Vocabulary Fill in the Blanks

Developed by Engin Kurtay (engin_kurtay@yahoo.com) and Gokhan Sahin (gashinpi@gmail.com) , we hope you will enjoy this matchless exercise method to improve your English vocabulary. We kindly ask you to be patient and persistent in reading and trying to understand the texts to guess the disguised word. Press "SHOW ROOTS" to see the etymological semantic roots that form the disguised word. Press "SHOW ANSWER" if you cannot come up with a conclusion, to see directly the disguised word, but avoid using this button before thinking hard to decipher the answer.
Our method is matchless, but indeed it is not a magic. For best result, try hard, do not give up, get used to enjoy thinking and rationalizing the language. Keep in mind that memorizing is always prone to forgetting, however an information becomes a lasting "knowledge" when it is rationalized.

DON'T MEMORIZE, RATIONALIZE !

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 the vocabulary knowledge.

WHY TO AVOID DICTIONARY DEFINITIONS TO EXPAND VOCABULARY KNOWLEDGE ?

This method encourages the user to capture the meaning within the usage of the word in a sentence. THe sentences are retrieved from the web, so the source is pretty unlimited and perfect exemplary of the actual-living English.

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.