages: in speeches and in texts.